Logistics

During my first job as a researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), my office was down the hall from the Operations Research (OR) Department. At the time, I had no idea what OR was. I soon came to learn it was a branch of mathematics which uses methods such as mathematical modeling, statistics, and algorithms to arrive at optimal or good decisions. At NPS, the OR Department focused on military logistics. In fact, I saw a sign on the door of one of the tenured OR professors: “Amateurs discuss tactics – professionals discuss logistics.” This made me feel amateurish since I was there to research strategy and tactics. It was 1991 and the first US-led coalition had just ejected Saddam’s army from Kuwait, destroying a good portion of it as it retreated north from Kuwait laden with war booty. I remember hearing OR professors discussing the logistical effort that was necessary to move supplies, vehicles, and soldiers from the US to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the brief ground war that ensued in February, 1991. It was akin to moving the entire city of Atlanta from the US to Saudi Arabia, I remember hearing on the television.

When my NIACT class was at the Udairi Range in Kuwait we heard a giant rumbling sound after walking off the small arms weapons range. Having watched too many World War II movies, I asked, “are those tanks?” The weapons range master said that it was a supply convoy headed north into Iraq. As we walked back to our housing/classroom area we got a small view of the main highway several miles away. We saw an endless train of trucks flowing north into Iraq carrying supplies. During our three-day stay at Udairi we heard numerous convoys moving north at all hours of the day and night in spite attacks by insurgents earlier in the year. Watching that first convoy made me appreciate the magnitude of the operation here – and how well the US military does logistics.

That effort is manifest everywhere in Iraq where the coalition operates. The best example is any DFAC in theater. Even modest DFACs have a wide array of food which differs every day. Living in the US, people expect the lights to come on when they flick the switch in their houses and expect to see food at the grocery store. On a major base in Iraq, it’s just the same but the fact it can happen here is a testament to just how good our logistics are.

Tonight at the DFAC, I celebrated this by having an ice cream cone. As I enjoyed it, I couldn't recall any major army in history that marched into the field while maintaining near simultaneous access to soft-serve ice cream. I’m glad the OR professionals are on our side.

Heads

I’ve written before about Saddam Hussein’s ego. One can’t get a full sense of how much he meant to himself until visiting Baghdad. Thankfully, his penchant for building palaces throughout the country makes housing the coalition reconstruction effort easier. Almost every serviceable palace has been put to use by the Coalition for administrative purposes. The Republican Palace in Baghdad, where I work and where the US Embassy is housed, functioned as Saddam’s seat of government. He often chose to meet visiting foreign dignitaries there. I’ve met several Iraqis who work in the Palace who told me that Saddam never posted a schedule, especially after his defeat (which he characterized as a victory) by the US-led coalition in 1991. Exceptionally paranoid, not unlike his idol, Josef Stain, Saddam always varied his schedule rarely sleeping in the same place, er, palace, twice in a row. One of the Iraqis told me that every palace, especially the ones in Baghdad, was fully staffed and prepared daily meals in case Saddam chose to show up.

The central structure of the Republican Palace originally was built by the British in the 1920s. By the 1990s, Saddam effectively tripled the size of the building by adding two large wings on either side, along with an elaborate arching portico along the front. For the finish, he added two giant bronzed statues of his head, adorned with a warrior’s helmet that sat atop the ends of the porticos. These were referred to as the “Saddam Warrior Heads.” Naturally, after the Embassy and military command moved into the palace, the heads had to go (so pervasive and powerful was Saddam, that his visage still makes most Iraqis nervous). They eventually were removed using a large crane. For a time, the heads remained upright in a storage yard not far from the palace. Later, they were moved again but this time placed, unceremoniously, face down.

On New Year’s Eve, my friend Alan and I were walking around the grounds surrounding the palace in search of an Arabic restaurant called the Blue Star Cafe. Quite by accident, we came across the yard where the heads were stored. They were in the company of a Romanian gentleman, who was sitting with several Iraqis in the shade. I asked him, well, sign-languaged is a more appropriate term, if we could take pictures and smiled and said, yes. Coincidentally, it was the one year anniversary of Saddam’s execution by hanging; how the mighty have fallen -- literally and figuratively.

Vices

Most traditional vices, sex and alcohol being chief among them, are prohibited for those of us in the military under General Order 1 in a combat zone. Presumably, such activities would detract from the frosty concentration required to prosecute the war and otherwise taking the fight to the enemy. Not so, for the Department of State folks who can indulge in a public drink now and again although they are restricted from drinking while armed, which seem reasonable.

This leaves caffeine and tobacco as substances to enjoy and, ultimately, to abuse during our tour here. I certainly enjoy a good cup of coffee in the morning but my co-workers elevate coffee consumption to new acme. My metabolism, which still runs high despite being in my early forties, simply could not process the heroic amounts of coffee a typical staff officer consumes. Instead, I treat myself to a delicious double mocha every morning at the Green Beans Café, blessedly located in the Embassy. (Green Beans is a company that caters to deployed US and Coalition troops, setting up near Starbuck-levels of coffee and tea artistry in such remote places as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. In my opinion, they should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, stop reading this blog and buy an anonymous solider a Green Beans Coffee card. S/he will appreciate it.)

I don’t smoke cigarettes but do enjoy a good cigar now and then – more often now that I’m here. I have two co-workers in particular, an army major named Howey and a captain named Alan, who are regular cigar connoisseurs (in addition to being professional coffee drinkers). I inherited a nearly full box of Dominican Cohiba Churchills from the officer I replaced and have enjoyed a couple of them. Together with our vocally amusing English friend, Neil – who does smoke cigarettes – we often enjoy an after dinner smoke. According to flyers distributed throughout the Embassy, there is a Cigar Aficionado Club which meets at a day and time none of us can go to. Howey and Alan thus formed the nucleus of another group of cigar smokers, informally dubbed, “The Other Cigar Club” (OCG) which meets nearly every night around 2200 hours near the Embassy Pool Cabana. (This is the same cabana that has the fireplace mentioned in the New Year’s post below.) Some of the OCG members gather right after dinner and sit around the fire. What’s great about OCG is that one can meet people who are performing very different types of work in and around the Embassy – Department of State Foreign Service Officers (FSOs), other military, contractors, etc. On the times I’ve gone, I’ve had a grand time. The only drawback is that my uniform and fleece jacket tends to smell like cigars; it’s better than the burning trash smell though…

Hand Across the Sea

The Coalition Force here has some thirty-odd countries participating, the lion’s share from the United Kingdom, Australia and Georgia (yes, the former Soviet Republic). Here in my office we have three Coalition officers, two Britons (an army colonel and major) and one Australian (an army lieutenant colonel). One of the Britons, the major, whom I will call Neil, is especially colorful, in that off-putting, subtle, English manner. He’s actually Scottish and regularly corrects me when I ask him about how things are in England (it’s the United Kingdom – England is only part of it). Although Neil is Scottish, he doesn’t talk with what we in the U.S. would say is classic Scottish accent. In fact, he sounds rather, well, English due to his education there. He is a master of the sardonic response to just about anything said in the bull pen office area where our desks reside. He is especially fond of making fun of the U.S. dollar’s recent woes. Today, during a conversation regarding the state of the Iraqi Stock Exchange (yes, they have one now), I asked him if they still had farthings and shillings in the UK. He replied, “No, that’s old money … but even then it was still worth something like three thousand U.S. dollars.”

Neil's boss, a US army colonel, is particularly demanding and who has a penchant for calling meetings that start at 9:30 PM. Worse, he has Neil's cell phone number on speed dial. Until just recently, Neil's major project was assisting with a high profile public event involving the Iraqi Government. One night at dinner, prior to the turnover and while we dined al fresco, his cell phone rang. He answered it very cheerily, “Hallo, sir. Splendid!” and was silent for a time listening. We all knew it could only be his boss. He ended the conversation, hung up the phone, stared at it and then threw it over his right shoulder. “Well lads, I’m off,” he said and abruptly left. Neil survived the high profile public event and is hard at work on the next one. At least for the moment, things aren’t as stressful for him as they were during the run up to the last event.

Neil has a fascination with the US accent or accents, as we have people from all over the US in our office. He has a habit, while working at his computer, to blurt out words and phrases like, “Oh hot diggidy!” or “You betcha!” in an imitated American accent. To our ears, he sounds like someone with Turret’s Syndrome.

Another favorite topic is the American Revolution. The other day, I printed a color copy of the Grand Union Flag, the first congressionally approved flag of the United States, and innocuously displayed on the wall next to Neil's desk. The flag features the Union Jack (minus the diagonal Cross of Saint Patrick) in the canton and thirteen red and white stripes representing the original states. The flag was first flown by General George Washington on January 1, 1776 while he was encamped outside Boston. Neil worked for a time and then discovered the flag. He took it off the wall and said, “This flag is all wrong!”

“Wrong?” I said, “It’s the Grand Union flag – a symbol of our two country’s shared heritage!”

“This bit,” he said pointing to the Union Flag, “is missing the red diagonal cross. And this part,” he said waving at the red and white stripes,” is all wrong.” Having just read the Wikipedia article on the Union Flag, I told him the St. Patrick’s Cross wasn’t part of the Union Jack in 1776 because the Kingdom of Ireland hadn’t been formally incorporated into the United Kingdom. “You Americans love your flags,” he said. He then had to run off to a meeting with his boss.

I and another co-worker then printed two copies of the Declaration of Independence. We stapled the first copy onto the wooden partition wall. Then we taped an additional copy on top of that. When Neil returned from his meeting, he went back to work at his computer. Not long after, he noticed the offending document on the wall and reached up nonchalantly to tear it off. As it came away from the wall of course the stapled copy remained, a fitting metaphor for victory during the Revolution.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year 2008 or, as most of us over here look at it, the year we get to go home. For those of you reading this blog from the US, my 2008 will be between eleven and eight hours longer than yours. I’m just lucky that way.

New Year’s Eve went by without much fanfare and, since New Year’s Day isn’t a holiday the military observes, I elected not to stay up. My co-worker, Adam, an army captain, elected to smoke cigars with a group of like minded individuals in the stone cabana near the Embassy Pool. This structure features a well-designed stone fireplace that provides an excellent source of warmth during the winter months. Aside from dedicated mortar and rocket attacks (thankfully, less frequent than they used to be) we worry about Iraqi Celebratory Fire, that is, Iraqis taking their legally allowed household AK-47 and firing it up into the sky. What most people around the world fail to recognize about point a rifle or pistol towards the sky and pulling the trigger is that bullets eventually fall to the ground at a good percentage of the speed they left the barrel. Iraqis love to fire their weapons on Thursday nights, a common day for Islamic weddings, or on days when their accomplished national soccer team wins a match. Since very few people here now were around last year, no one was quite sure if the Iraqis would ring in the Gregorian year.

As Adam described it, he was sitting around the fireplace close to midnight, which is nominally protected by a corrugated roof structure, when an air force officer calmly reached into his pack and pulled out his Kevlar helmet. This greatly disturbed one of our cigar smoking Lebanese translators. “Is it supposed to be dangerous out here?”

Midnight came and Baghdad denizens chose to ring in 2008 Gregorian with a twenty minute bang of sustained fire. Over at the intersection of Al Kindi and 17th of July Streets, inside the Int’l Zone, two FBI friends of mine were near their office at the base of the 17th of July bridge. They observed Iraqis in cars racing around the traffic circle firing AKs from the windows.

Somehow I slept through all this.

We Happy Few

In an unexpected antithesis to my “Merry Freakin’ Christmas” post, I found Christmas Eve and Christmas Day here in the IZ to be quite pleasant and even memorable thanks, in part, to the Marine Corps major general who runs our Plans shop and our local Catholic chaplain.

On Christmas Eve afternoon, we had a Hail and Farewell, hosted by our Deputy Chief of Staff, a Marine Corps major general. We greeted new arrivals and presented end of tour awards to those who would be headed home in the next thirty days. At the end of the presentations, the general made some remarks which likened our presence together in Baghdad, a combat zone, as this year’s substitute family. He challenged us to look to each other as brothers because serving together, especially here, likened us as a family. He said we were here in Iraq at an auspicious time; the last six months have seen a remarkable down turn in ethno-sectarian violence and, unless things took a dramatic turn for the worse, we can say we were here at the turning point of this conflict. Each of us, in their own way, has contributed. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Henry V, on the cold, rainy eve of the Battle of Agincourt, “We shall be remembered -- we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; and those at home, now-a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here whiles any speaks that fought with us upon this day.”

This morning, at Christmas Day mass, our Air Force chaplain similarly challenged us in his homily to reflect on the circumstances that brought us together this year. How many, he asked, could predict last Christmas, surrounded by those we love most, that we would come together from diverse countries like the United Kingdom, Italy, Kenya, Romania, and Poland, to spend Christmas together in Baghdad? We are all called by a higher purpose in our service to our respective countries be us military, civilian or contractor. This is memorable, he reminded us, and should rank with our collective set of treasured memories of Christmas. And like the spiritual promise represented by Christmas, our presence in Baghdad is the result of a promise delivered in part by all of us to make a difference here.

Merry Christmas to all.

Rico's Day Off

No one was more surprised than me when my immediate supervisor, an army Lieutenant Colonel, told me a few days ago, “Rico, this Sunday you’ll have the entire day off.” Each member of our three-man planning team is to have one full day off every month. I turned to two civilian friends who work for the FBI and DEA and are part of the Embassy’s Legal Attache (LEGAT) office. Their work regularly takes them around the International Zone and they agreed to give me a driving tour of the some of the sites.

We first crossed the 17th of July bridge over the Tigris River to the south bank. The bridge itself, and the area just on the other side of it, is still considered the Green Zone. Local Iraqis who work in the Green Zone can access it from the south over this bridge and its associated entry control point (ECP) on the south bank. After crossing the bridge, we walked on foot through the Coalition ECP onto a walk way. Along the way, we passed a bass relief monument to the construction of the bridge. On the extreme right of the relief was Saddam pointing and supervising to a multitude of construction workers. After walking more, we came to the Iraqi side of the ECP. Beyond was the “Red Zone,” that part of Baghdad not under Coalition control. We briefly stepped over the threshold (but still within control of the Iraqi army security forces) where I leaned over the concrete wall and snapped the first picture. The street was busy with traffic and there were people walking to and fro. It all refreshingly normal until my companions told me a story of an Iraqi housekeeper who worked in the Green Zone who was kidnapped from the very spot we were standing on. I suddenly felt very conspicuous in my uniform and body armor.

We walked back to the car, crossing back over the Iraqi and Coalition sides of the ECP. I made it point to greet every Iraqi I saw in Arabic (Sabah al Haer or Salaam). Most were surprised to hear someone in uniform speak this way and I even got a few smiles which was gratifying.

We did a cursory walk around the vehicle to check for any tampering (read, placement of explosives), crossed the bridge and drove west along the north bank of the Tigris. We drove past the walled US New Embassy Complex which is nearing completion. When complete sometime in mid to late 2008, all US Embassy personnel will leave the Republican Palace and work out of this new compound.

The drive took us to another edge of the Green Zone, the gate that leads to Route Irish. I had been here before on my previous trips to Victory Base Complex aboard the Rhino Runner and State Department SUVs. We U-turned and drove back into the Green Zone, turning north arriving at the famous Crossed Swords compound.

Saddam used this area to review military parades and had it constructed shortly after the end of the ruinous Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989). On either end of the parade ground are two sets of massive curved crossed swords held by giant hands. Many say the massive sculpted hands were modeled directly from casts of Saddam’s hands. Given his megalomaniacal tendencies, I believe this is true. Surrounding the base of each hand holding a sword are littered forty to fifty Iranian army steel helmets cemented in place, representing defeat of Iranian troops. A similar set of Iranian helmets are cemented into the asphalt roadway in neat rows resembling speed bumps which, back in the day, allowed Iraqi troops and vehicles to march ceremonially over them.

We explored both sets of crossed swords and then actually went into the central parade reviewing building, long since looted and abandoned after the invasion in 2003. After a climb up a dark staircase, we emerged into the sunlit reviewing stands. The center set of reviewing stand seats featured mysterious black plastic tubes which split into a v-like shape. After some inspection, I realized the tubes were air conditioning vents that came up from the floor to allow Saddam’s guests to view martial splendor in comfort. We admired the view, and imagined what it must have looked like watching divisions of Saddam’s touted Republican Guard march by the stands.

Inside the building was a large central atrium dominated by a modern looking, but ruined, chandelier. Flanking the atrium on either side were large assembly rooms whose long thin glass windows all were broken. One of the rooms had its entire marble floor ripped out by looters. Although the building was ruined it still managed to retain an air of grandeur. One could imagine important military related functions held at this place.

We hopped back in our armored SUV and drove to lunch at the Freedom Cafe, one of several authentic Iraqi restaurants in the Green Zone. This was a special treat for me; the only meals I’d had in country were provided by KBR at the DFAC. We sat down amongst Iraqis who worked in the Green Zone and ordered roasted chicken, lamb kabobs, babaganoush, and pita bread. It was fantastic. As our food arrived, my DEA friend spotted a Kurdish Iraqi Policeman he knew who had just returned to Baghdad after attending his brother’s wedding up north. He joined us and had a pleasant meal together. The policeman took the liberty of ordering tea for all us after dinner. Arabs drink sweetened Ceylonese tea. I had become a big fan of the tea during a trip to Egypt in early 1992 but had not had any since then. The taste of the tea brought back many good memories of that trip, taken with friends.

After lunch, we drove to the Baghdad Operations Center (BOC), a building near the foot of the 17th July Bridge, where a Joint Task Force of FBI, DEA, and other federal law enforcement agencies work together. It is surrounded by a walled compound that includes a soccer field with actual grass (green is such a rare color here). The FBI was hosting a flag football game against a team of military engineers. We watched the game in the afternoon chilly air, perfect football weather. The FBI team won.