Flood of mail catches up with Fort Lewis troops

MOSUL, Iraq - They're turning the mail back on now that the Stryker brigade is in Mosul.

The troops from Fort Lewis living on the Mosul palace grounds got hundreds of packages delivered Wednesday, with many hundreds more on the way over the next few days.

And soldiers still waiting to head north from Camp Pacesetter are getting their first delivery there in a couple of weeks. Regular service at the base camp near Duluyiah was shut off for the brigade's move to Mosul.

Some of the postmarks on boxes delivered Wednesday were as old as Dec. 4, but it appeared most were mailed late in December or in the first few days of this month.

"It's all catching up," said Sgt. 1st Class Donald Bulen, chief of the brigade's personnel section, who led a team on a mail run to the Mosul Airfield on Wednesday.

Soldiers' mail is delivered there directly by a private air contractor. The Fort Lewis-based 175th Postal Detachment sorts it at a small warehouse on the airfield camp.

Stryker soldiers stationed at the airfield will have it right there, and others based at another camp across the street from the airfield won't have far to go.

But getting mail to the troops at the palace is a 20-minute drive through often-heavy traffic. Every trip through the city of 1.8 million is a combat operation, requiring several vehicles and security.

Attacks are infrequent, and no Stryker convoys have reported that they've been fired on in Mosul, but it's happened plenty to the 101st Airborne Division soldiers the Fort Lewis troops are relieving.

The biggest hazard for Bulen's crew Wednesday was the two massive mud puddles - mud lakes is more like it - at both entrances to the mail warehouse.

The glop got one of his trucks. Soldiers used another truck and chains to pull the rig out.

At the palace grounds, mud isn't nearly the problem that it is at the airfield or at Camp Glory across the street.

Most of the brigade troops at the palace stay in cargo container-like shelters, in most cases two-to-a-shelter. Many leak - including the one in which the brigade commander, Col. Mike Rounds, is living.

Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Pentagon contractor at the palace and dozens of other camps across Iraq, got its guys out with caulking guns to plug the holes.

The palace camp, known as Camp Freedom, has heat and power and bunks with mattresses, and in pretty much every way the shelters beat the big tents the soldiers lived in at Pacesetter.

The place is loaded with creature comforts. There's a large weight room, a juice and espresso bar, and a couple of little stores where local merchants sell the usual assortment of tobacco, plus Cuban cigars for $5 apiece, devices to convert 220 power to 110, personal hygiene items, and snacks and goodies.

There's a swimming pool, a great big deep one, though it's been drained for the winter.

There's a diner, also run by local contractors, called the Eagle Cafe. A sign posted at the front door itemizes the operator's various public health deficiencies, but there are nearly always soldiers eating there. Which is curious because the main dining facility is free and, so far, delicious.

And there are two Internet cafes, one that's free and another that costs $2 an hour.

It's still an open question how much of all this will stay when the 101st rides out over the next several weeks. But it's likely the Stryker soldiers won't see much of a drop in the quality of life.

"This place feels like the Hilton," Sgt. 1st Class Devon Roy said after a couple of nights in the camp.

Sgt. Joshua McKeown, who rates the palace camp as superior to the conditions he found in Bosnia, had his own standard.

The uniform of choice these days for Stryker troops in Mosul is their Army-issued Peckham black fleece top, zipped up over their desert camouflage blouse.

They weren't allowed to wear fleece outside of their camouflage at Pacesetter. And they had to wear their kevlar helmets whenever outdoors, even on the base camp.

And at Pacesetter, the 4th Infantry Division's rules applied. In Mosul, they're in the 101st Airborne Division's area of operations.

Sgt. 1st Class Donald Bulen ponders his next move after one of the trucks on a Stryker brigade mail run gets stuck in the mud at Mosul Airfield on Wednesday. Another truck pulled it out.

Bucks as important as bullets in northern Iraq mission

MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune

MOSUL, Iraq - Money has been the 101st Airborne Division's weapon of choice in northern Iraq.

They've paid for Iraqis to refurbish looted schools and hospitals, set up 10 Internet cafes, fix potholes, field a 160-team citywide youth soccer league, stage an arts festival and restock library shelves at Mosul University.

They even built a nine-hole golf course in Qayyarah, an hour south of the city. It apparently is the only one in Iraq.

"If you can think of any idea that has to do with living in a city - anything - I can tell you we've funded it," said the division's spokesman, Maj. Trey Cate. "I haven't been stumped yet."

By the time they hand over northern Iraq to the Fort Lewis-based Stryker brigade and head home to Fort Campbell, Ky., the 101st will have spent more than $55 million in what's called commanders emergency relief program, or CERP, funds. Most of it comes from accounts seized from the old Saddam Hussein regime.

Division commander Maj. Gen. David Petraeus has a list of another $76 million in big-ticket projects, for which he's obtained more than $27 million, mostly from former regime money controlled by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

The 36-project list includes refurbishing the city hall, police headquarters and courthouse, as well as water-treatment plants, highway upgrades and garbage trucks. Five projects have been completed or are nearly finished, and 16 haven't yet been started.

Across northern Iraq there are still on average four to seven hostile acts against U.S. and Iraqi authorities every day, Cate said. But the region is not nearly as restive as Baghdad or the provinces immediately north and west of the capital.

And, in the 101st's view at least, the Mosul area is the best-prepared for the return of Iraqi sovereignty this summer.

Officials say the 101st has been steadily turning over the responsibility for government functions to the Iraqis. But to see it through, it will be up to the Stryker brigade and the Fort Lewis command staff that will lead the joint U.S.-Iraqi force in the north.

There likely won't be a dramatic change in approach, although the amount of money the new force will have at its disposal and where it will be spent are still in the works, said Col. Mike Rounds, the Stryker brigade commander.

But the goal will be to prepare the local institutions to stand on their own, and to live within the budgets set for them by the new national government that emerges in Baghdad, he said.

"We've all got to believe we can make the government here work, as opposed to Americans just handing them money," Rounds said.

A brigade commander like Rounds can approve CERP projects for up to $50,000 with little of the red tape that normally accompanies Army spending.

"The CERP funds allow you to do things very rapidly," he said, "but they undermine what you're working on over the long term."

But by cutting back on such spending, U.S. forces run the risk of angering locals who've benefited. Attacks on 101st troops rose sharply in late October and November, Cate said, when CERP payments dropped to about $1 million each month.

Now they're back up to the more typical $7 million to $8 million per month, he said.

"Money up here is ammunition, and you've got to keep it flowing," Cate said.

The 101st also has used more traditional means of military persuasion during its nine months in the north. Division troops have conducted numerous major counter-insurgency operations in Mosul and elsewhere.

In the most recent, "Operation Reindeer Games" on Dec. 10, troops from the division's 2nd Brigade captured 19 of 34 targeted ex-Fedayeen fighters and killed another in a shootout, Cate said.

That's more like what Stryker brigade troops did in their month in Samarra, Duluiyah and Balad - places 200 miles to the south, where the attacks on U.S. troops are more frequent.

Stryker infantrymen raided homes, hunted mortarmen, seized hidden weapons and arrested suspected insurgency leaders. They fixed some potholes, but what the Army calls civil affairs was not a large part of the brigade's approach in its first month in Iraq.

The mission in Mosul is likely to be far more complicated. Brigade staff officers are being assigned responsibility for various sectors of the local government and economy.

Executive officer Lt. Col. Barry Huggins said the brigade was designed to handle what the Army calls "full-spectrum operations" - everything from conventional fighting to peacekeeping and civil affairs.

In Mosul, Rounds said, "the days when we're doing more offensive operations and not civil-military operations will be the days when we're going in the wrong direction."

News Tribune staff writer Michael Gilbert is embedded with the Stryker brigade in Iraq. Reach him at mjgilbert41@yahoo.com.

For regular reports on the brigade, sign up for an e-mail newsletter at www.tribnet. com/registration.

(Published 12:01AM, January 14th, 2004)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.