Spc David Hayes a 30th Engineering Brigade from N.C., holds a Guidon Banner flag during Combat Shoulder Sleeve Insignia Awards while Brig. General Thomas Lawing greets the soliders at Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq. This awards is for the service in combat zone. Photo by Nick Oza
Missions of kindness keep spirits high
Posted on Sun, May. 22, 2005
MARK WASHBURN
Staff Writer
BALAD, Iraq -- Anaconda is a company town and the company loves misery.
Talk to U.S. soldiers and airmen occupying this old Iraqi air base an hour north of Baghdad, and they will tell you that, yes, they miss their families. Yes, it's hotter than Satan's stove. Yes, body armor and helmets are clunky office fashion when there's a mortar alert.
But at Logistical Staging Area Anaconda, a well-gated community of 23,000, they point with pride to their missions.
"The kids were all grabbing and excited," says Sgt. Barbara Tobin, describing a trip to a school where soldiers distributed candy and stuffed animals, the kind of humanitarian mission that U.S. forces conduct daily but rarely makes the news back home.
"I believe in fighting for my country," says Tobin, from Pineville and recently married. "The best country to live in is the United States of America even though we're overtaxed."
Tobin has been at Camp Anaconda since January, a member of the Charlotte-based N.C. National Guard 30th Engineer Brigade, responsible for projects in the northern half of Iraq ranging from school renovations to repairing highways after bomb attacks.
She is on a yearlong rotation at the sprawling base, where American touches like Pizza Hut and Burger King are available, but the most popular attraction is a leftover from the Saddam regime -- two swimming pools, one indoors, where troops slosh off the desert heat.
Even here, money walks
Isolated by danger, language and barbed wire, the 23,000 residents of Camp Anaconda have their own economy and 1st Lt. Michael Worley, of Wilson in Eastern North Carolina, is its overseer and analyst, sort of a far-flung Alan Greenspan.Worley is in charge of the base finance office and explains the tidal action of cash on the soldiers' twice-monthly paydays.
"They get that money and take it straight over to the PX. The next day it comes straight back here."
And goes straight to Sgt. Cynthia Lilly, who rules the vault. She swings open the door on her safe to reveal the camp's treasury, about $1.1 million in cash, much of it worn by the round trips to the military exchange store.
"It doesn't look like much, does it?" she asks, and no, it doesn't. The bills barely fill two shelves in the steel box. A fortune in fives has never been freed from its shrink-wrap.
True grit
Dust is so thick here it dances in headlight beams like a misty fog. Spc. Roderick Simon of Rocky Mount in Eastern North Carolina, has it worse than most. His sinuses are OK, but he fixes the engineering brigade's computers and often finds their delicate innards coated with fine grit.
CD ROMs have a short life here, and floppy discs are beyond redemption. Simon wages a never-ending battle against the ancient sands of Iraq, with cans of compressed air his sword and shield.
Pay for risky job
While no one complains they're overpaid here, war zone duty does have its rewards. Soldiers in Iraq get an extra $225 a month in family separation pay, another $225 a month for hostile fire pay and $100 a month in hardship duty pay, plus tax breaks.Meals and clothing are free, but there are temptations beyond the powers of even hardened soldiers.
"The food in the chow hall is great, but there's something about going by the Burger King and smelling it that makes you want to go in," Worley admits.
Stars and `Star Wars'
Hollywood gets out here, too.
Amanda Swisten, star of the movie "The Girl Next Door," was in camp last week on a morale mission. Blonde, impossibly thin and showcasing it all in nonregulation shorts, she said she liked visiting Anaconda because, "It's not all men like some of the other camps. There, they weren't paying much attention to Dean."
She extended a willowy limb at actor Dean Cain, posing nearby for pictures with passers-by. He starred in TV's "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" and was touring the war zone with her.
Thursday, the third installment of the new "Star Wars" trilogy opened, which included the screen at Anaconda. Because the camp is in a time zone eight hours ahead of New York, Anacondians were among the first U.S. audiences to see the movie.
Soldiers were gathering outside the post playhouse in the afternoon for a good spot in line for the 6 p.m. premiere.
Several dozen were in queue by 4:05 p.m. when a siren wailed, signaling that the camp was under attack by mortar or rocket fire. Everyone had to move into a bunker until the all clear was sounded 25 minutes later.
Thursday's was the 39th mortar alert this month. Sensitive radars often pick up the arc of the incoming round, and if there is enough data to triangulate its source, eager specialists in mortar huts send one back.
Fired from distances of 10 miles or more, the insurgents' mortars are the equivalent of pitching a dart onto a football field while blindfolded in the parking lot and trying to nail someone in the helmet.
They usually fall harmlessly into the vast open spaces of the base, which has a 23-mile perimeter, though one mortar round recently burrowed into a latrine. The structure was unoccupied. It would have been a bad way to go.
An upgrade in housing
What used to be a tent city has been transformed in the last year into a giant trailer park. Most soldiers live in mobile housing units, modest but comfortable compartments, many adorned with satellite TV dishes.Ambiance of highway construction is the camp's decorator motif. Jersey barriers, like those lining road projects, surround dwellings, eating halls and offices.
But these Jersey barriers are on basketball scholarship, reaching about 10 feet in height to shield against shrapnel blasts. Locals call them Texas barriers.
Hangars still house wings
Concrete humps measle the air base side of the post, old hangars for Saddam Hussein's air force. One of the vast bunkers has been transformed into a sorting center for mail, with boxes and letters destined for remote bases packed up and made ready for transport by truck or plane.
"We have a word here: fascuracy," says Maj. Ephraim Grubbs of High Point, meaning that the mission is to move the mail fast but accurately to its target. It's a complicated job in a military that is constantly on the go, and Grubbs' team takes pride in tracking down soldiers on the move and getting them their care package from home.
When military records fail to pinpoint the location of the addressee, Grubbs' unit does not admit defeat. "We've even e-mailed people to ask where they are so we can get them their stuff," he says.
In the cool cavern of the hangar where Saddam's mighty MiGs used to nest, a new generation of wings are found, something pleasant in the harsh desert. Entertaining mail sorters all day with giddy song are tiny birds in the rafters, making the best of their new quarters.
With Our Soldiers
Observer reporter Mark Washburn (right) and Macon (Ga.) Telegraph photographer Nick Oza, both of Knight Ridder newspapers, traveled with an N.C. National Guard unit to Iraq. 
