Posted on 02/20/2005 6:08:54 AM PST by billorites
BAGHDAD, Iraq — What Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli says he dreads most after a year in Baghdad at the head of the First Cavalry Division is going home.
He will leave by the end of the month, walk out of the headquarters his troops have built near Baghdad International Airport, stride past the sign saying “Complacency kills – don’t become a statistic,” and head for Fort Hood, Tex. The Third Infantry Division, which stormed into the airport almost two years ago at the spearhead of the American invasion, will take over. Some things come full circle.
But other things do not. They end when they should not end. They are cut short, arrested in motion, obliterated. General Chiarelli has seen too much of that, more than he ever hoped to see. He has seen what sabotage and roadside bombs do. He has known young men go out in the morning and not come back. That is why this American general says he dreads his homecoming.
“It is very hard to live with the loss of life,” General Chiarelli, 54, says, “and the hardest thing is going home and facing those parents and wives and loved ones for the first time.” He looks me in the eye and there are tears in his. A general loves his soldiers.
Over the past year, the First Cavalry Division has lost 160 men and women, or more than 1 percent of the approximately 1,460 service members who have died in Iraq. It has seen another 100 endure a severe injury like loss of a limb, and a total of more than 1,200 injured. It has battled for Baghdad street by street, trying to stifle a murky insurgency. Its men have become so expert in urban warfare they can now hear the spoon come off a hand grenade and tinkle to the floor. For this reason, they refuse to wear earplugs.
I gaze at the general, whose passionate belief in what the United States is doing in Iraq is as evident as his pain at what that mission involves, and wonder at the chain of events that have involved a soldier born in Seattle so deeply in the back streets of Baghdad. History happens, but only just. If federal aviation officials had heeded those many warnings about hijackings before Sept. 11, 2001, if failures of intelligence had not been so conspicuous…
But the hypothetical has no use. America is in Iraq now, deep in Iraq, in its alleys and its sewage systems and its electrical grids and its schools and its security, and the country can no more turn its back on all this than it can wind back the clock to the era before the United States was attacked and rocked in so many of its certainties.
This American involvement, the general says, now stands “right at the tipping-point.” The election of Jan. 30 was a watershed, a moment when Iraqis defied the insurgency to proclaim their belief in a democracy. It had a shattering effect on General Chiarelli’s forces.
“Soldiers were crying,” the general tells me. “That was payback. They were bawling. We felt the realization among Iraqis that if enough people are out there voting, nobody can kill them all. If I did not have a family, I would stay on here in a heartbeat.”
General Chiarelli would stay on in part because he is concerned that this moment of opportunity may be lost. It is not enough, he insists, to build up the Iraqi National Guard and the police. “I worry about us getting fixated on that,” he says.
Employment must be created. He has 2,500 Iraqis working on a landfill project that would employ 400 people back home. The landfill is being “crocheted” to provide jobs. But these jobs will not last.
For the general, building infrastructure plays as big a role in the battle for Iraq as any operation. He cites the example of Sadr City, the seething Shiite district of Baghdad where violence boiled last year. The area, where the First Cavalry Division has put enormous efforts into bringing water into homes, is now calm.
To what degree this quiet is due to the arrival of water – “Did I ever think I would be excited to see a woman turn on a tap?” General Chiarelli asks – and to what degree it reflects the political containment of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric influential in the area, is unclear. But the general says he believes water will win this war.
“Take Haifa Street,” he says referring to a main Baghdad thoroughfare. “We are turning people to our side there. We are moving southeast to northwest and we are improving electricity, sewerage and water. And as we go, the bad guys move back, and we find more and more people denouncing them.”
Of the 650 troops in the battalion on Haifa Street, 170 have been wounded and received Purple Hearts.
But will all this valor be vindicated? That phrase the general has just used – “bad guys” – is one that made the rounds in Vietnam, and General Chiarelli concedes that “post-Vietnam, we have been up against the presumption that these things can’t work.” Still, he insists, “We are getting there.”
Of late, more calls have come in to a “tip line” set up for the denunciation of insurgents. Significant arrests have been made. But, the general says, the fight is complicated by the fact that a domestic insurgency and international terrorism overlap. For anyone who wants to fight America, Iraq is now the principal theater, a grand attraction with “Kill the Infidel” in neon lights.
That is evident right outside General Chiarelli’s headquarters, on the airport road, a particularly dangerous place. I ask the general why he cannot end the violence there, so damaging to Iraq’s image.
“Look,” he replies, “I can’t stop somebody getting on that public road and deciding to kill themselves. Bad guys come up from the south in bomb-laden cars and hit the first group of S.U.V.’s they see. And that violence is easier to cover than a sewerage lift station in Sadr City.”
True enough. It is not easy to capture each shade of this vast American undertaking. Nor is it easy to say what exactly will reside in General Chiarelli’s heart as he looks into the eyes of the grieving at Fort Hood.
Not all from 1st Cav may be coming home. There are rumors that about 500 troops are getting their deployment extended to help in the transition period. My son is one of them. He fells the same way the Maj. Gen. feels. There is a job to be done and he doesn't want to leave till it is completed. But you won't hear that reported on MSM.
fells...should be feels
God bless your son.
Bless your son, and though I expect you'd like to see him come home sooner rather than later, I'm glad to hear this. Those experienced with the local "lay of the land" have much to pass on to those replacing them, and I'm glad to hear of this extended transition.
How did this make it past the NYT editors? It's a halfway decent report on what is happening there.
I got so mad I turned off the show! These Democrats must be confronted with the most obvious truth of what they say--they cannot and will not concede that we are having ANY success in Iraq becuase it makes their political opponent look good, and their constant "nabob of negativity" is affecting troop morale and undermining the war effort.
And so are most of the mainstream media. Republicans MUST start pointing this out and asking television interviewers and reporters: "WHY AREN'T YOU COVERING SUCCESS STORIES IN IRAQ?" Are you afraid to report good news--are your foreign correspondents afraid to go out and find GOOD news? Are you biased--or just cowardly?
Would love to see some pubbie Congressperson or a "former military expert" ask this question--right to the face of a Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or Brian Wilson!
OK--rant over!! Thank you for the post about your son. He is the kind of hero that we will probably never hear about on the nightly news or see on the silver screen--but his commitment and honor will forever be saluted by those who know him.
God bless him--and you also!
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