Op-Ed Contributor: A Million Miles From the Green Zone to the Front Lines:
"The other day I told General Petraeus about a young specialist fourth class I had met while waiting for a military flight out of Baghdad. The specialist was a college student from Iowa whose National Guard unit had been called up for the war. He had told me about a prolonged firefight that took place the week before, outside Camp Anaconda on the outskirts of the city of Balad, 40 miles from Baghdad.

'We began taking small arms fire about 8 a.m., from Abu Shakur, the village just north of the base camp's gate,' the specialist told me. 'Our guys responded with small arms and then mortars. Someone on patrol outside the wire got wounded, and they sent Bradley Fighting Vehicles out, and they hit the Bradleys pretty hard, and by 10 a.m., they were firing 155-millimeter howitzers, and attack helicopters were firing missiles into the village, and you could see tracers and smoke everywhere.

'I had just gotten off a night shift, and I was sitting outside my tent about 100 meters from the gate in my pajamas reading a book. Right near me, guys were doing laundry and standing in line for chow. I was sitting there thinking: `Have we had wars like this before? Shouldn't we drop everything and help? I mean, we were spectators! What kind of war is this, sir?' '"

General Petraeus, who graduated from West Point in 1974, just in time to witness the ignominious end to the war in Vietnam, didn't say anything. But slowly, and it seemed, unconsciously, his head began to nod, and his mind seemed far, far away. It seemed clear he knew the answer: yes, specialist, we have had wars like this before.

Commanding generals have had lavishly appointed offices before, as well. My grandfather, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., occupied the Borghese Palace when his VI Corps swept into Rome in 1943. His aide kept a record of the meals prepared for him by his three Chinese cooks, while every day dozens — and on some days, hundreds — of his soldiers perished on the front lines at Anzio, only a few miles away from his villa on the beach.

So there may be nothing new about this war and the way we are fighting it — with troops on day and night patrols from base camps being hit by a nameless, faceless enemy they cannot see and whose language they do not speak. However, the disconnect between the marbled hallways of the Coalition Provisional Authority palaces in Baghdad and the grubby camp in central Mosul where I spent last week as a guest of Bravo Company, First Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, is profound, and perhaps unprecedented.

An colonel in Baghdad (who will go nameless here for obvious reasons) told me just after I arrived that senior Army officers feel every order they receive is delivered with next November's election in mind, so there is little doubt at and near the top about who is really being used for what over here. The resentment in the ranks toward the civilian leadership in Baghdad and back in Washington is palpable. Another officer described the two camps, military and civilian, inhabiting the heavily fortified, gold-leafed presidential palace inside the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad, as "a divorced couple who won't leave the house."

Meanwhile in Mosul, the troops of Bravo Company bunker down amid smells of diesel fuel and burning trash and rotting vegetables and dishwater and human waste from open sewers running though the maze of stone and mud alleyways in the Old City across the street. Bravo Company's area of operations would be an assault on the senses even without the nightly rattle of AK-47 fire in the nearby streets, and the two rocket-propelled grenade rounds fired at the soldiers a couple of weeks ago.

It is difficult enough for the 120 or so men of Bravo Company to patrol their overcrowded sector of this city of maybe two million people and keep its streets safe and free of crime. But from the first day they arrived in Mosul, Bravo Company and the rest of the 101st Airborne Division were saddled with dozens of other missions, all of them distinctly nonmilitary, and most of them made necessary by the failure of civilian leaders in Washington and Baghdad to prepare for the occupation of Iraq.

The 101st entered Mosul on April 22 to find the city's businesses, civil ministries and utilities looted and its people rioting in the streets. By May 5, the soldiers had supervised elections for mayor and city council. On May 11, they oversaw the signing of harvest accords and the division of wheat profits among the region's frequently warring factions of Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrians. On May 14, a company commander of Alpha Company, Third Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st re-opened the Syrian border for trade, and by May 18, soldiers had largely restored the flow of automobile gas and cooking propane, shortages of which had been causing riots.

Since that time, soldiers from the 101st have overseen tens of millions of dollars worth of reconstruction projects: drilling wells for villages that had never had their own water supply; rebuilding playgrounds and schools; repairing outdated and broken electrical systems; installing satellite equipment needed to get the regional phone system up and running; restoring the city's water works; repairing sewers and in some cases installing sewage systems in neighborhoods that had never had them; policing, cleaning and reorganizing the ancient marketplace in the Old City; setting up a de facto social security system to provide "retirement" pay to the 110,000 former Iraqi soldiers in the area; screening and, in most cases, putting back to work most of the former Baath Party members who fled their jobs at the beginning of the war.

So many civil projects were reported on at a recent battle update briefing I attended that staff officers sometimes sounded more like board members of a multinational corporation than the combat-hardened infantry soldiers they are.…The Coalition Provisional Authority nominally has the job of "rebuilding" Iraq — using $20 billion or so of the $78 billion that recently flew out of America's deficit-plagued coffers. But during the time the 101st has been in Mosul, three regional coalition authority directors have come and gone. Only recently, long after the people of Mosul elected their mayor and city council, was a civilian American governance official sent to the area. And, according to the division leadership, not a nickel of the $20 billion controlled by the provisional authority has reached them.

"First they want a planning contractor to come in here, and even that step takes weeks to get approved," one officer in Mosul complained of the civilian leadership. "The planners were up here for months doing assessments, and then more weeks go by because everything has to be approved by Baghdad. If we sat around waiting for the C.P.A. and its civilian contractors to do it, we still wouldn't have electricity and running water in Mosul, so we just took our own funds and our engineers and infantry muscle and did it ourselves. We didn't have the option of waiting on the guys in the Green Zone."

But the guys in the Green Zone seem to have plenty of time on their hands. The place is something to behold, surrounded on one side by the heavily patrolled Tigris River, and on the three others by a 15-foot-high concrete wall backed by several rows of concertina razor wire and a maze of lesser concrete barriers. There's only one way in and out, through a heavily fortified checkpoint near the Jumhiriya Bridge guarded by tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles from the First Armored Division and an invisible array of British commando teams. More tanks guard key intersections inside the walls, machine gun towers line the wide boulevards, snipers man firing positions atop palaces great and small.

In all, hundreds of uniformed soldiers and heavily armed civilian security guards stand watch all day, every day over a display of grim garishness that would have given Liberace nightmares. If you're curious about how your tax dollars are being spent in Baghdad, you should get one of the many colonels strolling about the Green Zone to take you on a tour of the rebuilt duck pond across the road from the marble and gold-leafed palace serving as headquarters of an Army brigade. As I went to sleep one night a couple of weeks ago in the Green Zone, listening to the gurgle of the duck pond fountain and the comforting roar of Black Hawk helicopters patrolling overhead, it occurred to me that it was the safest night I've spent in about 25 years.

Which was a blessing for me, but a curse on the war effort. The super-defended Green Zone is the biggest, most secure American base camp in Iraq, but there is little connection between the troops in the field and the bottomless pit of planners and deciders who live inside the palace. Soldiers from the 101st tell me that they waited months for the Bechtel Corporation to unleash its corporate might in northern Iraq. "Then one of the Bechtel truck convoys got ambushed on the way up here three weeks ago, and one of the security guys got wounded," an infantryman told me. "They abandoned their trucks on the spot and pulled out, and we haven't seen them since."

"It's really not helpful when people down in Baghdad and politicians back in Washington refer to the `disorganized and ineffective' enemy we supposedly face," said one young officer, as we walked out of a battalion battle briefing that had been concerned largely with the tactics of an enemy force that is clearly well organized and very, very effective. After spending more than a week with the soldiers of Bravo Company, I know that they resent not only the inaccuracy of such statements, but the implication that soldiers facing a disorganized and ineffective enemy have an easy job.

No matter what you call this stage of the conflict in Iraq — the soldiers call it a guerrilla war while politicians back home often refer to it misleadingly and inaccurately as part of the amorphous "war on terror" — it is without a doubt a nasty, deadly war. And the people doing the fighting are soldiers, not the civilian employees of Kellogg, Brown & Root, or the officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or the visiting bigwigs from the Defense Department.

The troops in Bravo Company don't pay much attention to the rear-guard political wars being waged back in Washington, but they loved President Bush's quick visit to Baghdad on Thanksgiving. While it was clearly a political stunt, they were quick to credit the risks he took. I can confirm that flying in and out of Baghdad — even at night, when it's safest — is not for the faint of heart. A C-130 on approach takes a nervous, dodgy route, banking this way and that, gaining and losing altitude. Hanging onto one of those web-seats by only a seat belt (no shoulder harnesses), you're nearly upside down half the time — it would feel like the ultimate roller-coaster ride, except it's very much for real.

When Bravo Company troops roll out of the rack at 2 a.m. for street patrols, they walk the broad boulevards and narrow alleyways spread out as if they're walking a jungle trail — wheeling to the rear, sideways, back to the front; their eyes searching doorways, alleys, windows, rooftops, passing cars, even donkey carts — trying to keep one another alive for another day, another week, another month, whatever it takes to get home.

Meanwhile, two soldiers armed with M-4 carbines and fearsome M-249 Saws machine guns stand guard inside concrete and sandbag bunkers atop the Bravo Company camp's roof, while squads of soldiers patrol alleys with no names in Mosul's Old City, and everyone prays.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/opinion/07TRUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=