The Great Divide

This article was sent to me by a good friend.

Her husband is an officer stationed in Iraq. The story that follows was emailed to him by a friend of his, Sgt. Brian Wheelock. Sgt Wheelock is mentioned in the article. I found it to be a very powerful piece of journalism. It comes from a different perspective than the typical viewpoint and outright lies we see every day from the MSM.
The article takes place in 2005.
The reporter is embedded with the CAG (Civil Affairs Group), Det 5. Although it is not the same unit, or the same year, my friend's husband is located in Al Asad, as mentioned in the article, and doing the same work as these selfless Marines. I hope this gives everyone a better understanding of the role the United States has in Iraq.

It is a long article but there are no excerpting restrictions from this source that I know of.
It is a 'must' read. The link above goes to the website where the story appeared if you wish to read it there.

It was the moment I thought I’d been waiting for. After spending a week on Al Asad, the largest U.S. military installation in western Iraq, I’d been offered the chance to go “outside the wire” on a mission. Standing before me in the 110-degree heat, Sergeant Brian Wheelock explained that his detachment of Marines was going to a town called Hit. As far as Wheelock knew, I would be the first American journalist to visit the town, and he said this mission was one I ought to see: His men would be meeting with the most powerful imams and sheikhs of Al Anbar province, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, ground zero of the insurgency. The detachment’s captain was going to try to persuade them to encourage their mosques and tribes to vote in the upcoming election. In other words, the Iraqis who trusted the United States the least would be asked to trust us entirely and embrace democracy.

Looking like a locked-and-loaded Richie Cunningham, Wheelock practically begged me to go.

I had only about 40 minutes to grab my gear and rendezvous with Wheelock’s convoy bound for Hit. I ran to my quarters, a tiny room in one of the hundreds of trailers on Al Asad, and began to pack. Alone, jamming clothes into my backpack and pulling together my body armor, the realities of the mission hit me: The road to Hit (pronounced “Heat") is one of the deadliest in Iraq. Coalition troops were getting wounded or zipped into body bags on this stretch virtually every day. Death came most often from the ubiquitous improvised explosive devices. One minute you’re riding across the desert; the next, there’s a boom from below, and you’re in pieces on the sand, bleeding to death while you stare at what’s left of your legs a few feet away. And Hit — that place was still a shitstorm. I picked up my satellite phone and called my wife. To say hello? To say goodbye? It was the middle of the night in the States; she didn’t pick up. Probably fast asleep. I thought of never again sleeping next to her, of never seeing her, of leaving my two boys fatherless. I collapsed onto the tile floor and cried. Does this happen to a Marine before a mission? Does this happen to Tim McMenamin — my friend from St. Joe’s Prep, the Marine who lured me here? “There are those who do, and those who write about it,” Tim had said. I found Wheelock and told him I wouldn’t be going to Hit. It simply wasn’t worth it.

A little over a year later, on a recent winter morning, Tim and I are still alive, and back in Philly. Tim is Chief Warrant Officer of the 5th CAG — a Marine Civil Affairs Group. At St. Joe’s Prep, Timmy and I carried the same Northeast Philly chips on our shoulders. Now we’re in our mid-30s. I am, as he puts it, a “liberal journalist” against the war, and he is a gung-ho Marine who invited me to Iraq to show me the progress his CAG, and thereby the U.S. military, was making there. The 5th CAG, some 200 U.S. troops, primarily Marine reservists, was charged with establishing parochial democracies in Anbar — local governments that would be essential buttresses if there ever was to be a truly democratic Iraq.

It’s Christmastime, and over breakfast in Center City, we’re talking about our time in Iraq. Again. Though Timmy’s service there dwarfs anything I did, we know we’re both veterans now. What we shared there has made us tighter in inexplicable ways. When we’re together and hear someone complaining about weather, or a boss, or an undercooked steak, we look at each other, knowing what a bad day really looks like. When we’re apart, instead of catching up on the phone two or three times a year, like we used to, we talk once or twice a week, if only to tell a joke. Iraq has become our story.

I hand Tim a copy of the previous day’s New York Times, a paper he refers to as “slop,” and point to a story headlined THE ONLY CONSENSUS ON IRAQ: NOBODY’S LEAVING RIGHT NOW. The article is about the findings of the Iraq Study Group, led by Lee Hamilton and James Baker. One passage quotes a scholar at the Israel Policy Forum: “What the Baker group appears to have done is try to change the direction of the political momentum on Iraq. They have made clear that there isn’t a scenario for a democratic Iraq, at least for a very long time. ... “

Tim plunks down the paper and says, “I’m glad they’re not saying we should just pick up and leave.” He’s a man of very few words, most of them slathered in sarcasm, but his tone is now thoughtful and serious. “The lesson I learned in Iraq is patience. There is absolutely still hope. We need to have patience.” I find his conviction stunning, but I’m not able to dismiss it as the opinion of a patriot-fool. I can’t tell Timmy he’s wrong. I can’t tell him he’s ignoring the reports, and so many grim facts. I can’t tell him this because after I got over my fears back on that August day a year and a half ago, I did join Wheelock and Timmy’s Marines in Hit, and I glimpsed what he still sees: As the United States turns, inexorably away from, out of, this war, Timmy holds on to a promise that is at once much more complex and much simpler than the reports and those grim facts. I saw that promise, too.

AUGUST 2005
For a few moments, as the Marine Corps chopper shuttling me to western Iraq soared between a full summer moon and the Euphrates, I forgot everything, surrendering to Driftwood 41’s gentle rocking and the hypnotic thumping of its rotor blades. Two massive machine guns protruding through the windows to my immediate left appeared as benign silhouettes, while the green glow of the night-vision goggles on the two figures manning the weapons made for a mesmerizing focus. Hot breezes blew through the bird’s belly. I imagined misunderstood beauty in the darkness below. For a few moments. Then the ground unleashed what looked like green fireworks. Straight for us? And I remembered: this war, and Tim waiting for me down in that desert.

In 2003, Tim was deployed to Iraq for his first tour. He led a bulk-fuel unit of some 70 Marine reservists who established gas stations in the southern Iraqi desert. The pumps were stepping-stones for the initial U.S. ground assault on Baghdad. “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “The War on Terror,” “World War III” — whatever. Seemed to me that President Bush had dragged our nation into a bloody crusade, putting my friend, along with hundreds of thousands of other troops, in harm’s way, all on a colossal WMD whoopsy-daisy. I figured that on this issue, at least, Timmy must share my take. After all, it was 17-year-old Tim who researched the My Lai massacre for a high-school advanced-placement history class and concluded, “Lt. William Calley forgot one thing, and that is you do not carry out an unlawful order.”

“Over there, we had FROG missiles shot at us,” Tim said, when we talked after his first tour. “Far as I’m concerned, that’s a weapon of mass destruction. If you saw what I saw, you’d understand.” That was when he added, “There are those who do, and those who write about it.”

Tim volunteered to go to Iraq for a second tour in October 2004; he kissed his fiancée goodbye and arrived in-country the following March. We began exchanging e-mails. I wrote: “Remember when you said I’d have to see things firsthand over there to understand? How would you feel about me coming over to report on what you’re doing?” His reply arrived within minutes: “I’ll have a helmet and cot waiting for you.”

And so on a mid-August night only a few months later, I was on a Marine Corps chopper flying into Anbar Province, the “Wild West,” to see Tim. What looked like fireworks was streaking toward my helicopter. The Marines at the bird’s machine guns sat stoically. I felt like I was going to puke.

Intact, Driftwood 41 settled on the LZ — landing zone — of Camp Blue Diamond, a small Marine installation in central Iraq, on the eastern edge of Anbar. Stepping from the chopper’s rear hatch into the 103-degree night, I tugged at 50 pounds of body armor to reassure myself it was in place. Waving light sticks, a Marine escorted me from the LZ into a flakeboard shed. Inside, among a crowd of exhausted-looking troops waiting for birds to carry them to God knows where, I saw Tim, dressed in his brown-and-tan fatigues — 33 years old, with fair skin and intense dark eyes. His height is average, and his build is slight. He wasn’t made to carry a world on his shoulders. But you can’t tell him that. After graduating from the Prep, I racked up student-loan debt for a liberal-arts school in western Pennsylvania, while Tim enrolled at St. Joe’s University, lived at home, worked part-time as a grocery clerk, and joined the Marine Corps Reserves. He joined because, as he put it, he believed “it was important to serve,” and, hey, his old man was already working a construction gig on top of his regular cop job to pay for the Prep; Timmy didn’t want to lay the pressure of college tuition on him. While working part-time at a supermarket and training with his Reserve unit, Timmy got a bachelor’s degree in food marketing and rose to a management position in a supermarket chain.

Now he greeted me with “You all right?” I walked through his words and hugged him. He squeezed back hard, for only a second — he was, after all, surrounded by Marines. “So did you get shot at?” he asked. He must have seen it on my face. I explained. “Yeah, you were getting shot at,” he said, laughing. “Green tracers are bad. You had Soviet-made machine guns firing at you. The bad guys use the Russian stuff.” He speculated that my helicopter didn’t return fire because the crew didn’t have permission; air support must already have been present. “Welcome to Al Anbar,” he said.

By now, most of the U.S. has heard of Anbar, the largest and most dangerous of Iraq’s 18 provinces. It’s an ocean of sand and rocky hills sprawling from central Iraq some 300 miles west to Syria and Jordan. Most of its towns and villages are on the banks of the Euphrates, which snakes along the province’s northern and eastern borders. The vast majority of Anbar’s 1.2 million Iraqis are Sunni Arabs, which is to say, Saddam loyalists. The province is loaded with mujahideen, or in Marine-speak, “muj.” In and around Baghdad, coalition forces are playing a lethal game of whack-a-mole with the bad guys, but as a colonel who directed all Marine Corps combat operations in Anbar told me, “The war has moved out here.” And it hasn’t left.

After I dropped my gear in our quarters — a small air-conditioned room inside a trailer, with a set of bunk beds — Tim and I sat outside. The Diamond wasn’t Tim’s home base; he was stationed at Al Asad, a U.S. installation about 30 miles to the northwest. He’d flown in to escort me the rest of the way, and also to meet with brass to discuss the logistics of getting CAG home. After six months in-country, Tim’s unit was wrapping up its tour. He had one mission left, and the plan was for me to tag along.

“We’re making progress,” he told me. “You’ll see.” I lied and told him I believed him.

I handed Tim a note from his mom. Inside was a photograph of the American flag hanging in front of his parents’ Rhawnhurst twin. “That’s the flag I gave my dad,” he said, giving it a long look. Tim’s father is an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. Now retired from the Philly PD, “Big Tom” McMenamin is a truck driver for a coffee company. On his pickup he stuck this bumper sticker: I’LL FORGIVE JANE FONDA WHEN THE JEWS FORGIVE HITLER. Along with the picture, Timmy’s mom, Margaret Mary, had sent laminated St. Joseph prayer cards. “Whoever shall read this prayer or hear it or keep it about themselves,” they read, “shall not be overpowered in battle.”

During Timmy’s first tour, a pickup spouting gunfire sped toward his convoy, and he gave the order for his machine-gunner to take it out. Stopping to inspect the small pickup, he saw the body parts sliced and diced all over the front seat. “I didn’t feel bad about it,” he said when he got home. “I got all my Marines home alive.” I now asked if he’d seen similar action this time. “Not really,” he said. Just that a few weeks back, he and his Marines had come under mortar attack. Tim’s guys fired, turning the enemy into “hamburger.” He’d also been on a mission to the town of Hit when the lead vehicle of his convoy stopped short of a detected improvised explosive device. While waiting for the bomb squad to deactivate the IED, the Marines followed “immediate action” procedure: Climbing from their vehicles, they walked about the desert looking for more IEDs. For more than an hour, they tried not to step on mines while scanning the surrounding hills for snipers.

“Fine,” he said. “Good. Real good.” He lowered his head, spat out a stream of tobacco juice, and suggested we go in and get some sleep.

AFTER THE EXPLOSION, I lay awake in my bed enjoying the fact that we weren’t dead. I watched morning seep through the camouflage sheet hung over our room’s only window and waited to hear Tim stir above me. There was no rush. The next bird to Asad wouldn’t fly until nightfall. Flight schedules are “fluid” and kept secret. All Tim knew was that we were to report to the LZ at 10:30 p.m.

Around midmorning, two more IDFs hit the Diamond. When the attacks came, seconds apart, Tim was meeting in the Civil Affairs HQ, and I was on the other side of the small base, seated at a computer in the “recreation center” — a one-story building with a pool table, a paperback library, a big-screen TV, and a room with some phones and computers. Exactly where the IDF hit, I didn’t know. But the building shook. Books toppled. I overheard a Marine on one of the phones; the freckle-faced kid whispered into the receiver, “Oh, that — that was nothing.”

Brief flurries of incoming — mortars, grenades, gunfire, rockets — are still routine on U.S. bases in the Wild West. At least once every day, from somewhere outside the concrete walls, some muj armed with something fires once or twice onto the base. The bad guys don’t linger to recalibrate for accuracy. After taking their shots, insurgents scurry into the anonymity of darkness or meld into a village crowd, hoping that, “inshahallah” — God willing — they have inflicted death on the infidels.

OFFICIALLY, THE CAG MISSION is defined as “Reconstruction, Economic Development, and Governance” — in other words, nation-building. The idea that Marines have been assigned such a Sisyphean geopolitical chore struck me as ridiculous. After all, leathernecks aren’t sent to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for classes on how to create societies; they go to boot camp at Parris Island, where they’re taught to kill enemies. And the idea that Marine reservists would be handed the task seemed flat-out silly: weekend warriors on a massive plumbing-to-politics Habitat for Humanity mission in Iraq’s Wild West sounds like the premise for a sequel to the movie Stripes: “Am I to understand that you men are under orders to build a democracy in Al Anbar on your own?” Men respond: “That’s the fact, Jack.”

But this isn’t new. The U.S. military has been executing Civil Affairs-type missions for a couple hundred years, dating back to the U.S.-American Indian wars, when Army General Winfield Scott dared to work with the Cherokees to plan the “Trail of Tears,” rather than just point a rifle at the natives and order them to get moving. U.S. forces replicated Scott’s diplomacy in Haiti and the Philippines, and during World War I. Yet it wasn’t until 1940 that the Marines codified their Civil Affairs procedures. The Marine Small Wars Handbook states, “The motive ... is not material destruction,” but rather “the social, economic and political development of the people.” Armed with the handbook, U.S. military officers took the lead in rebuilding post-WWII-occupied Germany and Japan, stabilizing the new governments and economies. Military CAGs have played a role in every U.S. war, small and not so small, ever since, with varying degrees of success.

After the IDF attacks, I found Timmy in CAG HQ; he informed me of an intell report warning of a potential gas attack.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “You’d be dead before you could get it on.”

THE HELICOPTER RIDE TO ASAD was wonderfully uneventful. Asad is a Manhattan-size installation in northwest Iraq. It’s got a Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, a few mess halls, its own fire department, and a little mall — the “Haji Mart,” as Marines call it — that smells of incense and sells Xboxes and bootleg DVDs. There’s even a car dealership, which probably makes a fortune selling to homebound troops. Imagine the sales pitch: “You served your country well, sir. Now treat yourself. We could have an F-150 waiting for you when you get back home.”

For the troops, Asad is a necessary oasis; for me, it was a frustrating waste of time. And the mission Tim was taking me on didn’t sound like much of a mission at all. He informed me that first we’d go see a battle-damaged mosque that his CAG Marines had repaired (technically, it was on the base), and then we’d stop by a solar-panel project CAG has installed at an Iraqi school in the village of Arwan. As the executive officer of Det Four, one of four CAG detachments, Tim was something of a player-manager. His duties included monitoring Det Four’s budget and making battle-damage payments to Iraqis and payments to families whose innocent loved ones were mistakenly killed by U.S. troops. The going rate for an Iraqi life is about $2,500.

That’s when Sergeant Brian Wheelock begged me — out of Tim’s earshot — to go with him and a few of his Marines to Hit. Once I thought about it, I thanked him and said, “I promised my wife I’d come home. I don’t have three testicles like you Marines. I have two boys ...”

Wheelock, an accountant back in Massachusetts who’s in his mid-30s, with red hair buzzed short, cut me off. “Sir,” he said politely, “I understand. I have a wife, two-year-old twins, and an infant daughter I haven’t seen.” He told me his wife named their newborn Abigail Hope. She figured in times like these, you’ve got to have hope. “Tell you what,” he offered. “When I get back, I’ll tell you everything. It will be just like you were there with us.”

Back at camp, before I opened my mouth, Tim knew what had happened. “We still got my mission,” he said. “Let’s grab dinner.” As we walked toward the mess hall, I talked around the word: coward. I said if he and his team members, like Wheelock, are risking their lives for this mission, it merits attention; I should’ve gone — that’s why I came, isn’t it?

“I’ll listen to you bitch about this for today,” Tim said, “But then it ends. You made your decision.”

Hours later, I learned that another convoy was scheduled to leave for Hit early the next morning, and that if I got on it I’d be in time to link up with Wheelock and the rest of Timmy’s team down there. “If that’s what you want to do,” Timmy said, unconvinced, or maybe just tired of it all. I lay awake through the night, and at 4:30 a.m. grabbed my pack and snapped on the armor. Lapsed Catholic or not, I made sure a St. Joseph card from Timmy’s mom was in my pocket. I couldn’t see Tim in the dark room; as I left, he said nothing.

Marines call the road to Hit the “Hit-Haditha Corridor,” or “Route Bronze.” CAG still travels it often, up to the far-north town of Haditha, where they’ve been working to repair and upgrade the Haditha Dam, and down south to Hit, which only recently was deemed by CAG to be a “permissible” environment, meaning safe enough to operate in. Well over 50 percent of the injuries and fatalities to U.S. troops in Iraq still occur on roads and are caused by IEDs, mines, and suicide car bombers. I attached myself to a relatively small convoy of three Amphibious Assault Vehicles, or AAVs. An AAV resembles a long Dumpster on treads. A driver, a gunner and a communications guy sit in their own cockpits on the nose. How AAVs float and why they are in the desert, I have no idea. I was riding with Marines Herlihy and Boggs, both from Florida, both soft-spoken, God-fearing kids barely old enough to drink a beer. Boggs, the son of a Baptist preacher, was engaged to the daughter of a Vietnam Special Forces vet who’s now a minister. Herlihy had a pregnant wife and was trying to grow a mustache. Boggs did the driving. Herlihy did the shooting. Because they were down a crew member, they invited me to sit up front in the communications seat. “You can see what we see,” Boggs said.

It’s about 20 miles from Asad to Hit. The first leg of the trip was on a two-lane strip of unmarked asphalt that unfurled like a forgotten ribbon blown onto the sand. In the twilight, there was nothing much to look at. When the orange sun pushed above the horizon, it instantly cooked the air and illuminated our isolation. To describe this world as a desert is an understatement. In the baked brown sea, it seemed a man’s spirit could drown long before his body dehydrated.

What Boggs needed to mind were the piles of debris dotting the roadside. An old gas canister or a trash bag could be filled with explosives and shards of razor-sharp metal, wrapped around a small embedded receiver; a muj might be hiding with a cell phone rigged to trigger the IED as our convoy passed. Suddenly, Boggs pulled over as the lead AAV stopped to inspect what could be an IED. Herlihy rotated his machine gun. Nothing. We continued on, turning left off the asphalt into the desert for the second and last leg of the drive. Boggs stayed in the tread tracks left by other convoys. In the tracks, it’s easier to detect disturbed ground that might indicate a mine. I clenched my legs together tightly, foolishly thinking that if a mine did blow up from below, I might at least be able to save my legs that way. Guess this was what Tim meant when he said he was doing fine, real good.

It was six a.m. as we rolled into Hit. The streets were empty except for trash and charred cars, the one- and two-story storefronts closed up. Among the Arabic business signs and crookedly hung banners was graffiti sprayed in English: DEATH TO MARINES. U.S. LEAVE OR DIE. To our left, the city sloped down and then rose along a hillside. Mosques pierced the skyline. Now acutely vigilant, Herlihy kept the gun pivoting, left to right and back again. In the desert, death comes from below; in tight city streets like this, it could come from anywhere.

Two and a half hours after we left Asad, we arrived at Firm Base 1 in downtown Hit, a four-story building that was formerly a teacher’s college. The Marines had erected concrete barriers around the perimeter and lined the approaching streets with old AAV treads that served as speed bumps. The windows of the building were boarded shut and covered with sandbags; machine-gunners’ nests were visible at each of the four corners of the roof. A 10-foot-high wall of sandbags protected the building’s foundation.

Captain John Cordone, leader of Det Four’s six-man Team One, greeted me inside. “Tim told us to expect you,” he said. “He wants me to send him an e-mail to let him know you’re here.” Cordone is a 30-something graduate of the United States Naval Academy. Judging from his physique, at Annapolis he spent as much time with the weights as he did with the books. After graduating, Cordone chose to go directly into the Corps rather than pursue a mechanical engineering grad scholarship to M.I.T. He served a year over his obligatory five in the Corps and then joined the reserves. In his civilian life, he works for a D.C.-based military contractor doing telecommunications work for the Department of Defense.

With an hour to kill before meeting with the sheikhs and imams, Cordone led me to the CAG office inside Firm Base 1. In the poorly lit cinderblock box with a couch, a cot and his desk, we mixed packets of Gatorade into water bottles and talked.

“We’re not losing.” Cordone said this matter-of-factly, no pause, no stammer. He was certain. Like so many of us, Cordone draws parallels with the Vietnam War, except that for him, Vietnam was lost “in the press and the hearts and minds of America,” not in the jungles of Asia, and that’s the greatest risk here. “We can’t pull out. Withdrawal is not the answer. CAG is critical to giving the Iraqis a sense of ownership and hope. Hit has about 50,000 people; if there are 500 insurgents here, and that’s probably a high estimate, that’s one percent of the population. The Marines are here for that one percent — to kill them, to capture them. CAG, the six-man team I have, is here for the other 99 percent.”

CAG’s mission to win over the Sunnis in Hit and throughout Anbar is essential to forming and sustaining a free Iraqi nation and allowing the U.S. to ultimately withdraw. The Sunnis comprise the smallest of the country’s three political blocks, and they believe that the new government has been stacked to empower and enrich the Shia, in oil-rich southern Iraq, and the Kurds, who control the northern oil fields. If the Sunnis abandon hope in the democratic process, civil war will be inevitable.

That morning, Cordone was meeting with four of the top sheikhs in the province, hoping to persuade them to preach democracy from their mosques. We went to an old classroom in a building next to the barracks. Inside the room, the walls were lined with shelves of dusty books; above a long, rectangular conference table, a lone ceiling fan slowly churned the 117-degree air. At 10:30 a.m., the entourage arrived.

First into the room were three sheikhs, all in their late 30s to early 40s, bearded and clad in traditional tunics and headdresses. They shook hands with Cordone, his civilian interpreter, and me. “Salaam aleichem” — peace be with you — each Arab said. They sat together on the same side of the table. Last through the door was a small, much older sheikh. His face was creased with wrinkles; his skin was as dry and brown and ancient as the Anbar desert. His beard was gray, and his brown eyes conveyed a deep sadness, as if he once thought he had seen the worst a man could see, only to realize he’d been wrong. He was Sheikh Yaseen, the head imam in Hit, and clearly the elder in charge. He sat next to his fellow sheikhs, closest to Cordone, at the head of the table.

The captain didn’t identify me as a journalist. “Please tell them,” he said to the interpreter, Noal, “that I would like to talk about the elections and the role of the people, why they need to vote, but I’d like to begin by asking what is on their minds.” The younger sheikhs all turned to Yaseen. The old man’s gravelly voice spilled out slowly and softly, filtered through the translator: Yaseen wanted to know why the Marines were stopping so many citizens; he said he’d given the Marines a chart of who is to be stopped; the rest are good people; no one in Hit shoots at Marines. Uninterrupted, he continued while Cordone took notes. Yaseen said the two men who were killed at a checkpoint last week were innocent men. The other sheikhs nodded adamantly. Yaseen said one of the men shot wasn’t right in the head; the other was a student at university. He said that the men were unarmed, that the Marines at the checkpoint put an AK-47 in the hands of one of the dead men. People saw this happen. Good people told him this.

One of the younger sheikhs, Amar Mohammed, pushed away from the table. He was a big man, the only one of the four not wearing white, but a bright-purple tunic trimmed in gold. Clearly agitated, he walked around the table, yanked out a chair, and sat alone, on the opposite side of Yaseen and the other two. The room fell silent. The ceiling fan turned. Mohammed pumped his left leg under the table, cocked his head, and stared at Cordone. One of the CAG Marines walked into the room and stood just off to the side of his captain. The Marine was wearing dark sunglasses, and an M16 was slung over his shoulder.

Cordone looked at his notes and calmly addressed Yaseen’s points. “Sheikh Yaseen,” Cordone said, nodding respectfully, “you say that no one in Hit shoots at Marines, but last week we took 30 bullets, and every day we are finding bombs.” Cordone looked at the translator. “Please tell the sheikh that we understand he represents good people, but Marines have no reason to lie. When Marines make mistakes, and we have, we apologize, and we compensate. There is an investigation.” Cordone explained the rules for escalation of force at checkpoints: First the Marine waves for the vehicle to stop; next the Marine throws a noise grenade, then fires a warning shot. If the car continues, the Marine will shoot to kill. Cordone explained that the two men who were killed were speeding toward the checkpoint, and shots were heard coming from the car.

“No. No,” Sheikh Mohammed said, furiously pumping his leg. Everyone now looked to him as he talked loudly and rapidly. He asked about a young boy shot in the town market. He said the boy ran when he saw Marines because he was scared, and the Marines shot the boy in the side. People in the market tried to help, but the Marines said no, they would take care of him after they searched the boy and the area. Mohammed said the boy lay there and died. Mohammed dramatically extended his arms — as if about to lose control — then slowly lowered his palms onto the table and said, “And now is the time we are to ask people to vote?” One of the two sheikhs who had not yet spoken said, “What good is an investigation to a family who has lost its son?” From around the table, a litany of grievances was presented to Cordone: Why are there so many patrols through the city? Why are there barriers in front of businesses and the youth center? Why aren’t there warning signs as cars approach checkpoints? Why can’t we have ambulance services 24 hours? More than 30 people have been killed since June 23rd, and none were terrorists; all had family and friends and people who loved them. Why is this?

Since Sheikh Yaseen first spoke, he had remained silent, listening. He now turned to Captain Cordone, waiting for answers. Cordone looked over his notes. He said he had been working with the city council to remove the barriers, but then a car bomb went off in that area. He had spoken to command about warning signs and flares at checkpoints; the reason nighttime ambulance service was halted is that insurgents were using ambulances as suicide car bombs. One day, Marines didn’t patrol the city, and the next day, Marine patrols found eight bombs. “When you talk to me,” Cordone said, making eye contact with each of the sheikhs, one by one, “it does influence how we do business. When we shoot people and when we make mistakes, no one feels worse than a Marine.”

Then, as he spoke, Cordone looked directly and only at Yaseen. “We’re here talking right now, and we have been working very hard not to kill innocent people, but the insurgents don’t want to talk, and they don’t care who they kill.”

The large and animated Sheikh Mohammed, along with the other two sheikhs, turned silently to Yaseen. Where he chose to go, they would follow. For democracy to work in Iraq, it appeared, the old must lead the young into the new. The old sheikh’s hands were clasped just so on the table; he was looking at the ground. Yaseen looked up and said something. “He says you are right,” the translator said. Yaseen spoke some more. “He says you are a good and educated man. He says it’s clear you do want to help our people.”

Cordone asked Sheikh Yaseen if the sheikhs and imams would encourage their people to vote in October. Yaseen said they would, and with that, he stood. Cordone stood, and then the other sheikhs. With two hands, Yaseen grasped Cordone’s hand and looked directly into the captain’s eyes, nodded, and smiled, and for the first time in three hours, I no longer saw sadness in those eyes. No translator was required to interpret what they conveyed: hope. Yet the purple-clad Sheikh Mohammed stood apart from the group, looking disgusted and eager to leave.

After the meeting, I talked with Cordone in his office. I said it appeared to me that Yaseen and the others were testing him, deciding if he, and the United States and democracy and an Iraqi constitution, were worthy of their trust — and that Yaseen seemed to trust him and Mohammed did not. “Most Iraqis are sitting on the fence to see how this turns out,” Cordone explained. In the end, “You’re dealing with politicians, and you’re dealing with human nature, and their culture and their religion. Most of their primary focus is on self-preservation. And you’ve got to seek out the guys who are less likely to think that way. It’s just like anything — you know, what’s going to make an impact? Well, when I talk with you, how I treat you — that’s going to be the strongest message.”

As we talked, there was an explosion just outside the barracks. Dirt and debris rained on the roof and walls. “Put your shit on,” Cordone barked, pointing at my armor. We hurried into the hall. Marines ran by, their M16s ready. A Marine screamed to some grunts outside the front door: “Did you hear me? I said get in here! Do you want to die?” A Marine major approached Cordone. “How long ago did your sheikhs leave?” he asked. About a half-hour ago, Cordone said. “Gee, what a coincidence,” the major noted, implying that the strike was either coordinated to kill “cooperating” sheikhs, or perhaps had been given their blessing.

“Anything’s possible,” Cordone told me as we stood in the dark hallway, waiting for another blast that wouldn’t come. There was nothing more to say.

“HOW WAS IT?” TIM ASKED as I stood over his desk back in Asad, two days later.

He took me outside the office. He told me he had wanted to go with me, but that he was put on standby for a tactical operation, and he couldn’t tell me that at the time. For the first time, I told him about my mini-breakdown in his trailer, and that I’d been terrified the whole time I was gone — traveling, at the Firm Base 1 — and that now I felt like ...

He finished my sentence: “You feel like a load is off your shoulders.” Exactly. “Everything you felt, I feel, we all feel, when we go on a mission,” he said. “That’s it. There’s a lot of waiting around, and then it’s your turn to do your duty.”

I asked if we were still going on his mission. “Nah,” he said. “Where you were, that was the real deal. Nothing more I can show you.” We stood in the sun and looked at each other without saying anything for a second or two. I told him about the meeting, and that when it ended, I saw in Yaseen’s eyes a glimmer of ... “Hope,” he said, again finishing my thought. “Now you can get why I’m here, right? And why we can’t leave right now. While we’re here, there’s hope. If we leave right now, hope’s gone. That’s something you have to be here to appreciate.”

TWO MONTHS AGO, IN PHILADELPHIA, as Timmy and I finish up breakfast and talk, passers-by zip past the windows on 15th Street. I hear holiday music playing in the background: Bing Crosby is singing about coming home for Christmas. His words are optimistic, yet his tone is unmistakably melancholy, as if he doesn’t quite believe the tune he sings. My friend doesn’t have that problem. “The Iraqis want things done now,” he says. “And we want it done now. It’s the way society is. All those little meetings you have, like the one you saw with Cordone, you’re building relationships, and you have to be patient.”

As simple as that. But Timmy is aware, of course, of what the Iraq War scorecard now looks like: In that October vote, the referendum on the proposed Iraqi constitution — the election for which the 5th CAG worked so hard and risked so much — the majority of Iraq’s Sunnis turned out. And all told, 78 percent of Iraqis approved the document. In Anbar Province, however, in cities like Ramadi and Hit, where Cordone, Wheelock, Timmy and the rest had focused their energies, virtually no Sunnis cast ballots. On the day of that election, Ramadi and Hit, in particular, appeared to be ghost towns. The violence in Anbar hasn’t subsided; rather, it has gotten worse, and a ride on the Hit-Haditha corridor still has the potential to be a one-way trip.

The provincial governments that the 5th CAG helped establish do endure, but because of sectarian fighting, they meet on an “as-available basis.” The environment around the Ramadi Government Center is so “unpermissive” that, according to a CAG officer currently in Anbar, before the elected officials can convene there and get down to the business of governing, the center has to once again be made secure. And as the number of U.S. troops dying on a monthly basis in the country has risen, the civil war that the 5th CAG worked to prevent is now largely viewed in the States as a reality, a view that many in the military now share as well. It was hardly a surprise, then, that the reaction to President Bush’s current plan to send more troops to Iraq was overwhelmingly negative.

Yet Timmy remains steadfast in his belief that U.S. involvement is required, and he sees hope for a stable and democratic Iraq. Perhaps that’s because his expectations and his realization of what’s required in Iraq have always been more realistic than mine. “Nothing is perfect,” he says. “You invade a country. And suddenly servicemen are getting killed, and it’s, ‘Oh my God, let’s pull out, let’s pull out.’ The focus is on that.”

You mean, I ask, there isn’t enough focus on those moments of promise, like the one between Cordone and Yaseen?

“Exactly. When is the last time you saw a story in the media about CAG? You wouldn’t know anything about what we did if you hadn’t seen it for yourself.”

John Cordone, now a major, is back home in Virginia. He tells me that his last meeting with Yaseen was on September 4th, 2005, only days after I left. Yaseen had come to ask for the release of an Iraqi picked up by Marines for questioning. He insisted the man was innocent; good people, again, had told him this. Cordone explained why the man wouldn’t be immediately released. Minutes after Yaseen left, Firm Base 1 came under a heavy, orchestrated attack. Two suicide car bombers drove into the front gates; then came the fire from small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. During the attack, one of the CAG Marines took glass and shrapnel to the face; Cordone and his men forgot about diplomacy and returned to the role of Marine riflemen, taking up positions and firing until the firing stopped. Despite all of that, Cordone, too, says there is hope in Iraq, if only the American public is willing to stay committed. “The Marines don’t refer to the war as the Iraq War or Operation Iraqi Freedom,” he says. “We call it ‘The Long War.’”

Part of me is sure that Timmy holds to his conviction because he doesn’t have a choice, because he’s a Marine; he’s been there twice and could end up there again, and for him to believe otherwise would be akin to a Catholic kid from Northeast Philly who went to St. Joe’s Prep saying there is no Jesus. It’s a matter of faith. The war in Iraq, the Long War that once divided us — Timmy and me — is now our bond. Because I saw the possibility of what was there — a possibility I now believe is gone, but that, for reasons both so complex and quite simple, my friend still sees.

Maximillian Potter is the executive editor of Denver’s city magazine, 5280. Previously, he was a senior staff writer at Philadelphia magazine and GQ.

I've been on FR for a good number of years and I still can't figure out why some threads I post get read a lot and some get tepid response (volume-wise).

Other than the title, I can't figure why that is.
This is the one thread that I wanted to see get a lot of readers. I guess I'll have to keep bumping it.

Bump to the TOP!

I've been on FR for a good number of years and I still can't figure out why some threads I post get read a lot and some get tepid response (volume-wise).

Happens to me with the limericks--before last summer when I went to Alaska, I'd get 150 hits on each one. Now I'm lucky if I get a dozen replies.

Keep your chin up :-)

Cheers!

“The Marines don’t refer to the war as the Iraq War or Operation Iraqi Freedom,” he says. “We call it ‘The Long War.’”

Sorry to seem out of touch, but from this point on, I will no longer call the Iraq War (or the GWOT, for that matter) by any other name but 'The Long War'.

We must dispel the notion these enemies will be defeated in a few years. IMO, this war will take decades, just as it took decades to defeat the Soviet Union.

We must dispel the notion these enemies will be defeated in a few years.

I recall a State of The Union address given by President Bush before we went in to Iraq. He outlined what must be done and specifically said this would be a long and hard road. That it would take a long time to accomplish our goals. Why are they now carrying on like none of this was discussed beforehand?

I understand that those on the left who now oppose this war after initially giving their consent (Click Here) have been programmed with an MTV-3-minute-rock-video-where's-my-microwave-popcorn attention span. But given the nature and history of our enemy, could they at least put down the Hot-Pocket, step away from the bong and get with the program please?

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