Very enlightening email from a US Soldier In Iraq

[Serious Capitalist]

Hey everyone this is the long email I had been working on. Today I got a chance to pull guard duty in a tower on the wall over looking a middle class Iraqi neighborhood. This place looks like about at war torn as you can get. Most of the kids and adults in our area got around in carts made of pickup truck frames pulled by Donkeys. The only cars are really bad 1970 bombs.They get a few hours of electricity after dark then its gets shut off. Today they had off for their Christmas celebration so they all looked like they were having a good time. The insurgents are are still throwing moarters and rockets around even today but we are still in a safe place.Hope you like the email, sorry its so long.... I'm using my laptop to write this letter then I'm going to send it when I have time on the computer which is only limited to about 20 min. We have hot gun tonight, that means were on our gun for about 12 hours waiting for fire missions. As soon as we got on at 7pm we had a mission pending so it was a bit crazy, they scratched the mission for some reason so its back to our little bunker right behind the gun. I think our mission was to hit a road junction where a convoy into Fallujih had been ambushed . A General has to approve every mission we shoot so if it takes a long time, everything is usually over before we get to shoot. The weather so far has been nice It's about 80 during the day and about 60 at night but it still feels cold as heck when we wake up. In a few months it will start to climb well into the hundreds . All of our buildings have A/C so it shouldn't be that bad. Rob I are sitting in our cement 4x6 bunker trying to make a budget to pay some of his bills.....HAAAAAAA Everyone said I deserved a kid just like me....well I got him! Funny huh the blind leading the blind. Most of our guys are on a gate leading into the camp and some of the other guys are on the towers. There are huge cement walls about 20 ft high with barbed wire on top keeping anyone out, either you come through 3 or 4 checkpoints and a main gate or you don't come in at all. There are 3 or 4 different camps that make up camp victory, the whole area is based around Baghdad airport and Saddam's palace. Usually at night and early in the morning the insurgents shoot mortars into the camp but they can't see us so they just shoot blind, most of them just wake us up but none of them come close enough to do any damage. There is a big buffer zone between the camp and Baghdad itself so it makes it hard for anyone to get up close to the wall. Usuall! y the ins Leading up to this deployment we would always find ourselves debating the war with someone who either said it was all about oil, or a Bush family grudge. We would always get the question, "The Iraqis didn't blow up the twin towers, why do you have to go attack them?",where were the WMDs? I had faith in our leadership that they had good reasons for putting troops in harms way. Could we have left Saddam alone for now and delt with other terrorist nations first? I honestly was not sure what to think. We made our convoy into Iraq from Kuwait around Halloween and we had all seen the pictures of Saddam's many palaces and solid gold toilets and a silo gold carriage that would fit on a 18 wheel flat bed truck. We had heard about the 8 lane interstates that could compete with our modern interstates. The roads were great but everything else had much to be desired. The second day we crossed over and used a secondary road to cross the Euphrates river, the cradle of civilization was a dirt road lined with mud huts and lots of unfinished construction projects. There were no huge cites or towns, just kids on the side of the road looking for food and water to bring back to their families. Saddam was from a tribe in northern Iraq, many of his government positions in the bath party were filled with his relatives, southern Iraqis just got whatever was left. In the mid 90's the UN allowed him to sell a small amount of oil each year to buy food and medicine for his country, most of that money was never seen in much of Iraq. After getting settled in Camp we were all required to attend a cultural awareness class put on by the First Cav Div and it was taught by 5 or 6 Iraqi civilians. One lady who was a lawyer tried to sum up the Iraqi situation in about an hour and gave a great talk on the women of Iraq. It's not glamorous so you may not hear this on CNN so I hope I can put it as well as she did and give you an idea of why we came here and why it is so important that we stay the course here in Iraq. It's impossible to capture the whole dynamic of an Islamic culture in one email, books could not begin to explain the history and interworkings of this country. Her talk did however shed some light on the direction this country was heading in the 90's and today. We knew Saddam had WMD in the early 90's because we had weapons inspectors here that saw them first hand. He may have been smart enough not to use them on Israel the US or his neighbors, but seeing these insurgents first hand I c! an't say In Iraq there are three types of laws; tribal, Islamic(religious) and regular Iraqi civilian laws. The Tribal laws and Islamic laws are the most prominent because they have been in place for over 2000 years from the time of Babylon and the Turkish rule in this region. I was surprised to hear how structured Iraqi society was and how much they stressed family and tribal relationships. Honor and family status is the focal point to most Iraqi citizens, not much different from anywhere else in the world. In Iraq if you are invited to dinner you are expected to bring a gift, compliment the host, eat what is offered and in turn invite them back to your house for dinner. If you find yourself invited to a friends family function your whole family is invited to come with you, further strengthening the social and family bonds in that tribe or neighborhood.. Men are of course the head of this Islamic society, they are judged on land, wealth and women in that order. The women are head of the households; in the home they run the show, they handle the budget, take care of the kids and husband. There are no babysitters or daycare in Iraq , the women put all their effort into teaching their children right from wrong and the obligations and rules of an Islamic society. Outside the home there role is much different, they have no rights, decision making ability, no education or career options. While married the male has an obligation dictated by tribal law and Islamic law to support and make sure his wife is taken care of. At anytime during the marriage the male gets tired of his wife he can divorce her in about 2 hours for any reason at all. He has the option to take a 2nd wife and stay married to the first one but according the Islamic law he must treat each woman equally, but has no obligation to his kids from his first wife. Th! e husband

All Iraqi women are required by tribal and Islamic law to remain virgins till they get married. After the family decides who she will marry there is a very short engagement, sometimes a few weeks so there is no gossip in the community about having any pre marital relationship . If anyone sees a woman holding hands, eating with or even talking to a male in public she will bring disgrace on her family and her tribe. In Iraq the only way this honor can be restored is a honor killing. Either the male she was seen with or herself will be killed in order to restore honor, and usually its the female being killed b/c of her status. The modern Iraqi courts recognize this as murder but will defer to the tribal law in this case so the father or brother who kills his daughter or sister will get about 3 or 4 months in jail if any time at all. We have to be very careful while searching vehicles, we can only talk to the man and not even look at his wife or daughters. You never compliment ! him on a Over the last 25 years Iraq has been at war with Iran and the US twice. In the Iran Iraq war there were over 500,000 men killed and over 750,000 in the last 25 years. Military service is not voluntary in Iraq so many of these men had no choice. The problem that Iraq had was there was now 700,000 Iraqi women without support from their husbands and they had no education or career to support their children. Many women had no choice but to send their children out in the streets and resort to prostitution. Saddam who followed tribal law more than anything used this opportunity to murder many of these women to keep the peace between different tribes in Iraq. So now you have a few hundred thousand kids around Iraq who have no support, parents, food or education. they turn to the Islamic religion for their direction. Many of these kids are now grown men in their teens and 20's with only religion to guide them. They are not taught the good values of the Islamic religion; toler! ance, fri If we can bring the old Iraq back and make it work then maybe the region will see that and follow. Islam seems to be a very caring, loyal, friendly non violent religion. Its just the young extremists that get their faces on CNN every night that are twisting the words of the Koran to suit their cause. Will we win this battle over these extremists? Only time will tell. Do we need to be here trying? Absolutely. Saddam has taken so much from his people and given them nothing in return. They have no clue what freedom is all about. We have to at least give them the opportunity to find out. You hear that freedom is not free or cheap and it's true.Many of the buildings here are named for soldiers who have died and gone before us and in most cases they write home and talk about all the good things they are doing here. IF I shoot a firemission I tell my guys we are either taking a life or saving a life. We are either trying to save the life of some soldier in Fallujiah trying to! keep a r If this war was just about oil we could secure the oil fields and run a pipeline right to our tankers in the gulf but it's not. There is nothing in the US that even comes close to what we see here. . When you see kids 4 and 5 years old on a dirty stretch of road in the middle of the desert just to catch an MRE or a bottle of water to bring back to their family then there has been a break down somewhere. I'm not saying I want them to be just like we are in the US, they have their culture but they deserve the right to choose that culture freely and practice their religion. What the extremists practice is no religion, its no different from what Hitler, Stalin, Saddam or another thug did in their day. Could our grandparents have sat back and watch Hitler overtake Europe? Would he have stopped with Europe? Probably not. So this question keeps coming up and I feel most soldiers feel the same way I do. Will we win this battle over these extremists? Only time will tell. Do ! we need t I'm not sure how I got started on my views of the war but I guess it hits you like a ton of bricks and pulls you in all different directions. We see good and bad things here you never see on CNN. One day an Iraqi is trying to kill you and the next day you are having a wonderful conversation with an Iraqi that you would expect to have with anyone at home, friendly, gracious,polite and intelligent. There are so many good things the Armed Forces are doing here and it's just not getting back home. The violence and killings from our side is only done with great restraint and to protect ourselves . I guess its all about the kids here, if we stay we can maybe change the kids and put them on the right track and rebuild the Iraqi nation . If we leave now the extremists and terrorists will lead them down a different path for sure. Everyone here has to come to grips with why they are here and their roll in all of this. It's a confusing place and time here, maybe I'll have more to sa! y if and It's a few nights later, I apologize if I was all over the place and repeated a few things but this was a work in progress and I promised Brian I'd send it out to everyone soon. I need to get some sleep for an hour or two before we prep for this mission. Maybe this is my way of battling the media and CNN. Spread the word, there are good things happening here and we need to stay the course and give this time. Freedom has always had a cost and the lives we have given so far have not been wasted. If we do not fight them here and Afghanistan and around the world we will be fighting them in home towns all over the US.The eighteen wheelers here all have mesh screens over their windows and doors to keep handgranades and bombs from begin throw into them. The insurgents will stop at nothing to slow down any progress here in Iraq. I don't want to ever hear of the school board ordering mesh screens for school busses or face what Israel deals with every day. As the chief says, ! "Rome was not built in a day!"

Love

[Serious Capitalist]

This is from a fraternity brother who is working the artillery in Iraq. We're fortunate to have great American Soldiers doing the heavy lifting for the world.

[Misterioso]

Troll.

[Rokke]

Troll?!? I don't think so. I think the letter is pretty interesting (albeit a little hard to read in that format).

[MEG33]

God bless him and keep him safe.Thanks for sharing.

[rs79bm]

Is he a soldier or a sociologist? He seems to know alot about the Iraqi society.

[MEG33]

Wrong!

[SedVictaCatoni]

He seems to know alot about the Iraqi society.

"After getting settled in Camp we were all required to attend a cultural awareness class put on by the First Cav Div and it was taught by 5 or 6 Iraqi civilians."

[jocon307]

"Today they had off for their Christmas celebration so they all looked like they were having a good time."

?????

[Serious Capitalist]

must be ramadan