On Patrol in Sweltering Baghdad, a Platoon Turns Up the Heat
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 15, 2003; Page D01
BAGHDAD -- Call it peacekeeping, Spider-Man-style.
Pfc. Bryan Perwerton crouches on the railing of a balcony four stories above the sidewalk, then leaps three feet through the air to the next balcony, landing without a sound audible from the street below. His buddy, Cpl. Jeremy Simpson, passes over their rifles, then also jumps. Someone has reported that a man in this apartment was waving a pistol the night before, vowing to shoot his neighbors.
When both soldiers are on the supposed offender's balcony, they slide open the glass door and step inside. As it turns out, he isn't home. But a message has been sent to the dozens of Iraqis watching from the street, from rooftops and from behind curtained windows: Threaten people with violence and you may have U.S. soldiers appear in your living room, seemingly out of nowhere.
Ultimately, peacekeeping, like war, is about putting boots on the ground -- or on the balcony. Generals and colonels make policy and issue orders. But it is sergeants and privates who implement peacekeeping, conducting the patrols, responding to tips and sometimes detaining suspects. It is those actions, repeated day after day, that can alter the atmosphere of the city and, hopefully, build security.
In southeastern Baghdad, that slow but essential process has been the task of the 2nd Platoon of Charlie Company, a unit in a battalion of the Army's 1st Armored Division. For the moment, at least, the 41 soldiers of 2nd Platoon -- most in the Army only a year or two, some fresh out of boot camp -- are the law in this neighborhood of Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims and Christians.
A reporter visited the platoon several times at the end of last month, joining them on foot patrols and interviewing them at their base camp, "Outpost Beach," an old Baath Party social and swim club on a shady bend of the Tigris River.
A squad of nine assembles one day at 5 p.m. for its early evening patrol, its second of the day. They amble out the front gate -- weapons at the ready, but hardly operating in a tense, combat-ready posture. "When we first got here, we were real cautious -- running across intersections, staying off main avenues of approach," says 1st Lt. Phillip Snyder, the 26-year-old platoon leader from Wilkes-Barre, Pa. But after a few days, they adopted a more relaxed stance, designed to engage local residents rather than confront them. They've learned a lot about Baghdad in their two weeks here. Walking past a liquor store, Snyder says, "One of the misconceptions I had is that they didn't have liquor, prostitutes or Christians -- and they've got all three."
Just a few minutes into the patrol, two men -- one in a long white robe, the other in blue jeans and a shirt -- approach the point man.
"There are two 'Ali Babas' who steal, yesterday and before two days," says the robed man, using Baghdad slang for looters. "They are still here." The men point to the side street just ahead on the left.
Snyder is skeptical -- "Eighty percent of these stories are BS," he says quietly -- but pursues it anyway. Four soldiers stand guard at either end of the side street. The other half of the squad investigates.
This tip pans out. The two accused thieves, who had been cornered and pistol-whipped by locals, are brought out from a house and turned over to the squad.
Sgt. Jason Bergmann, a Missouri native, has them kneel and then "zip ties" their hands behind their backs with plastic handcuffs. He looks at their head wounds, brushing away the flies walking into the blood, then takes out his medical pack and bandages them.
"The cuffs are very hard," one man says, looking up at Bergmann. That complaint is shrugged off, but when the man asks for water, the sergeant asks a resident to get some. In Iraq's brutal summer heat, water is a matter of life and death, given even to adversaries.
A shot rings out perhaps 100 yards down the road. The soldiers take cover behind walls. Staff Sgt. Alfonso Delagarza, a squad leader from Laredo, Tex., slides along a wall to investigate. He returns a moment later -- "random gunfire," he shrugs. Delagarza's assessments are respected by other platoon members, in part because he spent a week in heavy combat in last year's Operation Anaconda battle in Afghanistan.
Two Humvees full of military police from the Illinois Army National Guard roll up to see if the patrol needs help. Spec. Shawna Keith, a diminutive insurance clerk from Bloomington, Ill., stands behind the machine gun mounted atop one vehicle. Four neighborhood girls stare at her in seeming amazement. She gives them small pieces of hard candy. Her unit's surprise appearance solves the platoon's problem of what to do with the prisoners.
The detainees disposed of, the patrol walks on. Neighborhood children greet them. Some older people wave gravely. But when a sedan full of four young men rolls by, one shouts something in Arabic. No one in the patrol understands the words, but the hostile tone is clear.
"There are a large amount of people who want you to be here, mainly kids," says Simpson, 23, from Loveland, Colo. "Seventeen- to 25-year-olds, they really don't want you here. Older adults, they're not too sure."
Coming to the commercial street at the northern edge of their sector, the soldiers encounter another squad from the 3rd Infantry Division going in the opposite direction. This heavy military presence -- the third Army patrol active in the neighborhood that afternoon -- is part of the Army's strategy of "flooding the zone" with troops to stop looting and restore a sense of security to the troubled city.
It was 5:43 in the afternoon, and a humid 108 degrees. A 3rd Division soldier shouts across the street, "You guys find the air conditioning yet?" No one laughs at the weak joke. Nor do they stop to talk -- troops from another division might as well be from another world. In the military, your squad is your family, your platoon is your neighborhood, and your company is your town. Beyond that, anyone else is pretty much a stranger.
The patrol cuts south, zigzagging through the neighborhood to ensure that they are seen even on the smallest side streets. At 6:45 they arrive back at their base camp's front gate and the welcoming shade of its eucalyptus trees. As the guard opens a gate in the concertina wire, they sling their weapons on their shoulders and start loosening their flak jackets. The sun has dropped to the horizon, but the temperature is still above 100. They are drenched in sweat. It is the fifth time in 48 hours that they have completed a patrol. No cooling breeze wafts in from the Tigris, one of the Book of Psalms' "rivers of Babylon."
Watching his men strip off their gear, Delagarza, the squad leader, worries aloud. The troops stop eating because of the heat, he says, but just guzzling water doesn't supply the salts and minerals their bodies need. The result, he says, is that "the guys wake up at night with cramps" in the legs as their muscles search for electrolytes.
As they walk across the outpost, two of the returning soldiers fantasize about life back home.
"Cold beer," says one, his uniform blouse dark with sweat.
"Ice cold beer," escalates the other, his clothes even wetter, drenched to the knees.
"A cooler filled with ice and beer," the first responds.
"You know when you stick your hand down in the cooler and get a can, and it's so cold, it almost hurts," the other says, reveling in the thought. "You know that feeling?"
But when they get to the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that is the platoon command post, Sgt.1st Class Andrew McConnell pulls them back into the present. "We just got a frago" -- a short, "fragmentary order." Instead of getting the next day off, a reward for two intense days of patrolling, they are being moved immediately to participate in a huge sweep of Sector 37N, the west Baghdad neighborhood where a U.S. Army soldier had been killed by a mine the day before. So before dawn the next day, they launch a 17-hour mission in that sector.
There, they are a tiny part of an operation that involves close to 1,000 troops and 50 armored vehicles. In a long day and night of searches and checkpoints, a variety of rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and small missiles are found.
One high point of the day, says McConnell, the platoon's top sergeant, was seeing Pfc. Shaun Jones -- only four months out of boot camp -- handle an Iraqi who aggressively got in his face.
It was dusk when the man strode up to Jones and began yelling at him.
Jones, 22, from Bozeman, Mont., thought the man was drunk. First he yelled at him, telling him to back off, he recalls. Then he waved with his hand. When the man still kept on walking at him and shouting, the private took half a step back and brought his M-4 carbine up to the ready stance -- that is, elevated three-quarters of the way, but still maintaining eye contact over its top.
At that point, says a pleased McConnell, "the guy backed right off." The private, he says, had shown measured escalation at the smallest possible level, one-on-one.
As the sergeant talks, most of the platoon is sprawled on the concrete floor in the next room, sleeping in their uniforms. Their weapons, helmets and other gear are spread out around them, the squad's machine guns standing sentry-like on bipods. Their restraint is tested again a day later. This time, they are alone in their zone. Their companion brigade from the 3rd Infantry Division has been shipped west to the town of Fallujah, where violent opposition to the U.S. military presence is intensifying.
"We're kind of thin," Snyder says. At any given point during the day, he has one squad out patrolling, one on perimeter security and a third improving the outpost defenses, mainly by filling sandbags and digging trenches. That morning, a boy wanders up to their camp's front gate, pulls out a pistol that looks like a Colt .45 and points it at the two soldiers on guard. They drop to the ground and shout at the child to put the weapon on the ground. They were prepared to fire if necessary, Snyder says later.
It turns out that the kid, who is 7 years old, wants to play soldier. The pistol is an air gun, but the soldiers are still shaken by the close call. They take him to his mother and angrily tell her to educate him about pointing weapons at people.
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