Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Under the Steel Rain: Life at Camp "Dirty Bird"  

(above: a soldier in Sader City, Iraq. Image: Kevin Sites.)

At 37 Specialist Eric Herron is one of the oldest men in his company -- something he's not likely to forget.

"Yeah -- he was in the army when Jesus was a corporal," quips Sergeant Ruiz, "he pulled KP for the last supper."

Herron laughs at digs like that, but he's also notorious for something few joke about at Forward Operating Base Eagle; mortar attacks.

Only about three city blocks east of teeming Shiite slums of Sader City, the base, nicknamed "Dirty Bird," has been mortared more than any other in Iraq -- 400 times in the last three months. And under that rain of steel, as the soldiers here refer to it, Herron is considered a mortar magnet.

Mortars fired by Shiite militia, mostly 60 or 82 millimeter, have narrowly missed killing him at least half a dozen times, including one particularly unlucky…or lucky day, depending on your point of view, when he survived three very close calls.

In May two rounds fell next to the Humvee he just parked and exited – peppering it with shrapnel--including the still warm driver's seat where he had been sitting.

"It was close enough for me to hear that bumble bee buzz," says Herron, "when shrapnel whizzes by you."

He was headed to another location when he stopped to talk with a colleague. A third mortar round dropped nearby. He was shocked to see where it landed -- right where he had been going--the walk up window at the motor pool.

Later in the afternoon a fourth round fell nearby while he was standing outside his barracks door.

"I decide to spend the rest of the day inside," Herron says, dryly.



(above: a mortar-shelled roof in Iraq. Image: Kevin Sites.)

Herron isn't alone in his experiences. When 400 mortars land in and around a base only about a square kilometer in size, nearly everyone has a story -- and remarkably, one they've all lived to tell about.

However there have been injuries, the most serious happening only a week ago when a barrage of mortars rained in on a large tin-roof maintenance building. One of them pierced the roof and exploded below, injuring seven soldiers. One nearly lost a leg to shrapnel. Funding for a new reinforced roof was quickly approved following the incident.

"The worst," says Herron, "is when first one hits. Then you know there's more coming."

Sergeant Robert Skinner agrees.

"You'd almost prefer to get hit by the first one," Skinner says, "because after that one you really don't know which way to run."

It was 3am when Sgt. Daniel Wood returned to base from a late night mission. On his way back to his barracks three mortars trailed him from a distance of 80 feet, 30 then 25.

"I watched as one of them flamed up and the shrapnel flew by," he says, "and when I turned to walk the rest of the way to my barracks the last one hit."

This one just 15 feet away. A small tractor absorbed most of the shrapnel, likely saving Wood's life. Shaken and unable to sleep afterwards, he spent the rest of the night trying to walk off the adrenaline rush.

And soldiers aren't the only ones in danger. Civilian employees of Kellog. Brown and Root –which provide many of the civilian services on base -- are also at risk. Many of the food service employees, mostly foreign workers from poor nations like the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh; say they're very frightened by the mortars.

One says he sleeps on the ground pulling sandbags around him, but while the mortars haven't got him yet, the sand fleas have. He shows me the red bites on arms.

Four Philippine workers were killed at the largest Army supply base in Iraq last April when insurgent rockets hit their living quarters at Camp Anaconda.

But those inside the camp aren't completely surrounded by hostility. At dusk in Guard Tower 7, soldiers watch Iraqi boys play soccer not more than a hundred yards away. Some Iraqi civilians even live in shacks right next to the massive walls surrounding the base.



(above: map of mortar sites. Image: Kevin Sites.)

"Hi Nora," one of the soldiers says, waving to a shy ten year old Iraqi girl popping her head out from behind a sheet that covers the opening to the mud and clapboard shack.

"Hi Michael," she says in a high-pitched voice, waving then quickly ducking back inside.

But inside the tactical operations center on base, the mood isn't as light. Captain Steven Price points to a mass of green dots on a map where the base is located. They overlap each other like a messy pile of poker chips. Each one represents a mortars attack this month. There are 60 green dots so far.

"It's frustrating," says Price, "because we can't really return fire. The area around us is mostly urban and the risk of collateral damage is too high"

What the 1st Cavalry here does do is trying to spot the mortar flash -- then sound out a quick reaction force to find the shooter. But by the time they get there he's usually gone.
"They shoot and scoot," says Price. "They don't stay anywhere long enough for us to get to them."

"They," is the Shiite militia associated with Muktada Al Sader, son of the city's namesake and the radical cleric who the coalition tried to arrest for the murder of another cleric. His Mahdi Army is made up of mostly of poor and disenfranchised Shiites from 2.5 million people that live in Sader City.

Sader's men were part of the bloody twin insurgent uprisings in April -- in which Shiites in Southern Iraq and Sunnis in Falluja battled U.S. troops. During that period, Shiites in Sader City, just north of Baghdad, had their own less publicized rebellion, firing rocket propelled grenades and small arms at any U.S. military vehicle that attempted to enter the city and launching hundreds of mortars and rockets into nearby U.S. Army bases. Because it's the closest to Sader City, the "Dirty Bird" got it the worst.



(above: the tank at Camp Eagle. Image: Kevin Sites.)

Sader, however, switched gears with just a few weeks before the transfer of sovereignty, saying he would support the interim government and was going to form a political party to participate in upcoming elections. Local Sader City mosques, often used to mobilize the populace against the coalition are now telling the people not to attack the U.S. military, Iraqi police or the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

Perhaps because of that, some of the "steel rain" of April and May has tapered off a bit but no one's taking off their raincoats yet.

In fact, even in the blazing 110 degree heat, soldiers here are still under orders to wear their body armor and Kevlar anytime they walk outside the safety of a building.

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Kevin 3:18 PM