Into the Darkness

For the second time in a month, I shuffled slowly through the late-evening heat after another long day, walked into my CHU hoping to cool off and check my online accounts, and had all of the power fail about three seconds after I hit the computer power button. Really takes the wind out of your sails.

This being the fourth time in threee months we've suffered this late night indignity (only the second one associated with me just walking in the door), I now have a drill to deal with this. After exhausting all known curses that might be heaped upon the electricity trolls responsible, I shut down the computer, grab the ever-handy flashlight, quickly switch to sleeping attire, put the earplugs into the iPod and lie down on the bed.

These are all meaningful, deliberate activities. The computer is rendered useless without AC power because the network card shuts down and kills Internet access. Before the screen goes dark I have to grab the flashlight, because we are talking about complete, utter, absolute darkness. Remember, I live in a metal container with a door. Have to quickly shed the long-sleeved uniform and go to shorts and t-shirt because it is still 105 degrees outside and the longer the power is out, the closer it gets to that inside. And the tunes go on because I just got out of work and need some diversion while I unwind from the day and hopefully drift off before it gets too hot.

This is sort of a dangerous time from a psychological standpoint. The music can take your mind places it shouldn't go when you're 7,000 miles from home. Make you think of places you'd prefer to be, people you'd prefer to be with, and things you'd rather be doing. It is, as I said, utterly dark. The heat rises steadily until you're soon lying in an expanding circle of your own sweat. And you're thinking to yourself, "what the hell was I thinking when I volunteered for this?"

Eventually the heat, the music, and the stillness conspire to pull you down into the early stages of sleep, all problems eased from your mind until, BAM, the power comes on and you resume cursing, this time at yourself, because even after three previous experiences you STILL haven't remembered to turn the light switch off before getting into bed. Rude awakenings. But because the metal box you live in is small, it cools off very quickly and soon enough all is well in your world again.

For those hoping to read yet another riveting adventure from your intrepid Baghdad reporter, tune in another day. Today is all about Susan Frances Larrea Miller, my bride of 30 years, and my deep and abiding love for this woman.

On July 26th, 30 years ago, we were wed at the Christ Episcopal Church on First Street in Corning, NY. That wondrous ceremony marked the culmination of my six years of hot pursuit of this beautiful, smart, funny, caring, and very much mischievous young woman. It was the luckiest day of my life and I continue to benefit greatly from it.

Sue has clearly been in it for better or for worse, and it has been my good fortune that it just seems to keep getting better and better. We had some lean years, but she was always hopeful, always supportive, and always a joy to be around regardless.

We eventually found ourselves headed down the path we remain on today, that of a military family. Twenty eight years of an interesting Army career, a career that can try the resolve of the strongest bonds. It figures prominently in our lurching around to 17 different addresses in 11 different cities and 8 different states.

As I approach the end of that career, I can never say often enough how absolutely vital her love, coaching, coaxing, cajoling, and, eventually, accepting she has been. I will repeat what I told the assembled audience at my promotion ceremony to colonel: any man that stands in the position I was on that day will call his wife one of just two things: he’ll call her the greatest human being to ever walk the earth or he’ll call her his ex-. I’m solidly in the camp of the former.

Thank you, Sue, for being there for me every day, every year. For giving birth to these two smart, attractive, and wonderful children of ours. For being my best friend and constant companion for 70% of my existence!

This being my first-ever deployment, I’m pretty sure we have reached a point in time that marks the longest we have ever been physically separated since being married. And I miss her something awful. Life without her near is too slow, too empty, too dull.

But this too shall pass and I eagerly await the day when she’ll be back in my arms and the good life resumes!

Happy Anniversary, sweetheart. I love you more than words can express.

Your hubby.

Coping

It is becoming more difficult each week to come up with anything even half-way interesting to write about, but I don't intend to let that stop me! After all, it's not like I'm getting paid to produce a quality product and there is no mandate for anyone to read it.

I'm going a little bit stir-crazy, getting a touch of cabin fever. I attribute it to the heat. It is 95 degrees when I get up in the morning and 105 when I go to bed. In between it gets hot. Too damn hot to take a walk, throw a Frisbee around, or even sit in the shade and contemplate life. And so we tend to scurry about from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, minimizing exposure to the elements and maximizing time in artificial atmospheres.

It is getting old and we still have six weeks of high summer to deal with before we can even think of a break from the heat. All physical activity is best left for the gym; unfortunately one of the two gymnasiums is closed for the entire month of July. Means I have to use the "girls gym." This is the one inside the recreation center, where the pool and basketball court is located. It has fewer options for strength training, exacerbated by its sudden overcrowding. It is also closest to where the embassy offices are, thus usually jammed with those civilians, many of whom are women.

Even when both facilities are open you're stuck with the old rat-in-a-wheel option for aerobic exercise -- meaning treadmill, elliptical trainer, or stationary bike. Not that the embassy compound is all that scenic a venue for jogging around, but for me it is considerably more distracting (I need distraction -- I hate running) having a moving landscape than staring at whatever lame graphic is scrolling on the machine.

Love it or hate it, you have to get to the gym. The ability to roam around (even if it wasn't hellishly hot) is very restricted and you quickly determine you're not burning any calories via work routines. Thus we get to a few quaint sayings about how a year-long deployment might affect you.

For civilians not burdened by the military's General Order #1, the tendency is to become a hunk, a monk, or a drunk. Meaning you'll be a gym rat, find religion, or seek enlightenment at the bottoms of liquor bottles.

For those of us constrained by prohibition, they claim you'll leave either weighing 300 or bench-pressing 300. Meaning you'll find solace either in the dining facility or the gym, both of which are first-rate.

Personally, I tend to adhere to moderation in all things. Get to the gym 4-5 days a week but don't pass up the surf and turf. And I'm not at all averse to getting a bowl of bread pudding, adding a sizeable dollop of soft-serve ice cream, bathing the whole mess in hot caramel sauce and calling it dinner.

Things are heating up. Three consecutive days topping out at 122 degrees.

Heating up in the work world as well as an increasing sense of urgency grips the US forces-Iraq staff in the face of significant looming changes.

It is summer, the season of turnover for military personnel. This is not new, given the difficulties the services would face if they were always trying to move families in the midst of any school year. What is new here in Iraq is the calculus of drawdown, the sad reality that forces you to say goodbye to a lot more people than you will be welcoming. The ranks continue to thin but nobody seems to know how to make the workload do the same. That is hard enough under normal conditions, but now we have this urgency thing going on.

GEN Odierno will soon be leaving as the commanding general of USF-I; his departure will coincide with closing out of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the beginning of Operation New Dawn. It marks the point at which the number of service members, which peaked around 170,000, must reach no more than 50,000. It officially ends planned combat operations for US troops, who will complete their transition to a train, advise, and assist role with the Iraqi security forces. Unless forced to defend themselves.

New Dawn also heralds a rather unique phase of operations for the US military -- the transition to civil authority. And there is the rub. There remains no true civil authority to accept the transition. More than four months after the national elections, the political elites remain mired in self-serving power posturing; the change so desperately hoped for by the Iraqi people now likened to a mirage induced by the baking sun across the dusty desert landscape. Ramadan looms, scarcely more than three weeks away, and failure to form the government by then will ensure that the light of New Dawn will shine on empty government seats.

And thus the urgency in the American camps. What else can possibly be done to establish conditions for continued success? Where can we help with security, economic development, or improvement of basic services? Failure is not an option. More than 4,400 American service members lost their lives in Iraq and that sacrifice weighs heavily on those now compelled to earn it. #1 on that list is the CG, GEN Odierno. He commanded an Army division, an Army Corps, and now all US forces in Iraq, spending all but about one year in country since the invasion in 2003. His son lost an arm here. Failure is not an option.

And so we sweat it out, literally and figuratively. It's going to be a bit busy over the next six weeks as we work this transition. I'd like to think things would then settle down, but I'm more inclined to believe a quote I recently heard, attributed to one of the USF-I Deputy Commanding Generals and referencing the end of combat operations: "The hard part is over. Now comes the harder part."

More from the Holiday Weekend

I provided a brief description of how things went over the fourth of July weekend, but need to expand a bit on one aspect. Being an All-American kind of holiday, the powers-that-be decided to send some All-American personalities, in this case prominent politicians. Thus we were descended upon by Senators McCain and Lieberman plus the Vice President bonus celebrity.

Now, there are a lot of good reasons for gentlemen such as these to make the long flight and spend a little time boosting troop morale and chatting up their Iraqi counterparts. The counterparts so wretchedly stuck on their ability to form the Iraq government. No telling if the delegation had any impact, but the Iraqi pols were happy to see and talk with them.

The downside of the whole business is that the bad guys were also keenly interested in the presence of these guys, but were more focused on killing them than entertaining them. Thus a few long nights as the rockets' red glare, in the guise of 107MM Katyusha rockets, burst upon the scene with wildly varying accuracy. Still, they don't have to be too close to be heard and felt. Enough booms for me for awhile. For the most part, we were all tucked all snug in our CHUs, with triple-canopy cover, but the reality of it is that the alarms are way too loud to sleep through.

By Tuesday, the memos went out that the dignitaries departed. The bad guys, foiled again, slithered off to pursue their butchery against softer targets. Calm is restored. Hopefully the Vice President will find himself too busy to return during my watch.

I did get to witness something pretty cool here last night. One of the Army majors was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Tremendous recognition of talent for any officer, but difficult to fully appreciate when all of your loved ones are 7,000 or more miles away. But this guy, in accordance with the Army ethos, opted not to give up or accept defeat. He worked with the local video-teleconference people to set up a three-way link between here, Atlanta GA, and Houston TX so his parents, his brother, and his girlfriend could be part of the ceremony.

About 20 of us squeezed into the small room, they got the remote sites on the screen, and the 2-star boss came in and said kind words and did the promotion. Worked like a charm and we left the newly-minted, no-time-in-grade lieutenant colonel locked in the room to continue his virtual visit in privacy. I always like to be part of promotions as well as reenlistments because each tends to be, in some way, a life-changing event and can be powerfully emotional.

Voting in Iraq

It is hot again. The early June heat wave turned out to be a historic anomaly, but it is now the 4th of July and it is for real.

As I walked to work late this morning (remember, if you've been following along, Sunday morning constitutes our weekend) I saw that the dining facility had fired up some huge grills and were barbecuing chicken and ribs. The first whiff instantly carried me 7,000 miles west, back to the good old U.S of A. and any of a number of Independence Day picnics. A real poignant reminder that I am a stranger in a strange land.

We did celebrate a bit in our own way. My office gathered around dinner time to eat pizza and play poker. It was a slow enough evening that we didn't bother going back to work, thus squeezing a couple of extra hours of free time into the holiday.

Independence Day is a good step-off point to talk about Iraqis forming their own government and taking control of their own destiny.

I have so far offered up just the very basics of Iraqi societal structure, and only to provide some sense of the complexity of trying to move this country toward an inclusive government, that being one whose many pieces coalesce to form the whole. It is easy to overlook some of the more obscure slices of the ethno-sectarian mix and there are a lot of them. And it seems most of them have an "extremist" segment, making it dangerous to slight them.

Back in the U.S., we are typically confronted each election with the minimal choice, two (usually sub-optimal) candidates representing each of the dominating parties. Representative government in Iraq, affectionately termed "Iraqracy," has lists instead of parties. And the election is "open list," meaning any self-identifying group can form a list, name a leader for the list, and join the fray. What everyone is aiming for is as many of the Council of Representative (COR) seats as they can muster.

They want as many seats as they can muster because the only way to truly have a role in forming the government is to have one of the most winning lists, meaning large blocks of seats in the COR. According to the Iraq constitution, the list with the most seats is given the role to form the government. And this is where it really departs from our American reality. We vote for all of the senators and congresspersons that represent us, but we also vote for our government leader, the president.

In Iraq, it is the responsibility of the list with the most seats to find a way to name the Prime Minister, the President, and the Speaker for the COR, the top governmental jobs, in that order. Seems simple enough, but it requires a majority (163 COR members) to select these positions and the leading list has only 91. And so the real fun begins.

Campaigning for representation were 86 blocs, lists, parties, and unaffiliated individuals. Just try to give equal air time to these folks on TV. Of the 86, just 14 gained sufficient votes to seat members in the COR. 90% of these seats went to just four lists, and now the leaders of those lists are locked in a long and seemingly intractable struggle to form the government.

The leading list, Iraqiya, seemed to have the upper hand by virtue of the most seats when the election results were announced. The incumbent Prime Minister, who has no intention of giving up his post (the most powerful one in the government), is not a member of the winning list. He protested the results of the election and forced a recount of the biggest district (Baghdad) and while this was going on he convinced another list to join his State of Law list.

The recount did not change the results (in fact it validated the integrity of the voting process) but now the current PM claims he has the largest winning bloc by virtue of the two lists joining. To us Americans, this is wrong on a lot of levels, but it remains unresolved here four full months after the election and it is really making the Iraqi populace a bit upset. No seated government means no new policy or regulation, both of which are critical to a lot of things that need to happen to get this country moving forward economically.

And that is where things stand, still, today (pun intended). There is more, but this is enough for now.