Posted on 02/04/2004 7:54:22 AM PST by bert
Here's some GOOD NEWS you may have missed in your daily wire reports.........
February 1, 2004Acts of courage, big and small, occur daily in Iraq.
Fairpress: Baghdad, Iraq, January 27, 2004 -- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt and Dan Senor
CJTF7 and Coalition Provisional Authority Update
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, Deputy Director of Operation, CJTF-7:
Coalition forces conducted a cordon and search north of Ar Ramadi to kill or capture Hassan Mohammed Oswald (ph) and Mohammed Hamad Oswald (ph). Hassan Oswald is believed to be planning attacks on coalition forces in the Ar Ramadi area, while Mohammed Oswald is suspected of being the key leader of a paramilitary force in the region. He was a colonel in the Iraqi police and a former national branch committee leader in the Ba'ath Party. Both primary targets are considered suspects in the assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Salah, and the operation was conducted without incident and resulted in the capture of both targets.
...In the central-south zone of operations coalition and Iraqi security forces conducted 117 patrols, 30 checkpoints, and escorted 29 convoys.
...In the southeastern zone of operation, in al-Amarah over 11,000 persons gathered for the scheduled job fair. The day passed without incident, and 6,000 people registered for jobs.
More:
http://www.cjtf7.army.mil/media-information/briefing-transcripts/brieft040127a.htm
---------------------------Fairpress: Tikrit, Iraq, January 29, 2004 -- 4th Infantry Division Continues Operations
Fairpress: Baghdad, Iraq, January 28, 2004 -- Brig. Gen. Vincent Boles
CJTF7 and Coalition Provisional Authority Update
Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce Brigadier General Vincent E. Boles, commanding general of the 3rd Corps Support Command, also known as the 3rd COSCOM, currently stationed in LSA Anaconda, Balad, Iraq.
Brigadier General Boles previously served during Desert Shield and Desert Storm as the material management chief for the 2nd Armored Division. He has been in the region for over one year during this operational tour, initially with the U.S. Army Field Support Command working with pre-positioning equipment, and later assuming command in July of the 3rd Corps Support Command.
The 3rd Corps Support Command is responsible for providing support to all CJTF-7 forces operating in the Iraqi theater of operations. His command has a unit footprint that stretches from Kuwait to the Turkish border.
GEN. BOLES: I'm privileged to command what is called a Corps Support Command.
(There) are three COSCOMs in the Army. I command the 3rd... And we presently have 15,000 soldiers, a little more than 10 percent of the task force...
If any one of the 150,000 men or women in CJTF-7 eat it, drive it, move it, drink it, fly it or wear it, we're responsible for getting it to them. And it passes through us...We call ourselves the workforce of the task force, and we do that every day. And I'm pretty blessed and privileged to do that.
This is who we are....We're 15,000 soldiers. We come from the active Army, and then we also have about 43 percent of our force... come from our Army National Guard and Army Reserve.
....We've issued 53-1/2 million meals in the year that we've been deployed here. We have issued 15,000 pallets of mail and processed that mail for our soldiers -- that's almost 8 million pieces of mail to our soldiers.
We have delivered an awful lot of fuel -- 186 million gallons -- and 330 million gallons of water. Four-and-a-half million cases of bottled water is what we have taken out to our soldiers, and 100,000 maintenance work orders. So we fix our equipment to keep it at a pretty high readiness level for what we're going to do.... And then finally, we order a lot of repair parts to keep that equipment running: 4.3 million requisitions to request things, to get repair parts.
But that's kind of dry also, so perhaps it's helpful if I put it another way. There is a city in the United States of America called Springfield, Missouri in the center of our country, has about 150,000 people. We have provided enough food to feed everybody in Springfield, Missouri three meals a day for a year. We have delivered enough fuel for 40,000 automobiles every day. We have got enough water out there to fill 3.2 million one-liter bottles, and everybody in Las Vegas, Nevada -- all 500,000 people in Las Vegas -- can take a shower every day with the water that our soldiers make. And we repair 400 pieces of equipment daily, turning them around and sending them out and getting it moving. All right?
Next, we have a saying that nothing happens till something moves because I can do all that, but I have to move it someplace to get it to the Soldiers. As you heard before, we operate from the Turkish border all the way down to Kuwait, and that's how we do it. We have driven 26 million miles this year. We have over 2,000 trucks on the road every day...
Seven thousand of those moves that we do every year are called heavy equipment moves. We move rather large tanks. We don't want to drive them on the roadways, we don't want to drive the bulldozers on the roadways, so we will put them up on heavy equipment transporters and move them around in order to save the road networks. We have been very flattered and happy to be part of the stand up of the Iraqi railroad again, and we have had over 350 rail movements just in the past four to six months as we have stood up and gotten that moving, and it has been a great asset to us also. And then we have put 8,800 flights in our Iraqi airfields....
But to put it another way -- the 26 million miles is 8,700 trips from New York to San Francisco. We have a large company in the United States called Wal-Mart, and they have 3,000 trucks throughout the United States. I put 2,000 trucks on the road every day, and that's a pretty significant thing we think.
We have moved 210,000 tons of equipment. That's 35 days on the trains -- that's 35 days of Amtrak going Boston to Washington every day. And that's 20 flights every day in and out of Los Angeles Airport....
...What our forefathers did when they fought World War II in Europe, they went from Normandy to Berlin, about 756 miles, and it took them 11 months to do that. It took them from June of 1944 to May of 1945 to go that distance. We operated over that distance in four weeks, a longer distance, 828 miles from Arifijan, where we started, in Kuwait, all the way up to Mosul and beyond, and we did that distance in four weeks. And we continue to support along those lines even to this day and now.
...(W)here we are now: Eighty-two percent of our soldiers are eating in dining facilities that are contracted. We have four bottles of water per soldier per day. A hundred percent of the force...has the new-style body armor. And we now have United States Army, we have contractor trucks, and we have trucks from the Iraqi nationals who are helping us, also.
No mission's without its challenges, however. I wouldn't want to make this sound like an easy brief, because no mission is without its challenges, and this mission has had its own.
The first challenge we've found since we've been here has been the environment.
First and foremost, in the most recent past we've seen the rain have an impact on what we do. In Germany we have a phenomena on the roads we call black ice...Here in Iraq we've had a phenomena called brown ice. We find when the rain hits, it will get the mud...and it will start making it very slick for our soldiers. And when you're driving very heavy trucks, that's something we have to guard against for our own safety and the safety of the Iraqi population.
We've got very reduced visibility because of the blowing dust and sand that we work through. Fog, especially in the morning up in Balad, where I'm at, in the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys, that's a function of both our air operations and our ground operations.
Our time and distance is also a factor because it's a pretty large operation, if Iraq's the size of California. It's about 910 kilometers just from the Kuwait border, where we start, up into this vicinity here in Baghdad. And that's a 15-1/2 hour drive with the convoys that we have. And, put another way, if Iraq is the size of California, that would equate from driving from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Francisco...And our soldiers do that every day....
Finally, we have a very adaptive enemy...whether through small-arms fire, mortars or improvised explosive devices...if you have 2,000 trucks on the road every day, you'll run into some of these and our soldiers face these challenges every day...
...I've had six soldiers, unfortunately.. killed in action, since we have been here. And I have 181 soldiers that have been inducted into the Order of the Purple Heart, who have been wounded in action.
Of those soldiers -- it's a testimony to our great medical team -- of those 181, 134 have been returned to duty and are back serving with us now. And the medevac system has worked very, very well for our soldiers.
We're learning as well...
-- we've been very blessed with satellite-based communications for in-transit visibility. We also have a system called a movement tracking system which allows a Soldier anywhere they go in their truck to tap on a keyboard and send a message anywhere with their position and where they're at ..
...We've put our Soldiers in Interceptor body armor, 100 percent of them now. And we've also adapted our vehicles and gun trucks and our Soldiers have made gun truck out of their own devices and put additional protection on, and additional ballistic armor... And our Soldiers do this every day, every mission.
Well, why would we do this? We don't just do it for ourselves. We're looking at building a better future together. We've spent $2.8 million to help 12,000 students in 121 schools up in our districts in the area that we work within. And I got to tell you, that's a labor of love when you look in the eyes of our soldiers' faces. And people say how do we need to connect with the Iraqi population? I would say just simply put Soldiers with children and the right things seem to happen. It's just magical. It seems to bring out the best in both of us.
More:
http://www.cjtf7.army.mil/media-information/briefing-transcripts/brieft040128a.htm
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Finally, Act II ~ and more daily acts of courage for the returning Marines who risked their lives to remove a tyrant and free a nation, who helped the Iraqi people topple the statues of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003: Baghdad Liberation Day:
Here is a selection of the best.
Ping.....
A great compilation by Bert!
Thanks for the Ping!
Acts of courage, big and small, occur daily in Iraq.
A few recent victories by our military, civilian and allied champions of freedom
Private Mail to be added to or removed from the GNFI (or Pro-Coalition) ping list.
I apologize for asking bert to remove my name from the mailings.
It was unfair to the non-Freepers ~ troops and their supporters ~ who have been receiving my good news e-mailings since last summer, who would check my homepage for this link, who were told that bert was now putting out my weekly recaps through FR Network's Fairpress.org.
Apologies to all for the mistake.
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