"Is that a firing range ... or is it just possible that armageddon is going down?"

Whapwhapwhapwhap!

"It's gotta be a firing range." Eyes closed.

Snap, crackle, crackle, crackle! ... Whapwhapwhap!

"But on the off chance it is armageddon ... I should probably get up ...

WHAP. WHAP. WHAP.

"... and cover that ..."

"Nah."

WHAP!

"..."

WHAP. WHAP.

"..."

WHAP.

"Damn, I better get up and make sure."

Yeah, it was the firing range. What a noob.

A .50 cal cuts loose on the range.

A Nighttime Raid with the Iraqi Army: Blooper Reel
My tag-along on a nighttime raid with the Iraqis may sound like exciting, "high-speed s***," and it certainly was in my frame of reference, but Major Joel Poudrier joked that all he remembers is "walking around in s*** at night, lighting up dogs with [his] PEC II and NVGs."

At least he had NVGs. The only night vision gear in my possession was a manually-focused monacle duct-taped to the front of my camcorder, which rendered stumbling around the pitch-black streets and back-alleys of Fallujah a blindly comical, additionally perilous endeavor. I'd trip, land ankle deep in sewage and mud and once even face-planted into a wall at a jog. Thanks to blessed ballistic goggles and kevlar, I simply bounced off like a pinball, reoriented myself and kept on going.

All that was missing was a Benny Hill soundtrack.

Fallujah alley aftermath: if only you could smell it.

One Reason I Enjoy Hanging Out with Marines
Almost all of the marines I met share an extremely active, often juvenile sense of humor.

I'd love to go into detail, but this web site would wind up blocked by most internet obscenity filters.

'Nuff said.

Members of the Fallujah Police Transition Team (PiTT) share a laugh.

On Fear
There were times in Iraq when I felt fear, when thoughts descended into a sticky cycle of analysis of a particular setting and my own vulnerability. Being downtown in an unfriendly city housing snipers, mortars, small arms fire and potential Vehicle-Borne IEDs. Traveling in convoys subject to regular IEDs, occasional bombs big enough to totally obliterate an armored humvee, others laden with fuel accelerant intended to burn you alive. The fear constantly lurked in the background and waited for an opportunity to ride shotgun, and me being me, there were a couple of times when I let it. I'd get talkative, joke more than usual and ask annoying questions of the calm folks surrounding me. But then I'd club the feeling over the head and shove it down somewhere low and out of sight, using a tool box of motivational tricks and tactics.

Bundled up in flame-resistent Nomex while convoying.

Foremost among them is perspective: the death and casualty rate here is like nothing an insulated American like me is used to, but it's not Stalingrad, Carthage, Bastogne or al-Fajr. This is a low-level insurgency fought by ultraviolent yet unfocused guerillas cowed into indirect attacks by the training and technology of the Americans. Statistics were my friend: being a blogging war tourist who spends merely days at a time in exposed locations is a reasonable bet. During my embed, others got hit. The sister IED patrol was hit by roadside bombs. The Iraqi Police were shot at the perimeter of the station. The Army MiTT officer was killed up the street. The Weapons Company Marine was shot in the neck outside the Fallujah Government Center. The 12 year-old Iraqi boy and the local welder were hit by mortars. The violence swirled around but never touched me. It's frightening and terribly sad, but the insulation of warriors and walls and fearfully inaccurate shooting by insurgents dimmed the chaos to bloody background music, a grating but tolerable soundtrack of war.

Once perspective is established, fatalism helps. If your number comes up, it comes up. Almost - but not quite - as silly as the sentiment that "it will happen to me," is the idea that "it can never happen to me." A bunch of maniacs shooting RPG's, sniping, slinging mortars, triggering bombs and loosing machine guns are bound to hit something. And they do. But if you take reasonable precautions, keep your eyes open and do what you're told by people with experience, odds are, you'll be fine. And if you do get hit, at least you did everything prudent to avoid it.

A civil affairs officer holds a piece of the World Trade Center that we rubbed for luck prior to a convoy. The standard pre-convoy briefing by this CAG team seemed especially serious and tense compared to other briefings. When I noted this to a MiTT officer, he said, "Yeah, they've been hit a couple of times, taken some casualties."

My coping process ended by looking at the people around me. Thinking, "Some of these guys are out here, in exposed living conditions or constant missions, for months to over a year at a time."

And that's where their character is truly tested. By my fourth week as an embed, I confess that I was looking forward to a hotel in Kuwait. As the list of folks hit by IEDs during my stay got longer, I started getting itchy about convoys, and wanted to avoid trips unneccessary to my coverage.

The marines, corpsmen and soldiers don't have that option.

Leftover graffiti from prior residents marks the door of a gutted building that serves as an OP in the Fallujah Government Center.

Among the military personnel in Fallujah, there are degrees of risk, varying from the safety enjoyed by marines stationed 24 hours-a-day at Camp Fallujah to Weapons Company grunts patrolling the streets, looking for fights, finding them, and taking 16 casualties in little over a month. But every single individual who operates outside the wire - whether one lives there permanently like many MiTT and PiTT members, leaves for IED patrols, or simply moves around in convoys - takes on a degree of personal risk radically foreign to those of us who live such casual daily lives in the States. And to take on this risk for months at a time, day after day, merits respect.

Politics & Why Some Fight
By the second week, my patience for politics - already at an ebb - hit an all-time low. I'd see the comments at blogs linking to my post quickly devolve into finger-pointing policy arguments centered around political identity and like vs. dislike for the Bush Administration. Seemingly buried in a majority of discussion were attempts at unbiased analysis of what was best for the conduct of the war, best for the Iraqi people, best for US personnel fighting the war and best for all those of good intent struggling to do the right thing.

Even the generically welcome "let's support the troops" mantra rang hollow from many quarters, because, in reality, what were most folks actually doing for the conflict? Many offer support on a superficial level, but interest in even sacrificing a few minutes reading about Iraq is on the wane.

And when interest is mustered, it often centers around that political argument: a battle over your worldview vs. their worldview. My exposure to those bearing the true stress of the war - Iraqis and Americans fighting and dying - rendered many of these arguments distasteful, even if I logically understand the necessity of political scuffles in determining policy. But when I heard the lament, "America isn't fighting this war, the US military is fighting this war," twice during my embed, all I could do was nod.

Additionally and specifically, I lost patience for the "let's just kick more ass" meme that fails to acknowledge the intricately humane elements required to fight a successful counterinsurgency campaign. Many of the marines and soldiers I met display a significant level of tolerance and compassion for the Iraqis around them, and this should not be regarded as a weakness.

But if I had to choose, the political argument that grated most of all came from those haughtily advocating "calling it a debacle and getting out" from a 30,000-foot perch, either ostensibly in the name of what's best for the Iraqis, or without even a logical head-nod to the consequences of that decision, both realpolitikal and humanitarian.

Look ...

... there are tons of negative angles to Iraq. It's a terribly imperfect struggle being waged within the framework of an alien, ultraviolent culture often at odds with our own. It is quite easy and situationally rational to go to Iraq and come to the conclusion that we should throw up our hands and leave that country to its fate. Frustration abounds.

But I kept coming back to the idea that this ignores positive aspects, realistic and evolving foreign policy interest, our responsibility as enablers of the current situation and, to no small extent, our duty to fellow human beings.

Major Joel Poudrier of the Fallujah MiTT 6 took this fantastic picture on a convoy.

The fear that I mentioned earlier would morph into exhaustion on convoys. Bizarrely, the acute tension of waiting to take an explosion made me yawn once en route. But on one of my last convoys of the trip, we passed by a group of children playing in littered streets. When they spotted Americans, they began running with the humvees, smiling and waving excitedly for a short burst. And, schmaltzy as it sounds, I achieved a moment of clarity looking at one kid's face. The exhaustion evaporated and my opinion on the war swung ever so slightly in its ongoing pendulum between cynical exasperation and hopeful resolve.

The smiling faces of those kids, coupled with the countless assessments from Americans and Iraqis who told me Fallujah would dissolve into blood-soaked anarchy if the US precipitously withdraws, spurred rigorous examination of the conflict's worth and workability. And in the end I think it's both worth it and workable, if we define realistic endpoints and muster requisite political will. To be clear, these are big "ifs."

At the very least, we have an obligation to leave behind Iraqi security that can run their own city and sustain a fight against the worst extremists within their midst. It may be hard to find straight-up "good guys" in Fallujah, but there's certainly a number of truly evil actors in need of extermination. And if you find moral arguments "immature and illogical," as one INDC Journal commenter characterized them, consider the previous realpolitikal ramifications of little American involvement in Fallujah, something that might repeat itself in the event of withdrawal before nascent security forces can sustain themselves: In 2003, the city was overrun by Islamic radicals who murdered, purged and dominated initially welcoming locals who refused their brand of ideological purity. They wanted to start the new Islamic Caliphate from the city, establishing a staging area for regional terrorist attacks.

Thus, the fight in Fallujah and al-Anbar is a slightly less confusing paradigm than the Shia-Sunni divide and the politics of the central government in Baghdad; American interest is clearly served by crushing al Qaeda and the splintered terrorist groups and lawless gangs waging insurgency in the West.

Looking at kids clarified this aspect of the struggle. That - whether it's well-timed withdrawal with advisorship or continuing an active American role in the fight - the US has a responsibility to shun political expediency and honestly analyze and execute what is best for these people and what is best for our national interest, because in this case, to some degree, they intersect. The Saddam Hussein era was its own brand of terror, but we've altered Iraq and promised its citizens a shot at something better. Thus, to leave innocent Iraqis to the whim of the worst gangsters vying for power before they acquire the mojo to sustain a fight for stability ... well, let's just say that seems like a pretty tough call to me.

For myself and some of the marines and soldiers I met, the look on the face of an Iraqi kid can lend a moment of clarity to war's sacrifice.

***


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