When the Iraqi battalion received its annual dump of new supplies from the Iraqi brigade, I decided to act as interpreter and help Lt. Rob Adams, who usually dealt with supply issues but was having a tough time communicating with the Iraqis. “As salamu aleikum,” I said to the crowd of Iraqis preparing to offload the supplies. I was greeted as though I were an Arab rock star. “Jamal, Jamal, you speak Arabic? You are a good man. Come on over, sit down, we want to talk to you.” How do these guys know me? I wondered. I mustered together some Arabic words and all of a sudden I was Lawrence of Arabia with the jundi.
Supplying Iraqis
Amazingly, the Ministry of Defense had sent supplies for three hundred soldiers, more than enough to cover our needs at the battalion. Of course the supply count was based on necessary items such as camouflage blouses, camouflage pants, and boots. To say the MOD had actually sent full supplies for each of the three hundred soldiers would not be true. For example, we had fourteen sweatshirts, forty pairs of tennis shoes, and sixty-five pairs of gloves. Don’t ask me how those numbers worked out.
Captain Hasen explained why he was disappointed the MOD did not take all of the odd lot supplies. “Jamal, let me explain to you something about Iraqis. If you give one guy something and don’t give another guy the same thing, the bitching and complaining will be so persistent, you will wish that we all had nothing. Trust me, you will see.”
Adams suggested a great idea to Hasen. “Why don’t you use the extra items as rewards? The Iraqi officers can give these to soldiers who do exceptional things in the battalion.” Hasen quickly responded, teaching us another lesson in survivor culture. “Listen, if I give one soldier an award, all of the soldiers will immediately berate me for playing favorites and giving special treatment to a single soldier. Plus, the soldier who receives the award will be scolded for being an ass kisser. In the end, it ends up being a worse deal for both me and the soldier receiving the award. This is crazy, but true.” Adams and I nodded in agreement. In our short time interacting with Iraqis, we knew Hasen was correct. Sadly, what Americans deem to be great ideas seldom work within the Iraqi culture.
Astonishingly, the handling of the new supply dump went extremely well, thanks to Captain Nihad, the S-4 logistics officer. Nihad was the closest thing to a Marine officer in our battalion. He worked extremely hard, he took pride in his work and duties, and his troops faithfully executed his well-conceived plans and orders.
For all the praise I could give Nihad, there was one aspect of leadership that even he failed to perform: leadership by example. Marine officers learn in their first days at Officer Candidates School (OCS) the concept of ductus exemplo, or leadership by example. The idea is simple and time tested: an officer, or any sort of good leader for that matter, does what his subordinates do, regardless of how dreadful the task may be. This in turn gains the subordinate’s respect and encourages them to accomplish the mission. The ductus exemplo concept is foreign to Iraqis. Leadership in their minds is not an opportunity to show the troops any task is possible but an opportunity to force someone under their command to do all the unwanted tasks.
The day the supplies arrived provided a perfect example of the Iraqi leadership trait I call lazimus maximus. Adams and I, feeling sorry for the jundi who were hauling the boxes of supplies in the burning heat, decided to help them finish their job. Nihad immediately scolded us, saying, “Jamal and Adams, what are you doing? Come over here with me in the shade, have a drink, and let the soldiers do that work. Work is not for you!” Samir and Ali, the jundi we were helping, said, “Shukran” (Thanks) and told us to go with Nihad. It was obvious they appreciated our help and respected us for putting in the effort. We wanted to continue helping the soldiers, but our basic knowledge of Arab culture gave us the good sense to go with what Captain Nihad wanted. Telling him he was wrong in front of his troops would have led to bigger issues. Later, in a more private arena, we explained to him the concept of ductus exemplo. I doubt he listened, but perhaps over time he learned.
The Iraqis finally squared away their new supplies into the supply area. Overall, it was an impressive effort by Iraqi standards. Nobody shot themselves in the foot, nobody slept on the job, and the actual mission was accomplished. After the event Samir and some other jundi demanded Adams and I come to lunch with them. There was no getting out of this one. Beans, rice, chicken, and khubbis are good for perhaps the first twenty times, however, by this point it was getting old. Nevertheless, in an effort to continue to build relationships with the jundi, we ate with our friends (see photo 12).
Counting Iraqis
Here is a paradox. Modern mathematics is based on the number system developed by the Arabs, yet somehow many Arabs do not understand simple arithmetic. My guess is there is some other element involved. In the case of the Iraqi S-1 shop, this other element is lying. Abdulrachman, an Iraqi soldier who still held grudges against the Americans for whipping his unit in Nasiriyah during the march up to Baghdad, gave me a lesson in Iraqi math, which uses the Arabic numeral system but has an uncanny ability to defy logic.
For a few weeks Abdulrachman had been telling me they had 134 jundi on leave. During my first couple of weeks here I went with this number, because I assumed a level of professionalism within the S-1. I am a gullible American.
I interrogated the S-1 on their leave counts. “Abdulrachman, I was in the swahuts this morning watching the morning formation and there were only 64 soldiers from H&S battalion present, yet you say there are 84 present?” He responded as though it was obvious. “Jamal, of course, there are only 64, it is just a mistake in the report.” I had him by the balls. “So Abdulrachman, if you agree with me there are only 64 soldiers on hand, that must mean there are 20 soldiers who took two consecutive ten-day periods of leave, correct? You really have 154 currently on leave, not the 134 you keep telling me?”
Abdulrachman acknowledged the mistake. “Jamal,” he said, “I am sorry, you are correct, I will fix it now. Sorry for all the confusion, you can trust me in the future. I am a very good S-1.” I played the part of the ignorant American and smiled in response. He took the bait and assumed I did not figure out his hidden agenda, which was to fake the accountability numbers so certain Iraqi soldiers could take extended twenty-day leave sessions. It seemed Iraqis were often trying to cheat the system, a trait heavily reinforced under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
I finally understood why the generals told us that accountability, leave, and pay issues are the Achilles heel of the Iraqi army (logistics are the Iraqi army’s kryptonite). Accurate accounting of Iraqis is an impossible business when the incentives for numbers to be accurate are not there. I remember a Washington Post article in late 2004 in which the Iraqi government claimed it could do a nationwide census in a day. The idea was to shut down the country and send out 150,000 schoolteachers to get an accurate number of the country’s population. My question was this: if Iraqis cannot account for a battalion’s worth of soldiers who they can physically line up and count, how can they expect to count the unorganized masses throughout Iraq? When you add the multiple layers of incentives for the census data to be tilted one way or the other by various religious, tribal, and ethnic groups, it only adds to the potential confusion. My guess is that any census data compiled in the post-Saddam era has a 20 to 30 percent error rate—at a minimum.
Feeding Iraqis
When it comes to chow distribution, the U.S. military is hands down the most effective military organization on the planet. One day on a leave run, Adams and I, with the help of Amir and his Leyland flatbed pickup, went to pick up food items at Al Asad’s food distribution center. We followed a U.S. Army sergeant around the chow supply area and loaded up on various goods. We were sweating our asses off in the 130-degree heat. Thankfully we soon came to the meat freezer. When the sergeant opened the door on the freezer, a crisp blast of air engulfed us.
Amir seized the opportunity to cool off. He dropped out of the driver’s side of the Leyland and moved around the Leyla
nd’s engine compartment to help us load supplies. At the first hint of cool air, he sprinted for the freezer. Amir dove into the meat freezer at full speed and bellowed at the top of his lungs in his best English, “Welcome to Amreeyca! I love Cali-forniya!” He fell to the freezer floor and rolled on the ground. He continued his rant, shouting, “I love Cali-forniya, I hate Iraq, please take me Amreeyca!” We all laughed hysterically. Although we could not believe what we were seeing, we definitely understood the logic behind it. It was hot as hell, the freezer felt damn good, and food was plentiful.
After loading all the frozen meats we could carry, we closed the large freezer doors. We had one problem, though. Amir would not leave. He was clinging to the floor like a leech. We eventually had to peel him off the ground. We next moved to the dry goods food area and filled the Leyland to the brim with food. Now the MiTT could survive happily for at least a few weeks without resupply and we could help the Iraqis if their situation became even more dire than it already was.
The U.S. military chow supply is abundant and organized, but the Iraqi chow supply system is criminal. We returned to the brigade camp on Al Asad to wait for the Iraqi chow to arrive. As usual the Iraqi food contractors had collected their paycheck without providing a service. No food arrived. Once again the Iraqis would have to rely on the U.S. taxpayer to provide their food. We were at a point that our battalion might starve. Just the week before, during an inventory of Iraqi chow, the counts were sparse: ten bags of potatoes—all of which were rotten, a box of tea, a few cans of peas, a small container of tomato paste, and seven twenty kilogram rice sacks. Ahmed Rial, the food contractor on our camp, gave me his assessment of the situation. “Jamal, we have enough chow for roughly three days, but they will be fed like prisoners.” I could not have agreed more with Rial’s assessment.
The Iraqi food situation was dire, and it opened my eyes to happenings around the camp. One day I saw the Iraqis throwing small wires with fish hooks attached across the electric lines running through the camp. They were using these wires to get the power to cook in their swahuts. Why are they cooking in their swahuts? I wondered. I noticed that when I was in the jundi swahuts learning about Muslim prayer practices, they were eating fresh-caught fish from the Euphrates. It appeared that the entire camp of Iraqis was sustaining themselves by fishing. At this stage we were effectively an agrarian army. I understand that a soldier’s life is sometimes rough, but any professional army should not have to spend 50 percent of its time engaging in hunting and gathering activities while the contractor is collecting fat checks and not providing anything.
I asked a few soldiers and officers around camp what the deal was with the food contract. The problem was multifaceted, they told me. The first issue had to do with security, which may have explained 10 to 20 percent of the shortfall. On occasion the Iraqi supply convoys and food contractors were pirated and everyone was murdered on their way west through Al Anbar Province. The second, and more important issue, revolved around a kink in Iraqi culture that developed over time due to a history of chronic supply shortages: Iraqi people hoard things. In the context of the Iraqi army this occurred when the chow was dropped at the higher-level headquarters, which was then given the responsibility to pass it down to subordinate units. The higher-level units often decided to keep the chow and never sent it to the lower units. They hoarded it for a “rainy day.”
Looking back on my experience at Camp Taji, which is a high-level training headquarters for the Iraqi army, I realized that I had witnessed chow hoarding firsthand. While at Taji we ate lamb chops, chicken breast, and steak; yet the Camp Taji jundi were on the same chow contract our battalion was using. The jundi’s theory is that soldiers at Camp Taji horde all the chow supplies and send table scraps to the brigades, who then subsequently horde the table scraps and pass their gas to the battalions. It is not surprising that all our jundi leave their AK-47s in their swahut and hang a “Gone Fishing” sign on their front doors.
We May Die from Starvation
Word came one morning from brigade that the emergency supply that had been en route from Baghdad would not be arriving. The Iraqi contractor, the Jabber Company, had been ambushed by Al Qaeda elements near Ramadi. Every one of the workers had been murdered and all the supplies, including the eighteen-wheeler that was hauling the chow, had been stolen.
What did this mean for the jundi and the MiTT? In a nutshell, more fishing in the Euphrates and more wasting of U.S. taxpayer money so the jundi can eat. We needed to purchase the chow using the MiTT’s four-thousand-dollar-a-month slush fund, which pays for things the Iraqi army needs. Food obviously qualifies as a need.
My motivation level wasn’t exactly “sky high” after hearing this news. I had originally bought into President Bush’s rhetoric that if we trained Iraqi security forces to take on the security of their own country, it might allow democratic institutions to flourish throughout Iraq. What I realized was that I would not be risking my life for Iraqi’s future but for hungry Iraqis and an inept and corrupt logistics system that has no chance of being reformed any time soon.
We decided to execute Operation Hungry Tiger. The operation’s name was a parody on the fact that we were heading into town with the sole purpose of buying chow for the Iraqis so they would not go hungry. We commenced the operation at 0600 and convoyed to Barwana. The Iraqis cruised on the way to Barwana; we arrived at 0730 (record time) without incident, il hamdu Allah (thanks be to God). After generating a basic mission plan to secure the market area, buy the necessary chow, and securely egress, we left the northeast Barwana FOB wire and headed through the rustic town of Barwana.
Before we left the gate a short, overweight Marine tottered to an Iraqi Leyland driver and yelled at him in English, “Switch positions in the convoy!” Perplexed, I looked at Adams and asked, “Who the hell is that?” Adams responded in a disgusted tone, “Dude, it’s the boss. He’s yelling at the jundi to get in position. What an idiot.” I replied, “Are you serious? When is he going to figure out we are advising the Iraqi army and not commanding the Iraqi army?”
The market in Barwana was notorious for small-arms attacks. Situated along the eastern bank of the Euphrates, the Barwana market allowed terrorists on the western side of the river to easily shoot across the river and escape without incident.
The lead Iraqi Humvee barged into the Barwana market. Crack! AK-47 fire came screaming through the air, trying to punish the front of the lead Iraqi armored Humvee with little success. I immediately ducked into the armor of the turret and started scanning for the enemy. Luckily, the small-arms fire was aimed squarely at the lead Humvee, which had already entered the market and was far from our Humvee.
Private Ali, the lead Iraqi gunner, who was in the hail of gunfire, ducked into the body of the Humvee, cautiously reached his arm up, and pulled the trigger on his PKC, letting a burst of thirty rounds fly in a skyward direction. These unaimed rounds were not going to hit any insurgents, but they did scare them enough to force them to evacuate the area before anyone else could return fire.
Once the scene calmed down, Adams said, “Dude, this is retarded. We’re risking our lives to buy chow for the Iraqi army? I ain’t walking out in that shit!” I responded, “Seriously man, let’s make sure everything is calm before you guys do anything. I don’t want to tell your wife you died in a heroic battle for Iraqi chow.” The jundi sent out a small team of men to search in the immediate vicinity to ensure there were no ambushes waiting in the wings as our convoy pushed completely into the market area.
“Gray, what’s it looking like up there in the turret?” Adams inquired. “Well, to be honest,” I said, “I can’t see shit to the west, because there is a big-ass palm grove forest; I can’t see shit to the east, because there is a big-ass hill in front of my face; and I can’t see shit to the south, because an Iraqi Humvee is in my way.” Adams interrupted me. “Gray, where can you see?” I replied, “Well, to the north things look clear. You can get out and buy some chow, I think.�
� I paused for a moment and then further antagonized Adams with false motivation. “Oohrah, Devil Dog. Go get some action!” Adams, not amused, responded, “Jamal—fuck you.”
Once security was set Adams, the funds handler (Corporal Jellison), and Moody (terp) exited the vehicles to negotiate prices and quantities with the locals. As Adams and his posse worked with the locals, I took a moment to enjoy the scene. I had to pinch myself. The Barwana market was so foreign to my American eyes that I needed to check that I wasn’t dreaming that I was in the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. The marketplace itself was small, perhaps a football field in length, but it was vibrant with life. Each shop was a stall the size of a small garage space, typically fitted with a tin awning and a couple of wrinkly faced merchants sitting in chairs enjoying the desert heat. Freshly slaughtered lamb carcasses hung from meat hooks outside stores, shoe stores had their shoes nicely assorted in lines, jewelry shops had all their goods on display, and the farmers had their produce products nestled in the shade. My guess is that when the Ottomans came to these same Arab lands many centuries ago, they saw the exact same thing.
“Gray, we bought the entire thing!” Adams exclaimed proudly as he approached the Humvee. I was not involved in the conversation, but from the looks of it, Adams had managed to buy the entire marketplace. Every shop had a Leyland backed up to it and four jundi loading sacks of rice, bags of potatoes, and various other food sacks. Bravo! (See photo 13.)
After emptying the Barwana market we marched the convoy back to the Barwana FOB. As we were moving out of the market a young boy waved and offered us some Pepsi. His father sat back and watched approvingly as his son handed us four sodas, expecting nothing in return. Adams graciously gave him a five-dollar bill. I waved at the kid from my turret and said, “Shukran jazeelan” (Thank you very much). He returned my wave and smiled. I think we may have won one heart and mind today. Of course, we also may have been bamboozled into paying five dollars for four Pepsis; we will never know for sure.
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