November 14, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Globalization, Human Rights, Water
Africa Lifelines: A THREE-DAY SERIES
Engucwini, Malawi – Five times a day, Agnes Munthali hikes barefoot half a mile from a grass-roofed hut to fetch water for her thirsty children, balancing a sloshing 5-gallon bucket on her head. Corn barely sprouts from surrounding fields. Nearly half of Malawi’s 12 million people face starvation.
But water needs gnaw most urgently here and across rural Africa,
where 303 million villagers lack access to a safe source.
Waterborne disease kills thousands every day.
Munthali and others carry the buckets, weighing up to 45 pounds,
using bone, muscle and sheer will, while the gray Zombwe Mountains
loom in the distance.
On a recent clear morning, Munthali, a vivacious 35-year-old whose
smile reveals a missing front tooth, shrieked with laughter at an
outsider’s suggestion that the government will address water woes.
For villagers, government “doesn’t work,” Munthali said.
Villagers can’t even approach politicians, she said. If one did,
politicians “would turn him down.”
As it is, Munthali and her water- carrying neighbors consider
themselves lucky.
For the first time in years, the water they haul is clean – not
because Malawi’s government helped, but because Engucwini connected
with a private group of Americans half a world away.
The villagers teamed up with Water for People, a Denver-based group
that funds self-help projects. This year, the group arranged for
installation of a 150-foot-deep well within a mile of Munthali’s
mud-brick hut.
“I’m very happy about this,” she said.
More than 2,000 villagers a day flock to this well for clean water.
Previously, they had no choice but to drink contaminated water from
hand-dug pits.
Americans may assume the world’s poorest people suffer silently,
but more and more are able to ask for help using cellphones, e-mail
and other connections, circumventing corrupt or cumbersome
governments, said Solomon Nkiwane, a Zimbabwean political scientist
at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Villagers increasingly form committees and pursue their interests
anywhere they can find help, Nkiwane said.
“This people-to-people thing is beginning. It may be a drop in the
bucket. But maybe this is the approach we should take,” he said.
Malawian life expectancy has fallen from 42 years in the 1970s to
39 in recent years because of AIDS and diseases caused by
contaminated water. And income is falling. Farmers in this area
earn about $8 a month.
The project began a few years ago when the local doctor, Steven
Chavinda, 65, called chiefs together and asked: “What are your
greatest needs?” All the chiefs said the same thing: clean water.
One chief, Mishek Ndzima, had lost his son to cholera, spread by
feces in water.
Chavinda told a U.S. Peace Corps worker posted nearby, who informed
a Malawian who worked as regional coordinator for Water for People.
That led to installation over the past 18 months of two wells at a
cost of $25,000. Denver-based supervisors lined up a local crew to
drill the holes and oversee maintenance training.
“The best solutions come from sitting down as close to the problem
as possible and talking with the people,” said Steve Werner,
executive director of Water for People, at his headquarters in
Denver.
Villagers worldwide propose dozens of projects each month, often
learning of the group through the Internet. Werner and 20 staffers
in five countries review all proposals. Sponsored by the American
Waterworks Association trade group, they fund what they can on an
annual budget of around $2.8 million: about 80 projects, including
40 wells from Bolivia to Vietnam.
In Malawi, the first of the two wells helped revive the local
health clinic. The clinic, built in 1984, for years offered only
limited services because of a lack of water. Government officials
never supplied medicine as they do at other rural clinics. Radios
for emergency communications weren’t maintained. A 10-bed maternity
wing never opened.
This year, villagers notified health officials that the clinic has
water from a foreign-funded well with a solar-powered pump. And
health-ministry crews delivered mattresses for maternity beds, said
Manford Nyirenda, 49, chairman of the village water committee.
“We pushed them into action,” Nyirenda said, smiling, finger on
the pump power switch.
At the other well, Munthali gripped a hand pump and pushed up and
down as the noon sun beat down. Clear water gushed from the tap.
Women and girls took turns filling blue and orange buckets,
chattering. Between buckets, girls jockeyed to drink from the tap,
including Munthali’s pride and joy, Memory, 8, in a torn red
dress.
Last year, Memory got sick after drinking contaminated water from a
shallow well. “Very bad for her,” Munthali said. Purifying water
by boiling was impractical, given limited wood in the area.
Most of the 18,000 villagers around Engucwini still rely on water
drawn from hand-dug pits. Cloudy, stagnant pools in the pits
contain bacteria that cause cholera and diarrhea, known locally as
“open bowels.”
Malarial mosquitoes breed in mud around the pools. Women wash
clothes close by.
At the health clinic, the doctor Chavinda recently faced Ester
Chiumia, 32, cradling her dehydrated month-old son, Samuel. She had
walked since sunrise to reach Chavinda in his concrete building
without electricity. Now it was noon.
Gazing down at her baby, Chiumia said Samuel had bloody diarrhea
and no appetite.
Chavinda looked at her silently at first. At that moment, he lacked
the right medication. He saw Chiumia practically shaking with fear.
He gave her a folded piece of paper containing a couple tablets of
an adult antibiotic – the closest substitute he could find – with
instructions to cut each pill in half.
Chiumia nodded, still worried. She told the doctor the water she
hauls “looks dark. … We have no choice.”
At least 150 villagers die around Engucwini each year from easily
preventable sickness from contaminated water, Chavinda said. Deaths
decreased a bit recently in the area around Engucwini’s two new
wells, he said, “but we’ve got a lot more work to do.” He
reckoned Engucwini needs at least 20 wells.
Today, girls skip school to join the stoic parade of women hauling
water. And mothers are resigned that contaminated water will kill
kids.
“We do take chances here,” one woman said, watching her
granddaughter, Tiyese Chirwa, climb down a log into a muddy pit and
dip her bucket into a plate-sized milky pool of water.
Some villagers here struggle to find water at all. At an outlying
area called Chileda, there are no wells within 5 miles for an
estimated 5,000 people. For them, even marginal water is precious.
Barefoot boys in raggedy clothes were there, some with bellies
bloated from malnourishment, crouched around a drying water hole.
They had been digging it out a bit trying to coax more water from
the ground. A saucer-sized cloudy white pool of water only grew
more opaque.
Desperate, Chileda chiefs recently dispatched Frank Kumwenda, 29,
to go to the regional capital, Mzuzu, for help.
He set out by bicycle at 4 a.m., bouncing down a dirt road. He
pedaled furiously, crossed the sewage-contaminated Kasitu River
before anybody was up and reached the pavement of Malawi’s main
north-south road.
Then, moving along faster, he noticed some roadside villages had
wells. “I compared them to us,” Kumwenda said. “We are still
behind.”
Kumwenda drank from one well, savoring the water on his journey.
He reached Mzuzu and its government offices by 9 a.m.
“I found the secretary,” Kumwenda said.
He announced that he had come to get help for his village.
“The secretary said, ‘The boss is not in the office,”‘ he said.
When he rode home that afternoon after a fruitless wait and told
what had happened, the chiefs were angry.
Kumwenda planned to try again soon.
Meanwhile, Munthali, sitting with relatives at their tidy farm
compound, said she wants to be part of a local maintenance team to
make sure the new wells work properly.
Men had assumed they would travel for maintenance training, but
Munthali said, “We’ll need a good mix.” After all, women haul
most of the water.
And while acknowledging the pressing needs of villagers at Chileda,
she also proposed drilling a new well closer to her home.
Today, even with a clean water source a half mile away, she and
Memory still must devote much of each day to trekking back and
forth.
In America, “people have a much easier life,” Munthali said.
“How can that happen here?”
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
November 13, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Counter-Terrorism, Globalization, Human Rights, Migration, Security, U.S. Role in the World
Denver agent training Kenyan officers in forensics The U.S. views Africa with interest as a frontier for terrorism, but any military acts can stoke resentment.
Nairobi, Kenya – Nine thousand miles from his home in Denver, FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff faced 60 top African detectives packed into a room in Nairobi as part of a new U.S. focus on Africa.
Schlaff’s mission: to work with these African counterparts on
forensics and cultivate them as security partners.
The U.S. government views Africa with renewed interest as a
frontier for terrorism where al-Qaeda and other Islamic radicals
hide. Africa also supplies a growing share of the oil Americans
consume – nearly a fifth.
Terrorists in Africa could affect U.S. interests and organize
attacks inside the United States, said William Bellamy, U.S.
ambassador to Kenya.
“We try to monitor as best we can” airport travelers to prevent
terrorists from entering America, he said. “But I would not
exclude the possibility that could occur. … It’s certainly
possible.”
Kenyan police recently found anti-tank missiles – some U.S.-made – in a terrorism suspect’s apartment at Mombasa, Kenya.
The U.S. priority in Africa of combating global terrorism has led
President Bush to deploy military forces at a growing network of
bases from Algeria to Uganda – in a pattern Bush set after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
About 1,600 U.S. soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors are posted
in Djibouti at a base called Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign
Legion outpost. It is the first large long-term deployment of U.S.
forces to Africa.
Bush also sent special forces soldiers to Mali, Chad and Niger for
exercises with local forces against radical Muslims.
And U.S. officials have delivered more than $152 million in weapons
to sub-Saharan Africa since 2001, up from $92 million during the
previous four years.
But the military approach stokes resentment. African leaders say
they’re more interested in fighting worsening poverty than serving
U.S. interests.
African authorities believe young men were willing to join
anti-U.S. groups “because they had no jobs,” said Nicholas
Kamwende, commander of the Kenyan National Police anti-terrorism unit.
“We think fighting poverty is one of our ways of fighting
terrorism,” he said.
Kamwende said the United States traditionally has used skillful
diplomacy and developmental aid to help Africa address water,
health care and economic needs.
Tensions are mounting. Kenyan courts recently acquitted several
terrorism suspects indicted in the United States, and Kenyan
lawmakers have refused to pass an anti-terrorism law.
U.S. State Department officials say savvy cops such as Schlaff, who
also has worked in Botswana and the Red Sea area, can be more
effective than soldiers in helping locals root out terrorists.
In a spartan conference hall in Nairobi, Schlaff wore a sport shirt
and slacks instead of the camouflage fatigues that mark most U.S.
warriors.
He smiled the way he might over coffee back home as the African
detectives in coats and ties stood quiet. He handed out FBI pins,
patches, fingerprint kits and cameras. He showed photos of his
family in the Colorado mountains.
He told of his forensics work on the FBI team that investigated the
bombing of the USS Cole warship that killed 17 sailors. Schlaff
helped dredge the harbor off Yemen and found part of an outboard
motor that cracked the case.
The attentiveness of Kenyan police officers impressed him, Schlaff
said.
“Their focus is street crime. We’re not suggesting a different
focus. We’re just trying to make them aware there could be a
terrorism matter involved.”
Now, Schlaff is back in the United States. But detectives he
coached are working in Eastleigh, a Somali-run ghetto on the
outskirts of Nairobi, trying to recruit sources, offering money for
tips.
They’ve discovered funds flowing from Somalia to Eastleigh for
construction of shopping malls. They’re investigating who might be
sinking roots or raising money in Kenya.
These efforts bore out Schlaff’s conclusions. Street-
level police when treated with respect “are genuinely interested
in working with us” against terrorism, he said.
“If you want to convince people Americans are not the aggressor, I
think you’ve got to do it by being there low on the ground.”
November 13, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Globalization, Human Rights, Water
Idweli, Tanzania – From the back of a lantern-lit schoolroom at a rural orphanage, Fodi Julius fixed his shining eyes on the blackboard. He was fighting exhaustion and trying to please his parents.
They died three years ago, leaving Fodi, 11, and his brother,
Nhambo, 8, among Africa’s 12.3 million children who’ve lost parents
to AIDS.
Their mom and dad’s final advice: Do well in school, because
survival depends on it.
Before moving to the orphanage, Fodi and Nhambo rose each morning
from their mats by a fire pit in their crumbling mud-brick hut.
They straightened their smudged school uniforms. Their small
fingers wove grass in place of lost buttons to fasten tattered
shirts.
The boys set out barefoot and without breakfast down the dirt path
to school. At lunch break, while others ate, they waited. Finally,
when the teacher dismissed them for the day, Fodi and Nhambo
wandered through farm fields, foraging for food.
“We’d get leaves,” Fodi said. He weighs 48 pounds, half the
weight of others his age.
He mixed those green leaves with water and urged Nhambo to eat, no
matter how bad the leaves tasted or how sad he felt.
“I’d just tell him: ‘She died. There’s nothing we can do about
it.’ I’d tell him: ‘Even if you cry, she’s not coming back. So we
should stop crying and do what we have to do.”‘
But now, after three years on their own, Fodi and Nhambo have beds,
meals and basic instruction at an experimental children’s center
where they live with 56 other orphans on the outskirts of this
dusty, Swahili-speaking village.
Americans half a world away in Colorado and Oregon set up the
center – stepping in where governments and big charities had done
nothing.
As the world grows more intertwined, African villagers mired in
disease, poverty and conflict – and those who want to help them –
are discovering new ways to connect, bypassing Africa’s
corruption-crippled governments and Western bureaucrats.
Television, radio and reports from migrant sons and daughters have
whetted village appetites for better living conditions. The recent
arrival of cellphones and e-mail in rural hubs encourages direct
links with Americans.
Help began with an e-mail
Here at Idweli, whose 1,300 people include more than 200 orphans,
the children’s center where Fodi now finds full plates of rice and
potatoes began with a simple e-mail.
Godfrey Mahenge, a student from Idweli studying medicine in
Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, five years ago vowed to do
something to help orphans back home. He’d told elders of his plans.
They’d dismissed him as a dreamer.
Mahenge drowned five years ago while swimming in the ocean. But his
girlfriend, Neema Mgana, kept sending e-mail queries to groups
outside Africa. One e-mail reached Barry Childs, 61, a corporate
executive turned philanthropist in Oregon who’d formed the group
Africa Bridge to try to help villagers.
Instead of dismissing the message as just another African e-mail
scam, Childs asked for details. He paid for Mgana to visit him.
Childs enlisted Vic Dukay, 49, a former aviation-business owner in
Denver with experience running AIDS projects, to work with him at
Idweli. Their first visits in 2002 focused on listening to children
and village elders.
“You want to be useful,” said Dukay, a heavyset, jovial man prone
to overworking himself. Orphaned at age 15, he was later moved to
tears as he sat with kids unsure where they’d find their next meal
and who habitually raised their hands before speaking.
“It took me back instantly to when I was 15,” he said. “That
look in the eye, body language, speech, that low, soft voice,
wanting to be in the back of the room away from everybody, not
wanting to be seen. You look in their eyes. Have you ever seen
anybody really sad? I can see sadness in somebody’s eyes. …
Probably from looking at myself.”
Dukay and Childs guided construction of the center, five ochre-hued
buildings with cement-and-stone foundations. Village men did the
work. There’s no electricity or running water.
This year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded Dukay a grant to
assess whether the children’s center is meeting village needs. He
led an evaluation team, including psychologists and social workers,
on his 10th visit to Idweli this fall – feeling “more alive than
I’ve ever felt,” he said.
Staving off extremists
Sustaining this children’s center, and possibly replicating it
elsewhere, is more than a humanitarian effort, Dukay said. Security
analysts worry that Africa’s millions of desperate AIDS orphans
will join jobless urban masses adrift and vulnerable to extremists
who could lure them into violence.
“Where best to recruit?” Dukay said. “Out here in the
hinterlands where there is no security.”
He watched Fodi playing soccer in donated white sneakers, fighting
hard for the ball against bigger players, despite his physical
weakness after three years of eating very little. Nhambo, solitary
and silent, played a bit, too.
Any chore, Fodi volunteered. He hauled a 16-foot-long bamboo pole
for a mile to help cooks who were building a shelf.
Life’s better now than before, Fodi said, recalling how taunts from
children with parents tormented him.
“I’d leave, go sit someplace alone. Very bad to hear. I thought:
‘This will happen many times in my life. People will always be
telling me I am an orphan.”‘
Far more typical across Africa today are orphaned children who
raise other children with no help. Village elders are overwhelmed.
Nearby at the village of Ndulamo, three teenage girls – Shida
Mahenge, 16, and her sisters, Ona, 14, and Rehema, 12 – huddled
together at sunset. When they beg for food from neighbors, “people
cannot give,” Shida said.
For five years after AIDS killed their father and then their
mother, Shida served as surrogate parent and caretaker, insisting
that Ona and Rehema stay in school.
“I’m always telling them they need to behave and to listen to
their teacher and when they don’t understand, to ask questions,”
she said.
She deals with food. Working to earn money means enduring
harassment from boys and men unaccustomed to working with a girl.
First, Shida broke rock into gravel that villagers sell to road
crews for maintenance.
“Very hard work. You have to carry the rocks. It takes a long time
with the hammer to break the rocks into small stones. Now, I work
carrying timber. I think it might be better.”
But this night they had no food or wood to burn and stay warm. The
girls huddled silently in the cold, blue darkness. They were
hungry, barely able to think about their dreams of attending a
vocational school.
“We like to pray,” Shida said. “We have a very hard life now. We
pray to God to help us, so that we will not get sick. … We need
help to survive.”
HIV adds to struggles
Helping children such as this can be difficult because many are
infected with HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Doctors are scarce,
about one per 50,000 people in rural Tanzania, let alone anti-retroviral drugs for villagers.
At a German-run clinic nearby in Bolongwa, Dr. Rainer Brandl was
amazed to see a tiny, bloated girl, her feet swollen, staggering in
from a farm.
When he tested Veneranda Ganga, 13, he found she was HIV-positive with virtually no immunities. Doubting she’d survive,
Brandl put her on anti-retrovirals.
Veneranda gained strength. She began helping around the hospital,
cradling an abandoned 1-year-old girl. She told nurses she’d been
sick for years, after her father died of AIDS. Later, her mother
died, too, when Veneranda was 5. Before dying, she said, her mother
told her: “You must listen to other people. One day I will die,
and you must get along.”
Each day Veneranda retrieved water, washed dishes and took care of
her brother and an aunt’s two young children. This year, she grew
too weak to work. “I told my uncle, I better go to the
hospital.”
Frustrated and deluged with sick children, Brandl works on a
shoestring, unable to pay and keep staff. United Nations and U.S.
aid often funds workshops for doctors and social workers in cities,
drawing them away from urgent work in villages, he said.
“Nobody wants to work out here,” he said.
Orphans start to cope
At the Idweli children’s center, regular meals, chores and classes
let orphans begin coming to terms with their plight.
Vaileti Bonifasi, 14, who was 2 when her parents died, said she’d
been sneaking away to visit their graves, praying a bit, talking
and crying.
“I was walking back home from school thinking: ‘How can I not even
know what my mother looked like?”‘ Vaileti said. “I thought about
it all the way home. And I was lying on my bed. When I got up, the
ghost of my mother came to me. She was speaking to me. But I
couldn’t understand her.”
Godfrey Mahenge’s younger brother Elia, 21, told Vaileti she should
ask her brother Fred at the family house by the graves if he had a
photo of their mother. When they arrived, they found Fred standing
with his wife, Gloria, and their baby.
“There’s no picture” of their mother, Fred said. Instead, Fred
produced a wrinkled, laminated driver’s license showing their
father, who died in 1994. Vaileti clutched it but still wanted a
photo of her mother.
“I need to compare it with the face of the ghost,” she said.
Involving the villagers
The cost of the project at Idweli, including construction and
support for daily operations, has been about $300,000. Now Dukay’s
evaluation is focused on perceptions of villagers and the
children.
“Are there any concerns?” Dukay asked recently in the meeting
hall, addressing village elders. “If there are any problems in
what we are doing, I would like to know directly.”
Some villagers benefit – such as Florence Doset, 39, a mother of
two who teaches at the center. She earns $50 a month.
“Because of these children, we have money,” she said. “So we’re
happy.”
Others are bewildered. Orphans at the center suddenly enjoy better
living conditions and food than other children living with their
parents. Project supporters have begun to give small
“microcredit” loans to villagers.
Fodi is now studying as his parents advised, but the habit of
worrying about Nhambo is ingrained. He recently warned Elia that
Nhambo’s mind wanders in school.
But Fodi also was beginning to think about himself. In the
classroom where he sat recently in the early evening, he summoned
the last energy he had to hold his head up. Three lanterns cast a
golden light just bright enough to illuminate the blackboard. Elia
was teaching English, writing sentences – “You sing a song” – for
students to copy.
This was extra instruction to give the orphans a better chance at
school. Twenty boys, mostly older, were taking advantage.
And Fodi was especially resolute.
He wanted to be ready for competitive tests that determine who
qualifies for college.
“I want to be a teacher,” Fodi said. “Then I can help other
people.”
———————————-
SERIES TEAM
Series reporter: Bruce Finley covers international affairs and
security for The Denver Post, which he joined in 1988. He has
reported from more than 30 nations, including his third tour in
Iraq with a U.S. combat unit earlier this year. This is Finley’s
fifth Africa assignment.
He grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford University in 1984
and earned master’s degrees in international relations as a
Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at NorthwesternUniversity.
Finley can be reached at bfinley@denverpost.com.
Series photographer: Helen H. Richardson previously traveled to
Thailand and Indonesia to cover the South Asian tsunami and to Rome
for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, among other overseas
assignments for The Post, which she joined in 1993. Her freelance
work has appeared in The New York Times and Christian Science
Monitor.
Richardson grew up in Aspen and graduated from Parsons School of
Design in New York.
Richardson can be reached at hrichardson@denverpost.com
Series editor: Mark Harden
Photo editor: Larry C. Price
Copy editor: Eddie Chuculate
Maps and graphics: Severiano Galván
Multimedia producers: Doug Conarroe, Demetria Gallegos
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
Today: A Coloradan works in a Tanzanian village where the spread of
AIDS is leaving growing numbers of children parentless.
Also, a Denver FBI agent cultivates African police as partners
against terrorism.
Monday: Efforts by Colorado-based Water for People to drill wells in Malawi help
thousands who search daily for safe water.
Tuesday: Colorado engineers assist Rwandan schoolgirls quavering
from the horrors of war.
Some quoted material in these reports was translated from Swahili,
Tambuka, Kinyarwanda and local dialects.
May 18, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Dispatches with U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Ar Ridwaniyah, Iraq – On a recent morning here south of Baghdad, insurgents detonated a remote-controlled bomb. It blew a crater in a hard-packed rural road seconds before a U.S. armored vehicle passed.
Within hours, Iraqi troops backed by the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry stormed into a farm compound half a mile away. They’d planned to hit it the night before, when Iraqi Lt. Col. Jassim Abbas received a tip from a vegetable-warehouse caretaker that this was where killers hung out.
Now U.S. Capt. Andy Watson was inside the home, looking over items found around the farm. A bundle of batteries wrapped in black tape with wires sticking out. Switches and plugs disconnected from appliances. Cellphone chargers and boxes, minus the phones. Bullets swept under plush rugs. A pencil sketch showing main U.S. military routes through Iraq. Downloaded propaganda printouts urging Iraqis to join the Islamic Army and “do anything you can to resist the Americans.”
Watson and 1st Lt. Carlos Montalvan, liaisons working with the Iraqi troops, smiled.
“This guy makes bombs,” Montalvan said.
Nodding, Watson spoke into his radio headset to Capt. Michael Davis in a Humvee outside, coordinating this raid with others.
“Definitely a good hit,” Watson said. “Good info” gleaned by the Iraqis, he added.
Now they needed the triggerman who set off the bomb that blew that morning.
Three women sat silently in their kitchen as a dozen or so U.S. and Iraqi soldiers combed their home. A blue flame burned beneath a pot on the stove.
The owner’s two sons and a cousin next door were telling conflicting stories – that the father was at a hospital working, that he was a patient in the hospital, that he was away at a funeral.
Montalvan held up the sketched map and confronted the 15-year-old: “A map. Explain it.”
Nothing.
Watson figured: “Papa might be hiding in the mosque.” He radioed Davis, who had helicopters circling already. “I recommend we talk to people at mosques in this area,” Watson said.
Meanwhile, another team of troops pulled a man from a field near where the bomb exploded. They zip-tied his hands in front of him and led him to a truck for questioning and then detention.
“One of the guys who detonated the bomb,” Davis said.
Raids starting to pay off
These recent U.S.-Iraqi joint raids, part of a five-day “Operation Tigerwalk” blitz south of Baghdad, had started to produce results.
Troops in this area caught 10 suspected insurgents and, after initial questioning, ended up holding six for further questioning. They found three roadside bombs, a car bomb and four weapons caches. A cavalry squadron working to the east in the Tigris River Valley had found similar bombmaking materials, including a heap of explosives.
Iraqi troops played key roles. “They can get intelligence we can’t,” Davis said. “Not to mention the psychological effects on Iraqis. We’re genuinely trying to let the Iraqis take over. It’ll help us in the long run, because we are the ‘infidel.’ Some people may see the Iraqis as our puppets. But I don’t see them that way.”
With roadblocks everywhere, local farmers cowered and stayed home. American troops did what they could to be friendly. Following a meal under a palm tree, Pvt. Jose Martinez, a 21-year-old from Loving, N.M., shared his Skittles and oatmeal cookies with children during house-to-house patrols. Lt. Brian Hollandsworth gave out soccer balls and “Beanie Baby” ponies.
Still, the sight of big, armored men in splotched uniforms carrying guns and speaking a strange language, with helicopters clacking above them, made some kids crinkle their small faces and cry.
They “are terrified. They think you are going to kill them,” farmer Salman Muneef told Hollandsworth. Muneef later served soldiers tea.
Some Iraqis fumed. “As you have wives and children, we also do, and we are afraid for our families,” said Ahmad Suleyman, 36, brother of the owner of the house troops raided that morning. “We want the Americans to help us stay safe and walk on our roads without fear.”
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s henchmen killed hundreds of Shiite farmers south of Baghdad. Then regime insiders moved in, pushing some farmers to marginal land and then building big houses along the Tigris and Euphrates. U.S. commanders suspect these former insiders now may be orchestrating attacks.
Chasing leads
The next day, as Davis and his contract interpreter, Somalian refugee Ahmed Hassan, 24, joined soldiers on patrol, an Iraqi woman in a headscarf dared to approach them. Davis hung back, letting Hassan listen to her.
She told him a man named Rahman Hamzi Mohammed, 25, who lived nearby, made remote- controlled bombs for insurgents. She gave directions to his house.
Troops then found Mohammed hiding – and also propaganda urging Iraqis to join Islamic Army fighters against America. They zip-tied his hands behind him.
Iraqi troops began questioning him. They hit his left shoulder with a bamboo switch repeatedly, just enough to cause welts to appear. They hauled him, blindfolded, back to a joint U.S.-Iraqi staging area, where they held him in the back of a civilian sport-utility vehicle. U.S. soldiers arranged to detain him officially in a guarded pen overnight, then later move him for further questioning.
Now guarded by Iraqi soldiers, Mohammed rubbed a swollen red welt on his left shoulder, wincing.
Speaking through an interpreter, he told a reporter he was innocent. “Some people don’t like me, and they gave false information. The first thing I wish is that our farms and villages are safe.”
Iraqi soldiers then pulled up his blindfold – his eyes darted side to side, scared – and thrust handfuls of water toward his mouth. He gulped water, gasping.
If anyone approached him about joining the Islamic Army, “I’d go report him,” he said. A grocery stall manager, he lived a simple life, playing soccer in the afternoons, he said.
“Don’t believe what these people say about me. If I was doing something bad, why would I stay in my house and not run away from you when I had the chance?”
Davis figured “he’s a little fish” but had him held nonetheless so that intelligence specialists might learn more.
U.S. commanders weren’t overly concerned about detainee treatment when asked about the interrogation. There were more raids to do.
“I’m concerned if the Iraqis go in too rough,” Davis said. “Obviously, that’s not our standard. … It’s their army, and I didn’t see any of that.”
May 18, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Dispatches with U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Tall Afar, Iraq – U.S. soldiers in armored vehicles rattled in recently and stopped by the bullet-riddled Al-Farouk mosque. The soldiers stormed out of their vehicles and, crouching with rifles raised, dove into combat positions.
Lying on gravel, goat horns and excrement, Spec. Kris Guido, 21, of El Paso, peered through his rifle scope at what appeared to be masonry workers a quarter-mile away.
When one of those workers moved behind a dirt heap and lit a fire, Guido spotted it instantly. “Hey,” he said, notifying Sgt. Charles Rumschlag, 25, of Colorado Springs, also on his belly a few feet to the left. Rumschlag took a look and reckoned the workers might be “signaling.”
The soldiers – members of the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry – were poised to fire on anybody raising weapons or placing roadside bombs.
A few hours before, anti-U.S. fighters in a building nearby had fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an armored Stryker vehicle. The grenade hit a protective grill, bounced off and exploded far enough away that no one was hurt. The day before, other 3rd ACR troops had hit a remote-controlled bomb and endured the blast – along this same strategic road in front of the mosque. The road, linking Syria with Tall Afar (population 200,000) and the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, is considered a major supply route for insurgents.
A day after this mission, a bomb nearby would seriously injure four U.S. troops, including two from the 3rd ACR, and hurt two other people.
Now on this morning, Guido, Rumschlag and about 25 others were acting on recent intelligence. Insurgents apparently were using the Al-Farouk mosque to stage attacks, according to a U.S. military intelligence file reviewed by The Denver Post.
Led by an imam named Mohammed, the mosque was “reportedly used nightly by AIF (anti-Iraq forces) to coordinate attacks,” the file said. Attackers had fired from its walls at soldiers. U.S. troops have avoided raiding mosques or other actions that would threaten similar holy places.
Young men recruited for attacks
Around June 2003, Sunni Iraqis who run the Al-Farouk mosque began recruiting jobless young men in the area to attack Americans, said Tall Afar men hired to work as interpreters. The recruiters offered $50 for attacks. Then they tried to coerce recruits into making more attacks by threatening to report their first deeds.
One 29-year-old interpreter working at the U.S. base south of town, who asked not to be identified for fear his family could be hurt, said people in Syria supported the mosque and took recruits to a terrorist training camp at Latakiya, along Syria’s northern coast.
“We hate them,” the interpreter said of the insurgents. “We know they are damaging our community.”
So the soldiers’ positioning on this recent morning also served as a show of force.
Yet troops peering through their rifle scopes also saw civilians just going about their lives: a man on a motorcycle passing a metal storage shed, a farmer leading geese, children walking to and from school, including girls in prim uniforms and head scarves.
Hard to know what was what. The strength of Iraqi insurgents today, says 3rd ACR commander Col. H.R. McMaster, “is their ability to blend into the local population.”
And the more insurgents increase the effectiveness of their bombs, the more they force U.S. soldiers to adopt a menacing posture. Armored Humvees that the 3rd ACR brought to Iraq on this second combat deployment no longer are sufficient. On this day, Guido, Rumschlag and others arrived outside the mosque in four M1A2 tanks and two Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
As they trained their rifles on possible enemies and watched traffic along the road from tank turrets, Apache attack helicopters swooped overhead. Guido heard them as he lay on his belly. “Cool,” he said, without looking up. “Feel safer.”
Interpreter exhorts troops
Inside Guido and Rumschlag’s Bradley, an interpreter waited – a 39-year-old father of eight from a religious sect that worships fallen angels – the Yezidi people.
“We belong to Malak Taus,” he said, referring to the “peacock angel” the Yezidis revere at a mountain shrine nearby. Like other religious and ethnic minority groups, the Yezidis had suffered under Saddam Hussein.
Now this interpreter was frustrated. Security in Tall Afar and other cities around here “is getting worse,” he said, asking to remain anonymous because he had been threatened after he began working for America.
The fire Guido and Rumschlag suspected might be used for signaling actually was for making gypsum for road construction, he said. And U.S. soldiers here by the mosque “aren’t doing anything. They’ve got to seize the city center. All the bad guys are in the city center.”
Around noon, troops atop tanks spotted a man along the road digging. Engines revved. The troops raced en masse to the scene. A crowd gathered, watching as the Americans in their armor stormed out and converged on the digger, who quickly set aside his shovel.
Rumschlag approached him. “Salam,” he declared. Peace.
The man stared back, dumbfounded.
And then, through the interpreter, Rumschlag demanded: “What are you doing?”
The man said he was Asad Rasol, an unemployed father of 11. He was digging to clear a roadside sewage ditch backed up with water that smelled bad, he said.
“Every day, we dig out this ditch to make the water drain better,” he said. Eyeing the soldiers and their tanks, he added: “We need this area to be safe.”
The troops accepted that, and with their interpreter rolled back to their position across from the mosque. They would sit there watching the road for another two hours, when another crew from the base would relieve them.
Lying again on his belly, Guido now spotted one of the masonry workers rising and falling in prayer.
He felt awkward training his rifle on this worker even though the man might not notice, he said. A matter of “respect,” Guido said. “I’ll just glance back and forth” at him now and then. “When they are praying, they don’t seem to pose a threat.”
May 18, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Dispatches with U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Ar Ridwaniyah, Iraq – Hunting farm-to-farm for insurgents, Staff Sgt. Jeremy Daniel tramped through chest-high green wheat, drenched in sweat under his armor and helmet, boots caked with mud.
He sang, “Got to get some way out of here, said the joker to the thief.”
The 25-year-old from West Fork, Ark., said the slog through the field was probably what soldiers must have felt like in Vietnam. His father fought in Vietnam and returned home to jeers after thousands died on counterinsurgency missions like the one he was on now.
On a recent sweep south of Baghdad, the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment began a mission intended to help stabilize the country without getting bogged down in a complex scenario similar to Vietnam’s.
Daniel and fellow soldiers from the 3rd ACR teamed up with 140 Iraqi soldiers – putting an Iraqi face on the fight against insurgents. So to his left and right and left, Iraqi troops also searched the wheat field.
One of the American soldiers found two Kalashnikov assault rifles and two green Russian crates full of ammunition stashed in the wheat. At a nearby farm, Iraqi Lt. Col. Jassim Abbas decided to question resident Ayad Talal about his neighbor.
At first Talal had said his neighbors were “good people.” But when told the neighbors had illegal weapons and ammunition stashed in their field, along a road where soldiers had been regularly attacked, Talal pretended not to know them.
Abbas had Talal kneel in the dirt with his hands tied behind him.
His brother, Faisal Talal, insisted they knew nothing. “If we knew anything, we would tell the American soldiers. Bad people put bombs on the roads. We are afraid of them.”
Abbas still pressed, alternatively standing over Talal, then squatting close to him and peering into his face.
U.S. 1st Lt. Carlos Montalvan watched the encounter. Talal “is probably thinking these guys could shoot me in the back of the head,” said Montalvan, 31, a burly ex-cop from Rockville, Md. “It is especially good in this case, because it is an Iraqi taking him away. It is Iraqi enforcement of law. Everyone in this area will know about this, and they will know that Iraqis, and the Americans, mean business.”
During a break on this recent day, Daniel and his cohorts slumped against the front bumper of a Humvee in 100-degree heat eating pre-packaged meals, sizing up their new partners.
“Last time, you wouldn’t hang out with any Iraqis,” Daniel said, comparing this with the cavalry’s first deployment in 2003 and 2004. “Now, we got ’em walking with us. I almost feel like a waste here.”
These Iraqi soldiers from an elite brigade seemed disciplined, said Daniel, the father of an 8-month-old girl. “If we could get a couple thousand more Iraqis like these, could be good.” One Iraqi that morning seemed eager to learn how to run a metal detector.
Staff Sgt. Gerald Betances nodded. “It’s easier having them with us, (to) deal with the detainees.”
These Iraqis eventually “could do this mission by themselves,” Sgt. 1st Class Robert Metzger said. “I’d have no qualms with that. That’s what we want. Then we could go home.”
May 4, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Dispatches with U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Tall Afar, Iraq – The soldiers marched half-step – boots thudding softly, rifles barely rattling – and stood silently by the airstrip at twilight.
Nobody had ordered them here. Yet more than 200 massed to send off their dead.
A few hours before, insurgents in Tall Afar had killed four of their comrades – including two from the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.
And now – as the gray-blue sky broke into bright constellations and many men wept at the sight of a helicopter lifting off with the flag-draped bodies – these soldiers wanted payback.
“I want to go out and find the bad guys,” said Sgt. Jean-Marie Alexis, 37, a Haitian-born member of the reconnaissance squadron. “This is really frustrating. We can’t see them.”
Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, leader of the Sabre Squadron that lost two of the four, sympathized with Alexis and the others. His squadron lost eight during its year-long deployment in Iraq. Yet now, Hickey faced his men solemnly. He ordered restraint.
“What we cannot do is go into that city and burn it down,” Hickey said. “That’s what the enemy wants us to do. We are here to help the Iraqis establish democracy.”
So instead of lashing out the way armies have done for centuries, these soldiers stood silently on cold gravel, muffling inner wails.
“We have a plan,” Hickey told them. He reviewed how winning over Iraqis and harnessing Iraq’s soldiers would prove far more effective to defeat the anti-U.S. fighters.
But nothing will ease this “tremendous loss,” said Staff Sgt. Scott Muirhead, who rode alone in the back of a medic Humvee escorting the wrapped bodies to the waiting soldiers. “This is like getting kicked in the gut, and it takes all the energy out of you.”
This was an unofficial ceremony, the one that happens in the field when soldiers die. Official ceremonies are to be held next week.
Army officials identified the Fort Carson-based soldiers Monday as newly married Spec. Ricky Rockholt, 29, of Roseburg, Ore., and Pvt. 2 Robert Murray, 21, of Indianapolis, who dreamed of flying.
Also dead were 1st Lt. William A. Edens, 29, of Columbia, Mo., and Sgt. Eric W. Morris, 31, of Sparks, Nev. Both were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade Combat Team), based in Fort Lewis, Wash.
The soldiers were killed on a reconnaissance mission Thursday afternoon. Army officials requested that The Denver Post not publish an account of the mission until relatives had been notified.
A convoy of five armored vehicles – two “Strykers” with rubber tires and three M1 tanks – had entered southwestern Tall Afar.
The city of 200,000 west of Mosul has become a hotbed for anti-U.S. fighters who have coerced residents to support them in battling “infidels,” U.S. officials and local men say.
The 3rd Armored Cavalry, along with a Fort Lewis-based reconnaissance squadron, are trying to help isolate and destroy the insurgents.
Around 4:20 p.m., one of the Strykers, carrying troops from both units, hit a bomb planted in the center of a dirt road. It blew through the bottom plate, right through where soldiers were sitting, and through the roof and rear of the vehicle. It flattened six tires.
The three tanks circled around the Strykers, firing at a man nearby who seemed to be running away, platoon leaders said later.
Two specialists newly trained in emergency medicine pulled out the wounded. Choppers clacked in to evacuate them.
But four soldiers died. Two other 3rd ACR soldiers – Spec. Nicholas Beintema and Spec. Bryan Lofton – were injured.
They are expected to recover.
Regimental commander Col. H.R. McMaster flew to the scene Friday morning and met with troops, then flew to Mosul and pinned Purple Hearts on blankets covering the wounded and dead.
This town, where insurgents have holed up, “is a tough place. We’ve got to figure it out,” McMaster said.
“The enemy wants us to overreact,” McMaster said. “We’ll pay them back. But we’re going to do it in a smart way that is consistent with our ideals and values.”
April 30, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Dispatches with U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Baghdad, Iraq – The days were getting longer, running together in a yellow, dusty haze as the mission of rooting out Iraqi fighters obscured all else.
Pvt. Allen Burns set his chin on his hand and just stared, “trying to zone away from this place.”
A 19-year-old tank loader from north St. Louis, he was leaning up against a concrete barrier that blocks potential suicide bombers from a base-camp phone center where other soldiers were talking with people back home. Tent tarps flapped in the distance and the sun rose, pushing temperatures above 90 degrees.
“I hate it here,” Burns said. “I run my life through my head. This is not how my life was supposed to be.”
He wouldn’t have to be here in Iraq, with the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, if he hadn’t messed up.
He made counterfeit U.S. money – new $20 bills – using a fancy home printer. It was “easy to get away with” – an addictive habit that Burns said brought him up to $1,000 a week for clothes, video games, Reeboks, Nikes. In January 2004, federal authorities closed him down.
His probation officer told him Army service could clear his record. Otherwise, he could lose rights such as voting, Burns said. “I didn’t want to give up those rights.”
So he signed up for four years, snagging a $4,000 bonus.
“But,” he said, “I’d rather be in college doing my electrical engineering stuff.” That had been part of the dream that sustained him while growing up poor. He tinkered with circuits and frequencies. In high school, he concentrated on math up to calculus.
The other part of his dream: his fiancée, Shanetta. She recently had a miscarriage. Burns still yearns to create a stable family with her.
But he wasn’t calling home to anybody on this day. He felt deeper woes, too, he said. A sense that everybody he has ever known has betrayed him, that nobody can be trusted.
His best friend betrayed him by spilling the beans about the counterfeiting. And a few years back, his own mother had betrayed him.
Burns recalled how he had hidden $100 under a dresser “trying to save it.” She was deep into drugs then, he said. She knew about that money. One day it was gone. When he confronted her, he said, he knew.
“That messed my whole world up,” he said. “It caused me not to trust people. If you can’t trust your parents, how can you trust anybody else?”
He paused, then added: “I still try to hold on to the love I have for my mother.”
His father, an assembly line worker at Ford, often wasn’t around. But “he whupped me and grounded me” after U.S. Secret Service agents came to his house about the phony bills.
Among fellow soldiers here at a base camp south of Baghdad, Burns stays to himself.
He slept alone on his tank at first. He often eats prepackaged meals rather than joining others in chow lines. He watches and rewatches “The Incredibles” on a small DVD player and plays the computer card game FreeCell.
Before rolling north from the desert in Kuwait this month, commanders put Burns through a rapid-reaction training course to hone urban combat skills. He excelled. They recognized his skills by awarding him a red- and-white coin he keeps in his pocket. He did call home about that, telling his grandmother Rosie, who raised him.
“She was, like, telling me how she was living her life for me, and when she prays for me, she prays to God I’ll be OK,” he said. “It just made me cry that she cares so much for me.”
There’s one person here he reveres, too: Sgt. Ralph Johnson, 44, of Anderson, S.C., a 20-year military veteran who runs his unit. Johnson is someone “I’d take a bullet for,” Burns said.
The feeling from Johnson is mutual. “I keep an eye out (for Burns),” he said. “Good kid.”
Commanders have the soldiers making house calls south of Baghdad, an area heavy with insurgents.
“Hot as hell. Raiding houses and stuff,” Burns said.
The tankers start at dawn and finish about 9:30 p.m. Burns’ tank once teetered along a crumbling canal wall – and he thought it might tip.
This is dangerous work “putting our lives on the line,” Burns said. “Whether I live or die, I just want to get through with it. I just want to not be here.”
April 30, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Dispatches with U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Baghdad, Iraq – Staff Sgt. David Henderson works long hours these days, trying to persuade soldiers to stay in the Army.
That’s an urgent priority as military chiefs struggle to line up recruits for U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where many of the 140,000 soldiers are on second combat deployments.
“We gotta do something,” Henderson said.
So here at a base camp south of Baghdad, he has set up in a tent by a banner that reads: “Reenlist 3rd Armored Cavalry” with a silk-screened photo of New York City when the Twin Towers still stood, framed in red, white and blue.
Inside, Henderson, 33, of Eaton, Ohio, and other Army retention officers help soldiers review options. They’re offering bonuses as high as $15,000 for those who commit to more time – up to $150,000 for some Special Forces soldiers.
And on a recent night, Henderson stood by the tent even as a crescent moon rose when many soldiers were sleeping. He was waiting for one who had promised to drop by.
That soldier – Staff Sgt. Ryan Marrero, 30, of Bayamon, Puerto Rico – had just completed a bumpy mission in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle chasing a white Suburban identified by a helicopter as possibly linked to insurgent activity in the area. Marrero rolled back into base camp around 9:30 p.m. and hustled to the tent.
Henderson had contract papers ready to sign.
Then, at a ceremony in front of a hastily hung flag, he and Lt. Stephan Bolton, 34, of Lawrence, Kan., administered the oath as Marrero held up his right hand.
He had collected a $14,000 bonus. It would help with housing in Colorado Springs for his wife and 6-year-old son, Ryan.
Marrero said: “It’s official, right?”
It is. And this retention work in the field is proceeding ahead of pace. Henderson and two other officers running the re-enlistment tent have re-signed 37 soldiers during one month away from their Fort Carson home base.
Two more career counselors are expected to join them in Iraq.
“Gotta be … new recruits”
At a recent flag-uncasing ceremony here, Sgt. Maj. John Caldwell urged all troops to consider re-enlisting, taking advantage of the bonus money that was now flowing from the Pentagon. Days later, Caldwell would be seriously injured during a convoy ambush involving a remote-controlled explosive device. One unit soldier was killed in the attack. His fellow soldiers still have gotten no word about Caldwell’s condition.
The war-zone re-enlistment campaign is a priority because recruiting lags at home in U.S. cities. But even if Henderson and crew surpass their quarterly quotas, he said, that will not be enough.
“There’s no way we can retain the numbers the Army needs. There’s gotta be some new recruits.”
Some of his conversations with soldiers here are hard. On a recent morning, Cpl. Willie Fanshier, 26, of Lufkin, Texas, serving her second stint in Iraq, sank into the folding chair by Henderson’s desk and practically begged. She was looking for a way to still serve the country in the Army, but also see more of her three young daughters.
Two stay with her mother, and the youngest with her ex-husband. She supports them on her earnings, but that’s not like getting to raise them.
“And being a fueler is not what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Fanshier said. She asked about Army medical work possibilities, or legal work – “something so that, when I get back, I could spend some time with my family.”
It’s not clear the Army can help. Fanshier could leave in June 2006.
“It’s hard to find a unit that’s not part of a deployment now,” Henderson said regarding Fanshier’s request. “I don’t even try to compete against family.”
Yet the more soldiers leave – especially those like Fanshier who have served repeatedly in war zones – the more pressure Henderson feels to persuade others to stay.
One possibility might be relying more on contractors to do more support work on U.S. bases abroad, he said, although contractors add significantly to their costs. “I don’t think the government could afford that,” he said. “I’d say it would increase taxes.”
Another possibility: Reinstate the draft. Military officials prefer a volunteer Army in the belief that soldiers serving by choice are more motivated.
Climbing out near a tracked medical transport vehicle marked with a red cross, Henderson met Staff Sgt. Victor Orozco, 34, of Colorado Springs. Orozco has served for nearly 14 years – “too long to get out,” he said. After 20 years, he will collect full retirement benefits. Here, Orozco helps run a 42-person medical clinic.
“But what I do here, there wouldn’t be much for me to do in the private sector. There’d be so many licenses required,” he said.
So he’d re-enlist, collecting a $2,900 bonus.
Tiger Squadron surgeon Maj. Roger Gelperin, 49, stood by to help swear him in.
And Henderson handled the papers. “All I need is your initial there … and your initial there.”
After that ceremony on the way to another, Henderson confided he’s planning to re-enlist, too. He has served nine years and could collect a $14,000 bonus. That would help his wife and two kids, he said. And he already ordered a new Harley-Davidson motorcycle for when he gets back from Iraq.
April 30, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Dispatches with U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Baghdad, Iraq – Spec. Thomas Evans had just hit four in a row.
The sun was setting here, just south of the city, as the 28-year-old from Dixon Mills, Ala., was twisting free of his opponent and barreling forward like a freight train.
Pickup basketball in the Iraqi desert is a contact sport.
Sgt. Gilberto Ortiz tried to contain the 249-pound Evans, a former high school power forward. Ortiz stuck tight, jabbing a hand against Evans’ back.
“You’ll be sorry,” Evans said.
Ortiz: “I’m waitin’ on you.”
For a moment, their situation – living out of tents surrounded by sandbags in a dusty land where enemies are targeting them – eased a bit.
A month away from home with the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Ortiz, 25, of San Benito, Texas, had been burdened with a seemingly unbearable longing for his wife, Nadia, and their 3-year-old son, Tristan.
“You don’t think about other things when you’re playing ball,” Ortiz said.
Today, while commanders plan complex operations in and around Iraqi communities, he and other soldiers plan more and more recreational activities.
Some stay up late playing dominoes, slamming them to the table, talking trash. Some brought golf clubs.
On a recent night, as Black Hawk and Apache helicopters swooped in and out of camp on patrols, soldiers under a floodlight beside tanks played volleyball. Others outside supply headquarters barbecued steaks and drank nonalcoholic beer. A platoon’s worth of soldiers pressed weights in a contractor-run gym.
That gym stays open until midnight, and the clap and thud of the rap inside drown out the occasional harassing gunfire outside the camp perimeter.
On the elliptical running machine, Capt. Ross Nelson, 30, of Colorado Springs, a helicopter maintenance crew chief, was sweating through his gray Army shirt. He perched a radio by the screen that measured how far he had run, and he occasionally tuned into it, in case anybody on the tarmac needed him urgently. “For me, this is stress release,” Nelson said.
Exercising regularly, as he does at home, “is part of a routine of normalcy,” he said. His two children and wife are a constant concern, he said, “and you go through times when you really miss your family.”
Meanwhile, soft chords from Sgt. Nathan Covey’s guitar wafted from the corner of one Tiger Squadron tent. A 19-year-old from Emporia, Kan., Covey bought the guitar in Kuwait, a $70 instrument made in China. It had just hit him, how long he would be gone. He has been playing guitar for three years and in high school enjoyed writing poetry. The song he was working on – he titled it “Until I Get Back to You” – began with him “hoping and praying that I’ll make it through.”
As Covey played, the flurry of activity around him receded, even as Pvt. Scotty Sausedo, 21, kicked a Hackey Sack his way.
“Definitely a good way to pass the time,” Covey said, left with red eyes from blowing dust during the day. “Get away from everything. You don’t gotta worry about all this stuff. Take you to a different place.”
The subject of this song: Nicole, 17, back at her home in Indiana. “Different from all the other girls,” he said. “It’s nice to have her to think about. It hurts, too.”
Before dawn the next day, he and his unit would roll from this camp on a long mission, living out of their tanks around Iraqi communities. Covey packed a notepad in his green duffel bag but not the guitar. “If an IED (improvised explosive device) hits us, it’s gone. And what am I going to do for the rest of the year?” Covey said.
“When I come back, if I do,” he said, “I want to have something to play.”
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A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
