Soldiers’ stories

This strange adventure had all begun a few days earlier when an e-mail plinked up on my office screen. “MFN-W can handle Mr Fletcher from November 10 through 14 in Ramadi,” it said. Weeks before — in an idle moment — I had applied to embed with the US military in Iraq, but I’d heard nothing, and more or less forgotten the idea.

Now I am on the spot. Ramadi is the most dangerous city in Iraq save Baghdad. Bring flak jacket and helmet, the e-mail ordered. Who is my next of kin? it asked. What is my blood type? I had just two days to prepare. The Iraqi embassy rushed through a visa. King’s College Hospital relieved me of £77 for a blood test. I lugged the dead weight of my flak jacket on to the Heathrow Tube for BA’s overnight flight to Kuwait, wondering whether to wear it to avoid an excess baggage charge.

At 6.40 the next morning I am collected from outside the Starbucks at Kuwait International Airport by no fewer than three US servicemen, and driven in a four-wheel- drive vehicle to the Ali al-Salem airbase in the desert. There I say goodbye to civilian life, to free will, and enter the maw of a giant military machine that is to prove bewildering, exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure.

First I have to be “processed”, which takes all day. I surrender my passport. I am allocated a bunk in tent M-5. Outside the wind whips up the sand as I pick my way down endless rows of dun-coloured canvas. I enter my tent to find half-a-dozen recumbent figures. No one says hello. This is, I realise, one vast transit camp, a temporary resting place for soldiers, contractors, civilians and mysterious intelligence types entering or leaving Iraq.

At 6pm I return to collect my passport. At 8pm I receive it. At 2am I report for my flight to Baghdad. At 5.30am we are taken by bus to a military airport, where we board one of those giant, grey, windowless transport aircraft that you enter through the rear and in which you sit lengthways along the fuselage. Two hours later we land at Baghdad airport.

But how am I to get to the Green Zone? The Iraqi capital is not somewhere you hail a cab. You can try to hop on a chopper, or wait for the evening Rhino convoy, a soldier told me. How do I hop on a helicopter, I ask? Ring Catfish, he says (I still don’t know what Catfish is). A disembodied voice tells me to report at noon. By early afternoon I am being whisked low over west Baghdad, machinegunners scouring the deadly streets below, towards the Green Zone’s “LZ (landing zone) Washington”.

I last visited Baghdad soon after the US invasion in 2003. In those days the Green Zone was just a small fortified area surrounding one of Saddam’s old presidential palaces. Today it is a vast collection of improvised embassies, ministries, military commands and contractors’ compounds carved from the heart of Baghdad. Think of London with Westminster, Whitehall, Victoria, Buckingham Place, St James’s Park and Trafalgar Square walled off.

At LZ Washington I call my POC (point of contact) at CPIC (Coalition Press Information Centre), who sends a Jeep to collect me. More processing, this time my biometrics. My irises are photographed, as is my head, from five angles. My ten fingerprints are recorded individually and together. For security, I wonder, or to identify me if killed? I am told that my flight to Ramadi will leave the next day or, to be precise, the next night, as US Marine helicopters fly only under cover of darkness.

In the meantime I am imprisoned in a CPIC dormitory. The long wait is broken by the arrival of Captain Jodie Kunkel, a kindly young woman from Illinois who drives me across the Green Zone to a cluster of trailers housing a Burger King, Subway, Green Beans coffee shop and PX selling everything from Pringles to televisions. There are even US mail boxes. The only things the Americans have not shipped out are coins: change comes in cardboard dimes and quarters.

At nine the next evening I return to LZ Washington. I’m told that my flight leaves at 1.35am. My ticket is a number written on the back of my hand with a marker pen. I sit in a trailer with a couple of soldiers, watch American football on television and talk to an Iraqi-American interpreter working for the US military. She left Iraq at the age of 12, when her parents fled Saddam’s regime. She raised four children in California, and signed up after Saddam’s fall to help her native and adopted country. The frustrating thing is that she cannot visit old friends and childhood haunts because she would be killed.

Some time in the small hours of the morning we don our flak jackets and helmets and run across the concrete apron to another helicopter. This time we skim in moonlight up the Euphrates valley. It looks beautiful, but this is the infamous Sunni Triangle, where hundreds of US soldiers have died.

We reach Camp Ramadi at 4am. No one meets me. My POC cannot be found. Eventually a flummoxed young GI takes me to a hangar-like tent and clips off the padlock with bolt cutters. Inside are two long rows of empty bunks. I try to sleep but it is freezing. At dawn I give up.

Outside it is a beautiful crisp morning. The camp stretches away in all directions — tents and trailers, portable toilets, rows of tanks, Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles, huge generators, hangars, water containers the size of swimming pools, miles of blastproof walls. How did it all get here? Off-duty soldiers are jogging along the dirt tracks. There is either dust or mud in these camps, nothing in between. I find the “chow hall”, all decked out in red, white and blue. The soldiers discharge their weapons into barrels of sand, and we each have to aid the cause by filling two sandbags before entering. I gorge on bacon, eggs, sausage, hash browns, coffee, fruit and juice.

I track down my POC, a PAO (public affairs officer) named Major Megan McClung (MMM?), a redhead from California who has earned the respect of her male colleagues by outrunning them and organising a base marathon (the course was necessarily circular). I will be accompanying a river patrol, she says. Three hours later I am on one of three SURCs (small-unit riverine crafts) chugging down a canal into the country south of Ramadi with B Company, 4th Light Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion, from Maryland.

It is a hearts and minds mission. We land by primitive homes. Soldiers brandishing machineguns jump out to secure the area, and then we hand out heaters, running shoes and sugar. What these simple Iraqi farmers and fishermen make of these strange men who simultaneously point guns and hand out gifts I cannot guess.

My companions are reservists: policemen, firefighters, students. They have left behind jobs and families. Some are on second or third tours. They have all had friends killed. Their leader, Captain Michael Weston, 34, a Harvard graduate who normally works for the Drug Enforcement Agency, was divorced by his wife after his second tour because “she got fed up”.

I had expected them to be sick of Iraq but I was wrong. The American people may want their troops home, but these and most other troops I meet want to stay to finish their mission. Pull out now and “everything we’ve accomplished would be pointless”, says Eric Miller, 33, a Baltimore engineer whose first child was born three months before he was deployed to Iraq. “Everybody wants to be here. Everybody wants to complete this mission.”

Another surprise awaits me back at Camp Ramadi. I am briefed by senior officers from the First Brigade Combat Team which is responsible for Ramadi. Contrary to everything I’ve read, they claim to have al-Qaeda on the run, to be winning the battle for the insurgents’ stronghold. They claim that the local sheikhs — tribal leaders — have switched sides and brought the people with them. They have just named a mayor, a former lieutenant-colonel in Saddam’s air force named Saad Abu Alwani, who had apparently proved his mettle by kidnapping the son of an al-Qaeda leader after al-Qaeda kidnapped his.

That night I am dispatched by Humvee to Camp Blue Diamond on Ramadi’s northern edge. The vehicle breaks down en route. “We’re sitting ducks,” a fellow passenger — I later learn that he is an expert on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — squawks nervously into the radio. Another Humvee tows us into camp.

We dine off slabs of beef wellington, hunks of apple pie and mounds of ice-cream, all imported from America. This is an army that lives rough but feeds well. For Thanksgiving tomorrow the US military is shipping 6,000lb (2,720kg) of turkey to its five Kuwait bases alone, never mind the scores of bases it has in Iraq.

On the next table sits Lieutenant-Colonel John Tien, who commands the 2nd Battalion, 37th Armoured Regiment. He is of Chinese descent, the son of a newspaper columnist and one of those really sharp, clean-cut, personable men you often find at the top of the US military. He turns out to have been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. His dining companion is equally surprising: Lieutenant-Colonel Ayaub Moussa Ali, a giant Iraqi who was, until 2003, a senior officer in Saddam Hussein’s army. “It’s a dream come true,” Ali says of his new alliance with the Americans.

I ask Tien if I can meet Sheikh Abd Sittar Bezea Ftikhan, the leader of the shifting sheikhs. Sometimes things do happen fast in the US military. The next morning — after a night on a campbed in a converted bathroom plastered with porn mag nudes — a convoy of five Humvees whisks the colonel and me to the sheikh’s heavily fortified compound near the Baghdad-to-Jordan highway.

The sheikh is straight from central casting: he is wearing a black dishdasha and a white keffiyeh and is courteous, reserved and mysterious. He offers us sweet tea and cigarettes. I learn later that the British hanged his grandfather, but he is too polite to mention that. We sit around a large, darkened marble-floored meeting room while I interview him. Yes, he says, Ramadi is turning on al-Qaeda’s foreign fighters. He agrees to be photographed with Tien, standing, symbolically, beside our Humvees.

I call McClung. I must get into Ramadi, I say. I have to see it for myself. The next day another convoy miraculously materialises. My Humvee’s machinegunner tells me how to combat-lock the door, supply him with fresh ammunition and pass him a spare barrel if the first one overheats. And off we go, flak jackets fastened, guns primed, into a city laid waste by two years of warfare, its streets strewn with rubble, its buildings damaged or destroyed, its cowed inhabitants hiding in their homes.

The next 24 hours I spend in a COP (combat outpost) called Eagle’s Nest next to Ramadi’s abandoned football stadium. It is a cluster of once-pleasant homes converted into a fortress by blast walls, sandbags and miles of coiled razor wire. There is no running water. Hot meals are shipped in once a day. The urinals are pipes stuck in the sand. From the camp’s observation posts I survey an urban wasteland.

This is as close as I will get to the people of Ramadi, but we know they’re out there. The post is regularly attacked with bombs, bullets and mortars fired by invisible assailants. The surrounding streets are seeded with IEDs. From across the rooftops we hear frequent gunfire and explosions. It sounds like Bonfire Night, except that people are dying.

That evening I visit the post’s Iraqi army contingent with its senior officer, First Lieutenant Matthew McGraw, who receives his local paper from Auburn, Alabama, each day but is also making an admirable effort to learn Arabic. I also talk at length to the post’s 40 shaven-headed US soldiers. They are youngsters from Texas, California, Missouri, Alabama. Some abandoned jobs or university to sign up in the patriotic fervour that followed 9/11. They are white, black, brown and all shades in between, but consider themselves family. They josh McGraw and each other, they call me “sir”. They show little curiosity about Iraq or the Iraqis, but they believe in what they’re doing and I like them.

I am supposed to be picked up at 9am the next day to be taken on patrol. Nobody comes. Instead I hitch a ride that evening with the food convoy that takes me to another of the camps surrounding Ramadi, Corregidor. Thus it is that two hours later a helicopter swoops down to take me back to Camp Ramadi — or Baghdad if I prefer. I choose the latter, arrive at 1am and sleep in a trailer full of Gatorade. I later learn that the patrol waited at Camp Ramadi for me all morning; I fear my presence has not helped the war effort.

I never met the people of Ramadi. I have no idea if the military is really about to reclaim the city, or whether that is yet more wishful thinking. But that is the nature of reporting Iraq nowadays: you can see it only down a gun barrel, or from behind bulletproof glass. But I did learn a bit about the US military. It is a vast, cumbersome, bureaucratic monster. It sometimes seems to have 50 support jobs for every front-line soldier. But for all the Abu Ghraibs and Hadithas, it is mostly peopled by good, brave men — and women — who endure wretched conditions in a hostile country for months on end, and retain a touching belief in the rightness of their mission.

“Here’s my thing,” Colonel Sean MacFarland, the commander of the First Brigade Combat Team, says as we sit at a conference table in his office bearing a large bowl of jelly beans. “I want to go on holiday with my family in the US and not have to worry about terrorists blowing themselves up in America. I’d rather be over here killing terrorists than have them killing us in the US. That’s why most of my soldiers will tell you that they don’t want to leave until the job is done.”