Reconstructed
There was an interesting event at the UCC Church in Bethesda last Sunday that I thought I'd write about. The reason for heading over to Glenbrook being that one of the parishioners was giving a presentation with slides on his recent experience as a member of the Air Force Reserve deployed for eight months to Iraq. My sister knows him and his wife a little, through another couple she is friends with. We'll call him Lt. Col. Joe F. USAF Reserve. His time in Iraq began about a year ago through a "Short Notice Call-up". Only very extremely important people fly directly into Iraq, Joe arrived in Qatar after several days and found himself assigned to housing in 5o man tents. Before long he gained an immediate temporary assignment to move a unit of the 101st airborne into Iraq. After that he joined his Duty Station in Bagdad. The nature of his work, he pointed out, allowed (required) extensive travel through the Red Zone as well as living in the Green (now renamed the International zone in part to dispel the notion that it was in any way a safe zone). He saw a great deal of Iraq. He was assigned to Iraq Reconstruction effort: Water Sector. There are, he noted, four sectors to the reconstruction (Iraq Relief and Reconstruction) i. Electrical, ii. Oil, iii. Facilities and Transportation, and iv. Water and Sanitation. He put up an Organization Chart that showed how this little corner of the Iraqi involvement formally under the State Department not the DOD fit in with the rest of the over all effort. A Colonel was in charge of the Water Reconstruction. Joe was the XO. He recalled that when he first met the commanding general, the general sharply told the assembled new arrivals. "You are going to be working 12-16 hour days, seven days a week, there are no days off. You are all type A people; you will burn-out unless you: exercise, sleep full nights, read, and set aside some quiet time on a daily basis. Joe had no Water / Sanitation background experience before being chosen for this assignment, though he did work on the Bosnian Reconstruction planning in the 90's. His civilian job, he pointed out, is as a Program Manager for Raytheon Corp. But the Personnel machinery of the DoD dropped him into water. Moving through his slides he related types of projects the water sector worked on: Water Treatment Reservoirs, Pump Stations, Sewage Treatment Plants, and common sewer drains. The military organized all projects and smaller projects were commonly executed by the Army Corp. of Engineers (ACE) directly. Large projects were accomplished under contracts with mostly Iraqi labour. To give an indication of how this sometimes went he related a short anecdote. A contract was organized to redo municipal pipes in Fallujah. Three sub-contractors were selected and a meeting was set up to show them the areas they were assigned to. After the meeting the contractor receiving the smallest portion of the work was upset. The other two contractors turned up dead the next day. The reconstruction authorities then restarted the contract process. The Iraqi middle class is mostly gone. The Army found it necessary to train working class Iraq's in water industry management, and such mundane but critical tasks as filing reports and using spreadsheets. The Army took care to examine the prevailing rates of pay in an area and payed workers at levels that would not cause distortion with in the local economy, or raise unnecessary eyebrows. The pay was commensurate with pay rates for the insurgency (which were approximately $10 per day and $50 for placing a IED (Improvised Explosive Device). There were people in the audience that did not know what an IED was. A lot of money was flowing through the Reconstruction. The Water Sector had a $2 billion budget while Joe was there. The Nassiryah pumping station (a big project he allowed) was a two year project recently completed and coming on line now. Another long term project involved sewers in Sadr city it was not clear that one was as much of a final success. 2004 and 2005 the years of visiting areas, assessing and prioritizing projects were remembered by the team he worked with as the best period of the work. He had another observation he had witnessed that served to underscore the situation. Many Iraqi's had plumbing in their homes that had never been used, for lack of of a normal water supply. Houses had holes cut in the floors to bring water up from wells.
The part of the talk that really brought the difference between state side and Iraq side living was when he shifted to an account of his personal life. It was also here that I realized I had never spoke or heard from anyone directly involved in this conflict until that moment. Joe lived in a Connex shipping container. Divided into separate sections he shared it with at least one other officer. He showed a picture, it resembled a ships cabin from the days before ships became hotels. Outside they carried loaded weapons at all times. He noted that because of this, buildings on bases all had sand barrels where these weapons would be cleared before entering. I recall from my active service this was true of all buildings that guards reported to, I remember the duty building at Henderson Hall in Arlington had this, and that there were plenty of 45 slugs in that barrel. They were taught a protocol of weapon handling involving when the weapon's safety was on or off, when you had your finger off the trigger guard, on it, or inside it on the trigger. There was a standing Uniform of the Day that mandated Earplugs, Gloves, Sleeves rolled down when off base and in transit. These were onerous provisions in a desert region, but were designed to ameliorate the effects of explosions on the body. Sunburns already present made blast burn injuries that much worse, earplugs protected eardrums. Gloves? I guess they kept your fingers close to your hand. They experienced both mortar and rocket attacks at their base. The mortars were native to Iraq's prewar arsenal and were ubiquitous in country. They were a difficult weapon to adjust to because they came straight down and offered no warning. Another weapon they had to contend with were rockets. His description indicated he was describing Katyushas or similar rockets
Katyusha - Wikipedia (see bm-21 varient). As a class 3 to 4 feet long with a range of a few miles and the impact of an artillery shell. These were thought to be fresher weapons and not Saddam's coming into Iraq from other countries during the course of the insurgency. They tended to fired into the bases more vertically and could be heard coming over. The rockets were typically launched from timers from crude racks allowing the persons responsible to be clear of the area when they went off. Off Base the most dangerous place they regularly went to was Sadr city, a section of Bagdad across the river. Sadr City required high profile patrols; 7 or more vehicles in convoys. Joe stated the concern was always, in crowd situations, that they might be
pulled out of their vehicles and sold to the insurgency. Sadr City was full of drug dealers also, who comprised some of the most troublesome charactors. Something that he didn't think the press was picking up on. Of other elements of the mission he wanted to talk about, one was the Iraq Water training Sector. As the big projects all wrapped up (as most of them are now) the last big push was training for operating modern municipal water systems and infrastructure. Training centers were set up across Iraq. These training centers were generally segregated sectarianly (Sunni/Shiite), but notably not so much by male/female. Many women attended these training programs. His impression is that the Iraqi people are grateful, by and large, for the American presence and efforts of the reconstruction. People would approach and talk to the water sector people at least. The work of the Electrical and Oil/Gas sector people was harder. He finished the talk relating that he got out just a week or so before the freeze associated with the surge (which he had a more official term for) started and only because his replacement was already on station. His deployment had been extended once from three-four months to eight months. He ws quite ready to come home at that point. A short Q & A period followed. In response to one question he said he had worked with many Iraqi ex patriots that while some have given up and left again, and that for some the return was a tragic story, many are still quietly working in Iraq for its future. Another program people in the small audience asked about which he had seen first hand were the Women's Development Classes where Iraqi women were learning to set up and run small businesses. He came back to an issue he had touched on earlier: Jobs requiring midlevel managers. They had, he said, many applicants but few qualified for these positions and found it was necessary to send recruiters to look for personell in the Iraqi diaspora, in Turkey, in Jordan, and elsewhere. Joe admitted that reconstruction in a war environment was a questionable idea (the reconstruction was planned, sort of, the return of the war wasn't. No adjustment was made). He reiterated the difficulties of the active building phase, the cost and corruption, the overall cumbersomeness involved with getting anything done. After the talk was over I went up to look at the photo scrapbooks he had on the table beside him. These were put together by his wife and teenage daughter from his pictures and were very well done. The slide show was in fact made from the first book. Joe looked happy in every picture. On patrol with his weapon, in his cabin, in the office. Visiting various ancient or biblical sights: Abraham's house, the purported Garden of Eden off the Shatt al Arab Waterway. The offhand Ziggurat of Ur. This centered an observation I had already made: Joe F's fundamental mode of being is optimism. An enthusiastic cheerful optimism. I listened to the informal conversations he was having while I looked at the pictures. He voiced grievance to one person that even on the opening of a new completed project bringing fresh water to a city, the news crews filed a story of trash heaps in the area. Missing the forest for the leaf piles, he thought. The news coverage struck everyone over there as unbalanced (partly this is the press's reaction to being sucked into the DoD's alternate PR universe, but it is worth noting how it feels to people involved. Mostly, in these conversations with people who came up afterward, he talked about the surrealness of return. The decompression, adjustment, the difficulty in 'letting go'. The sense of not believing in 'normal' days. His wife was also a reservist and spent a year in Korea on a similar call-up a few years ago. They knew the sort of strains reserve duty call-ups involve. They originally met while on active duty years ago. Earlier in the week I went looking to see if there was any information online about the Reconstruction effort. I found that the State Dept. has been issuing Quarterly reports to congress on this
Section 2207 Report on Iraq Relief and Reconstruction US State Dept.. The last one Jan 2007 Report HTML Version in sections 2207 c21611 forms a good wrap-up to the others as for some reason the whole Reconstruction effort is winding down now. I was surprised a little to see a flurry of articles appear in the Washington Post latter in the week on this due to a report that had just been released. One on a Senate panel reacting to this report
Senators Calls for Coordination on Iraq - washingtonpost.com, Dana Hedgpeth's on the report itself
Inspector General Details Failures of Iraq Reconstruction - washingtonpost.com. The report was the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction: Iraq Reconstruction: Lessons in Program and Project Management Lessons_Learned_March21.pdf.
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