With my first embed complete and my second about to begin in earnest, I’ve begun to notice similarities in the way people here view the situation in Baghdad. Everyone, from privates to captains, from journalists to civilians, seems to be experiencing a collective sigh of relief. You’ll often hear mention of the fighting from mid-March through May. Soldiers I’ve talked to shake there heads and tell countless stories from that period, as if it were another time and another war. The field artillerymen of Bravo Battery 5-25 spoke of standing on the roof of their headquarters and watching rockets stream toward the Green Zone. They recounted rocket attacks on their own battalion headquarters that became so frequent, they would shrug their shoulders and continue with conversations when the alarm for “incoming” sounded. Today I met my new unit: Charlie Company 2-30, an infantry company based out of Fort Polk, Louisiana. Their area of operations is a roughly 10-square-kilometer chunk of eastern Baghdad, whose western limits border the tamed, but still dangerous, neighborhood of Sadr City. The company is clearly used to intensive combat operations. It was infantrymen from this unit who headed to the area when attacks became so fierce that combat engineers refused to continue with construction of the wall built to isolate Sadr City. I was told of main supply routes so densely populated with roadside bombs that simply bringing basic ...
Anytime
