Tuesday, January 27, 2004

09:35 – Baghdad. A number of days back, my mission to see the pump stations at Razzaza was scrubbed by the detonation of an IED. We turned and fled.

A couple of days later, I was driving the return route from BIAP with Chuck, we came upon an intractable traffic jam, caused when an EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) team shut down the highway to deal with an IED they found on a bridge. After about twenty minutes of going seriously nowhere, the Iraqi’s started to turn their vehicles and bug out. First the small cars, then the larger and larger vehicles until there was enough room cleared on the slab to turn the articulated rigs one hundred eighty degrees and west, to head back down the eastbound lanes of the Qadisiya Expressway. There would be an on ramp just down the road that they could go the wrong way off and seek out an alternate route to wherever.

This left a mostly empty highway, populated by primarily Coalition vehicles. However, as much as I appreciated the opportunity to be out of doors, the disappearance of the Iraqi vehicles changed our security profile, leaving us rather exposed. After a quick confabulation, I four wheel drove our Durango through a break in the guardrail and followed a couple of Humvees through the severely rutted and brushy parkway, eventually losing our escort, getting just a little bit lost ourselves, and eventually finding the obscure truck entrance to the Green Zone downstream of the palace.

While still with our escort, we drove through one of the worst neighborhoods I’ve seen here. It was filled with crappy, cinderblock houses, seemingly dropped from the sky both in their randomness and condition. The rag clad residents stopped doing whatever little they may have been doing and stood to watch our small group drive by, find the road blocked, make a half dozen five point turns (even more turns for the Humvees, the pigs) and parade past them again. These hovel communities in Iraq piss me off to no end. This one in particular - just a mile from the palace and immediately adjacent to the expressway. There was no way that The Evil Puke could not have known the condition of his people.

What surprised me most was the ground clearance of these new Durangos. Mine handled the deep tank ruts and sharp edged irrigation ditches and spoil banks next to the highway with no problem. Then, when our makeshift escort went in a direction we weren’t prepared to follow, we ably hopped the twenty centimeter curb, did much of a u-turn on the median, then the down version of hopped off the curb and screeched back towards a piece of highway I knew, back end bouncing a little as the roar of the V-8 woke a couple of Iraqi cops napping under a shady tree. Maybe the performance capabilities will change after we get more than six hundred miles on the thing but, for a new truck with just a few visits by the dent fairy, it seems to perform like the adverts suggest.

The next day, a suicide bomber went to Allah via 500 kilograms of military explosives at the Green Zone gate that I was scheduled to use just an hour later. There was well over a hundred casualties, with over a score and a half of Iraqi’s dead. Our mission to the Ministry was scrubbed for the day.

One day later, we tried again for the Ministry, and were almost thwarted by a massive demonstration that caused us to pursue a tertiary route to our destination. We got there eventually, and even returned without incident.

The demonstration, it turns out, was attended by about 100,000 Iraqis (plus the tens of thousands attending by default, due to the lack of effective surface transportation and the tie up of the streets) in an estimated ten-mile (or two-mile, depending on the media) line of continuous protest. Theirs was a call for free and fair elections, as soon as possible. Soon come. What they fail to realize is that there will be elections when they will be in the best interests of the Coalition and no sooner.

Four missions in a row, though, redirected due to circumstances unanticipated and unavoidable. In this anarchic place and time, it’s best to keep flexible. In the words of the Infantry – improvise, adapt, overcome.