The Galli Report

BAQUBAH, Iraq — The men started their engines and formed the convoy to Al Anbakiyah at 7:15 in the morning. They rolled into Al Anbakiyah, only ten miles away, more than seven hours later.

At first their departure was delayed because the route clearance crews had found more than the usual number of Improvised Explosive Devices along the usual routes that Americans use in this part of Iraq. Even after the convoy moved out, its progress was slowed because route clearance had not been completed.

The road to Al Anbakiyah is a narrow, two lane stretch of blacktop pocked with craters left by detonations. A single crater here; a pair of craters there. Each one a hit or a near miss; each one a reminder of what had happened to other Americans, and could happen to the men and women in this convoy at any point along the way. It was slow, anxious going.

Move 200 yards. Wait ten minutes. Move 100 yards. Wait fifteen minutes. Move another 100 yards. Wait twenty minutes. Move a quarter mile… Jeeze, would you look at that hole! Veer.

Some of the craters were small. Some were huge. In Iraq, small IED craters can produce big ones.

They call it “Drop and Pop.” First you dig a small hole and plant a small bomb. When it explodes, whether or not it does any damage it produces a larger hole. Into that hole you can drop a larger bomb. Boom! An even larger hole appears. Drop in a bigger IED. And so it goes.

Today the Army hoped to break that cycle.

The convoy included soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne Division and Charlie Company of the 431^st Civil Affairs Battalion, operating from FOB Warhorse in Baqubah. Whereas most of their missions to Al Anbakiyah might involve providing aid to the local community, or seeking cooperation in the war, today’s mission was different. Americans were on the road to Al Anbakiyah to ask for help in fixing the road to Al Anbakiyah. The road was itself the mission.

Before the mission began, a young captain from the 82^nd, who served as mission leader this day, had explained their objectives: to disrupt the enemy; to make him change his tactics; to rattle or delay him. In pursuit of that goal, this day the Army was going to fill those IED craters with concrete. If the enemy wanted to plant an IED tomorrow, he would have to dig a new hole.

The captain gave the order of march and assigned the role of each vehicle in the convoy in the event that an IED struck one of them; and what to do if it produced casualties.

The young captain also reminded his people: “We have five vehicles. Five.” He paused. “If we are engaged, we will maneuver. We will go after them.” He went on to explain precisely how each vehicle, and each soldier, would respond when the convoy converted from transport to assault.

This was in every respect a military mission. It involved 24 fully armed soldiers in five Humvees with rooftop turret machine guns.

But, actually, this convoy wasn’t pursuing the real mission. Not yet. The real mission was to fill the craters. That mission would begin much later in the day, after dark. It might take all night.

This preliminary mission was simply to ask the mayor of Al Anbakiyah – the sheik – to provide ten men to do the digging, hauling, mixing and pouring. This day there would be two missions, two trips back and forth along the dangerous road to Al Anbakiyah. One mission to ask for the laborers; a second mission to use them.

So 24 young Americans found themselves inching along a high-explosive road, ready to fight and die to fulfill the first mission their country had sent them on this day: to ask a question and get a response.

At one point the convoy stopped so that explosives found on the road could be destroyed by a controlled detonation. At another point the convoy linked up with some local soldiers, who reported that dead bodies had been found nearby.

After about four hours on the ten-mile road, the convoy slowly approached the village of Al Anbakiyah. The turret gunners remained alert, scanning their sectors. Other soldiers dismounted slowly. An advance team approached a small group of village men, talked, and then moved with them deeper into the village.

The mission commander followed, walking ahead of the main body of his force. Everyone had a weapon in a ready posture, hand on grip, finger near trigger.

“We aren’t sure how they’re going to react today,” he said. “Some Americans came here a couple of nights ago, and took away two of their men.”

They walked down a dirt path, bordered by mud or stucco walls, behind which small dwellings could be seen, some of the occupants standing in the doorways watching silently as the Americans passed by. With minor cosmetic changes, this could have been a patrol in rural World War II Europe.

When the soldiers finally approached the building where the mayor would receive them, the tension ebbed. It would be an ordinary visit after all. Which is to say that it seemed to make progress but not conclusively.

The mayor said perhaps he could produce ten men later that day; that might be possible even on such short notice; but there are some dead bodies that need to be brought to the village and will the Americans retrieve them?

The Americans demurred. We have come for the road, they said; we sympathize about the bodies, but today’s mission is the road, it’s the reason we are here, and we need to have assurance about the laborers.

But the bodies, the mayor insisted. Will the Americans bring the bodies to us?

“Every time we ask them to work with us,” one American said, “they only want to know what they can get from us.” On the other hand, the bodies were something, if not the focus of the mission. At the end of the meeting, the mayor said he would try to provide the laborers, and the Americans said they would try to find a solution to the bodies, possibly by involving the Iraqi Army, that was tasked to provide additional security for the crater-capping that night.

At the end of the meeting, that lasted for about an hour, an old Iraqi approached the only civilian in the American group. The old man spoke ragged English, about one word in ten having a familiar ring. With the help of an interpreter, he painstakingly constructed a request, which he clarified with a sketch. “We need protection,” he said, in effect. He drew the village on one side of a strip – it might have been the road or the nearby canal – and he drew something else on the other side; possibly another village. He waved his finger to mimic shooting back and forth. “Al Quaida,” he said, or something nearly that. He wanted American soldiers to occupy that strip separating his village from its enemy.

Everyone wants us to protect them from someone else, one of the soldiers explained; it’s always the other side that starts the shooting.

* * *

When they got back to their base after the first mission that day, the soldiers relaxed for a little while, had a meal… and then rolled out for another trip on the dangerous road to Al Anbakiyah. This time they brought trailers loaded with wheelbarrows, tools, bags filled with quick-setting concrete, and jugs of water.

It was deep dark when they picked up the laborers at Al Anbakiyah.

It was even darker when they made contact with the Iraqi Army soldiers who were to provide backup security. The IA balked: “we are going to be murdered if we go there,” one of them told an American officer. They reluctantly agreed to hold a position near but not next to the American working party.

It was even darker when the Americans began to maneuver their Humvees and trailers in position around the first big crater to be filled, using headlights to illuminate the project. “I don’t enjoy being silhouetted like this,” one soldier said.

It was even darker when a rifle shot ripped the night.

It came from the barren darkness on the easterly side of the road. It was contact, and if the mission commander had been impetuous he had all the excuse he needed to let loose. But he didn’t. He shouted “Shots fired” but didn’t issue a combat order. “It’s probably a warning shot,” he said calmly, “just letting us know someone is out there, and that they are armed.”

The Americans held their positions for about fifteen minutes, waiting to see what developed. Nothing did. So they began to complete their mission. The laborers worked furiously, the Americans kept scanning the perimeter, and one by one the IED craters were filled and capped.

Although this was no Hollywood sidewalk of stars, that was wet concrete after all, and these were Americans. Some knelt and wrote a word or two with a finger or a stick. No flag was raised, no monument was erected, no campaign ribbon was awarded for completion of this night’s mission. But something tangible remained. The nickname of one of the soldiers was carved into a concrete cap, next to the name of another fellow’s girl back home.

It was turning out to be a good mission. The IED craters were being filled. “Drop and Pop” would be harder for the enemy to accomplish for a while, at least until new little bombs made some knew little holes.

It would be that much safer for these men and others who used the dangerous road to Al Anbakiyah. But as the mission wound down and he looked through his night vision optics, one of the American officers could see the heat signatures of bullets streaking back and forth, east and west, farther up the road. The old man’s village and its enemies were at their private war again.

* * *

To understand this war, you have to appreciate how dangerous and important this mission was, and yet how insignificant. For most of the duration of the mission, the lives of 24 soldiers were at risk. They spent hours traveling over roads that have been peppered with devices that have improved over time in technological sophistication and lethality. Yet the first trip of the day, in which some of those soldiers could have lost their lives, was the functional equivalent of your sending someone one or two email messages and getting one or two replies.

And look at what this dangerous, expensive, time consuming mission eventually accomplished: It capped a fraction of one percent of the road with concrete, leaving more than 99% of the road free for the enemy to pepper with explosives using the same techniques they had used before.

In much of Iraq everything – everything – that takes Americans outside the wire is a hard to plan, hard to execute, high stress, high risk endeavor. In Iraq, the days of doing things easy are over.

For an observer, participating in most of the story and hearing parts of it later, this mission became symbolic: American courage and military power reduced to fixing potholes in the middle of the night. Dedicated soldiers trying to do their duty and stay alive on one lonely road, at the end of which Muslims persisted in waging their private war, that had begun long before America was born.

Would the newly-patched road help the Americans put a stop to that war? Or would the road enable us to slide into that war more quickly?

At FOB Warhorse, an ad-hoc Department of Public Works had patched potholes on the road they were assigned, and as the sun came up they went to bed. Someone else would have to decide if the road was worth traveling, and how far.

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This story is part of a series featuring the Army’s Civil Affairs mission in Iraq.

Richard Galli served as an interpreter in an Army Civil Affairs unit in Vietnam (1970-71). He is in Iraq as an embedded freelance journalist.