A US Soldier’s Experience in Iraq on 9/11

Here is some raw data–a second interview with my friend serving his second term in Baghdad. We talk about his ‘cultural training’ exercises, Bradley Manning, and his engagement with the local Iraqis.

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What type of cultural training are you given? What are you told about Iraqi culture? Where would you go if you needed a translator?

We were given very basic cultural training before my last deployment. This deployment I don’t remember any classes or anything being said much. I do remember that I was told at JRTC (month training exercise in Louisiana) that I should take it upon myself to learn some basic Arabic words. Arabic is a tough language. I’ve learned and forgotten many words and phrases. The truth is we don’t need to learn the language, we have an interpreter with us at all times outside the wire and we never use them anyhow. Anything a soldier learns about the culture here is on there own accord. I could go on for quite some time about the varying lifestyles of Iraqis from the illiterate rural farmers to the college educated inner city modern Iraqis. The people here in eastern Baghdad are mostly Shiite and … are strictly religious and are concerned mostly with the world as it applies to Shiites. The last big uproar these zealots had with the US was the fact that we weren’t doing enough to help there Shia bretheren in Bahrain. Anyhow most of what I learn about the Iraqis is through our Iraqi interpreters. They live with us on base and live the life of secret agents. They keep it a secret from even their families that they work with the US and have many times told me that they’d be dead if word got out. Our interpreters work with us for three years for their US citizenship. Our current two interpreters with our platoon have been on more route clearance missions than any American soldier that I know. Perhaps 4 to 5 hundred.

You are asked to go out and be friendly with the locals but then you are told not to. What is up with that? This is really interesting, why the mix messages?

The suggestions to mingle with the locals is coming from one echelon, while our missions are being commanded by another. The two echelons obviously have a different idea of how things should be done. I’m not sure what the right decision is. I know it’s a risk to walk around in the neighborhoods of eastern Baghdad, but it’s not like driving through them is any safer. I think if it were up to me we would stop at a different local market every time we went on mission and simply ask random Iraqis what were in for that day. I would as well stop and talk to the Sons of Iraq and ask them what is up. The SOI or Sons of Iraq are like volunteer police. They used to be paid by the government but now I believe they are free agents so to speak. Sometimes the locals pay them and sometimes they are burned alive by the local insurgents. They are the brave son of a bitches who stand on the streets with their AK 47’s everyday so they are in the know. Why we don’t interact with them more is beyond me. I think anyway you slice it we are in for a bad day, so my view is we should be doing as much as possible to figure out when and where it is coming from. If we get shot at or blown up while doing so, at least were dictating where and when.

What is the going consensus around the base regarding Bradley Manning? Are your fellow soldiers into discussing politics, watching news? What issues do you guys talk about alot? Are the majority of your soldier friend cynical or optimistic about what we are doing there?

The only military people optimistic about what we are doing are the ones who’s job it is to be optimistic. Every conversation about Iraq amongst soldiers is the same. We are wasting our lives in this shithole and I don’t care what any general on up has to say, we are accomplishing nothing. Of course you can’t say that at a soldiers memorial or funeral. But we all say the same thing. Its a fucking waste of time.

Bradley Manning is a traitor. He sold himself out to make a name for himself. Anyone in the military will tell you the same thing. No matter what the situation is, if you are in the military you take an oath and give up certain rights. It’s one of the few things soldiers can take pride in. Loyalty to your fellow man. You turn your back on your peers in the Army by leaking classified information, well good riddance and good luck. He won’t see the light of day for some time. The Universal Code of Military Justice is pretty black and white. You don’t play by the rules and you go away for a long time.

Most soldiers political conversations are very uneducated and uninteresting. Occasionally I’ll have a good argument with an officer or one of the few intelligent soldiers. You’ve gotta look hard but there are a few smart grunts out there. Perhaps you should have asked me this question before I’d spent 7 months in this shithole. Most of our conversations have been reduced to laughing at things that would make most people shutter. 8 or 9 nine months into a deployment is when the mind starts to turn to mush. Speaking for myself I don’t give a shit about much of anything other than going home. I don’t care people about dying that I don’t know and have never met. I don’t care about 80 civilians being killed by a car bomb at a funeral. I don’t care about Al Qaeda taking 30 government officials hostage and blowing themselves and their hostages up. Perhaps I should care but I think I’ve soaked up as much as I can take and really at some point you have to put up your defenses. All that matters to me is getting myself and my friends home alive. Everyone else is on there own. That is as much as I can do for myself or anyone else.

Adam Fish

I am a cultural anthropologist and media studies scholar currently teaching and researching in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. I investigate media technologies, digital finance, and network activism. @mediacultures

14 thoughts on “A US Soldier’s Experience in Iraq on 9/11

  1. The idea of the US military doing nation-building strikes me as highly dubious. Armies are mostly about fighting wars, and your best soldiers might not be good cultural ambassadors. A basic minimum respect for the locals, in the sense of not being abusive. is about as much as I think should be hoped for.

    Even worse, I don’t see how you could train soldiers for nation-building person to person work without indoctrinating them in some particular ideology, which right now would be free-market triumphalism + as much authoritarianism as is necessary + cooperation with the US + a dose of Christianism sneaked in + whatever else the individuals in the field come up with. And these principles then return to the US when military finish their tours or retire.

  2. You will please excuse us if on this anniversary of 9/11 we don’t all “thank you for your service” (though no doubt some of those whose kids have also been pushed into the armed “services” will). But I know too many vets who become angry when civilians thank them in this way because it is part of a processes covering-up all the bad things they know they did as part of this service, and secondly, such blind statements further remove us from acknowledging just what forms of empire “service” in Iraq actually serves. You might think the form of this interview somehow removes you from your own responsibility for being part of an operation that won’t even engage with the SOI etc., but your knowledge only further problemaizes your role in this misadventure.

    Where is your agency soldier? Or wait, aren’t we allowed to ask that on 9/11?

  3. Hey, that is really interesting because today i was watching the news and they were commemorating the crashes of 911, and i have always wondered if maybe they gave a better cultural education to soldiers maybe Middle Easterner’s would be more appreciative when encountering American soldiers and therefor slowly improving there views on America? I have traveled a lot and threw experience i have discovered that other cultures are more appreciative when you make a effort to speak there language.

  4. I would as well stop and talk to the Sons of Iraq and ask them what is up. The SOI or Sons of Iraq are like volunteer police. They used to be paid by the government but now I believe they are free agents so to speak. Sometimes the locals pay them and sometimes they are burned alive by the local insurgents. They are the brave son of a bitches who stand on the streets with their AK 47’s everyday so they are in the know. Why we don’t interact with them more is beyond me.

    A wonderful act of This American Life centers on a former member of the SOI.

  5. @John Emerson:

    See also: Spanish-American War, Panamanian Independence from Gran Colombia, etc. Nation building is what America does.

  6. @John Emerson

    Anthropologists have a way of talking about “the military” as if the military was an undifferentiated blob. Those of us with a bit more intimate perspective (in my case a daughter and son-in-law who are both Annapolis graduates and did tours in the Middle East—for a time we were one of the few families I knew who subscribed both to The Nation and to the Proceedings of the Naval Institute), the situation is more complex, involving both inter-service rivalries and on-going attempts to rethink the mission for different parts of the military. What seems to be happening at the moment is a growing gap between Special Operations Command, which is all about “We are warriors” and deeply involved in aggressive Kill/Capture programs directed at “terrorists” and the boots-on-the-ground big army folk, who have been scrambling, ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a primary mission defined as being able to defeat a Soviet invasion of Europe, to find a new raison d’être—which increasingly involves humanitarian and other “nation-building” activities.

    Just last week, before returning to Japan from the States, we saw a great PBS program on this issue. Check out

    http://interactive.wxxi.org/highlights/2011/05/frontline-killcapture-wxxi-tv

  7. bq. What seems to be happening at the moment is a growing gap between Special Operations Command, which is all about “We are warriors” and deeply involved in aggressive Kill/Capture programs directed at “terrorists” and the boots-on-the-ground big army folk, who have been scrambling, ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a primary mission defined as being able to defeat a Soviet invasion of Europe, to find a new raison d’être—which increasingly involves humanitarian and other “nation-building” activities.

    That’s a bit of an oversimplification in regards to SOCOM members. The Pararescuers are life savers first and foremost and the why of the Special Forces is to provide a foreign training capability. “JSOC”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-secret-america-a-look-at-the-militarys-joint-special-operations-command/2011/08/30/gIQAvYuAxJ_story.html is at the center of the kill or capture efforts, though non-Tier 1 units are also involved.

    I assume there are those who would like to see a COINcentric military (fewer and fewer every day, hopefully), but I think the nation-building stuff can just as well be read as mission specific to Iraq and Afghanistan. USFK and the 3rd Marine Division have remained pretty clear in their post-Berlin Wall raison d’être, for example.

  8. MT, thanks for the complications. Some day some historian will write an account of how Special Forces, originally conceived as organizers of local resistance to the enemy in question became transformed, via, for example, Operation Phoenix in the Vietnam Era, into the bleeding edge of wet work in the shadows—ideally with local accomplices but, now increasingly in cooperation with drones and other high-tech toys. What I thought the Frontline reporters did a pretty good job of was demonstrating the fundamental contradiction between “We are keeping you safe and helping you rebuild” (the ask assigned to the ordinary grunts) and “We kick down your doors at night and, if you happen to be killed by a drone while riding with a ‘known’ terrorist that’s just your bad luck.” Or, in other words, fighting terror with peacekeeping vs fighting terror with terror.

  9. Some day some historian will write an account of how Special Forces, originally conceived as organizers of local resistance to the enemy in question became transformed, via, for example, Operation Phoenix in the Vietnam Era, into the bleeding edge of wet work in the shadows—ideally with local accomplices but, now increasingly in cooperation with drones and other high-tech toys.

    The U.S. Special Forces (not to get too far into the weeds, but you seem to be making the common terminological mistake of referring to SOCOM as a whole as Special Forces) can trace their origin to the OSS and the Jedburgh teams. There’s an Afghanistan connection in there, as Churchill was an admirer of butcher and both while fighting the Pashtun in British India.

    I do think there is an argument to be made in favor of the night raid strategy, but having lived in a place were people went to bed at night with an honest fear that someone dressed in black was going to kick in their door before sunrise I am consistently creeped out by how unproblematically it is presented in American media, Frontline being a happy exception. The latest Frontline is a good one, too.

  10. @Ras, you are displaying not a very sophisticated use of anthropological theory to contextualize this ‘raw data’ about one soldier’s experience. I suggest you not only think a bit wider and deeper about the situation of this informant but most importantly show some respect for someone with the guts to exhibit his experiences honestly.

  11. Ras

    If not you, who else is going to look out for your ass?

    Personal responsibility begins with looking out for yourself.

    Just like in the airplane — put on the oxygen mask BEFORE you put it on the child. Otherwise you are going to be of no help to the child, and just become a burden to others as another victim.

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