Outside the wire

Note: The following was not a sight-seeing trip, so none of the photos below are actually mine, but are taken from unclassified sites on the Internet.

On a mild Spring morning a while back, I climbed into an armored vehicle and took up my seat. With my body armor wrapped tightly around me and my Kevlar helmet firm about my head, I took my seat inside what is known as a Rhino - a fortified bus. But this was no ordinary morning commute. At a final stop before passing through our gates, we were told to load our weapons.

There are many people who come over here and never once leave the confines of a fortified military base. In fact, the number of such people would be astounding to most un-initiated. Many jobs simply don't require it. A vehicle maintenance crew doesn't need to go "outside the wire" - as it is called. The vehicles damaged by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are towed back to base and worked on there. Helicopter ground crews, similarly, have no need to leave the base either.

That isn't to say that life isn't dangerous on base. When you're in a base inside a major city like Baghdad, you can be attacked with indirect fire - mortars or rockets - at any time, day and night, and there's not much you can do to prepare. It's not like when you hop into a Hummvee and go out locked and loaded, keyed up to a pitch and ready for anything. When you're on base, an attack can come at any time - when you're at breakfast, reading a book, sleeping, working, or in the shower. Those are some of the places I've been when the alarms went off and everyone got down and hugged the ground for a few tense moments as booms shattered the air around us.

That being said, for Camp Rats, Bobs on the FOBs, REMFs and others, nothing we do quite compares to the dangers faced by those outside of the wire. The soldiers who go out every day on patrols put their lives on the line far more than the rest of us ever will. And the dangers are wildly disproportionate. The vast majority of patrols never even see an IED, never get attacked with small arms fire, and never face a suicide vehicle. We literally send out thousands of vehicles each day, and recently, only about 15 a day have been hit by any kind of attack.

Some roads have very little activity, and are considered relatively safe. But even on these roads, the occasional IED can still be encountered. Other roads are known hotspots. The route names with the most danger are as familiar to soldiers as the staunchly-defended cities of Germany were to Allied Airmen in WWII. When a soldier finds he is to travel down one of these roads, he says an extra prayer, or writes an extra letter back home.

So it was that as I pulled my pistol from my hip holster and slapped a magazine home, I looked with aprehension on the trip ahead. I was traveling on one of the most notorious of Baghdad Roads - Route Irish.

Route Irish - named, like many other routes, for a sports team - is a terrorist's dream. Between the Baghdad International Airport and the International Zone, it's a short, narrow lifeline between the two most important outposts of American and coalition forces in the entire country. This 2005 article declared it "The Most Dangerous Road in the World":

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/The-worlds-most-dangerous-road/2005/06/07/1118123840061.html

That article was before the height of the violence in 2006-07, when the route became a key focal point of anti-Iraqi forces. Both Sunni and Shi'a insurgent groups had strongholds nearby, and both groups hit it daily, hoping to score a high-profile propaganda victory.

By the time I was ready for my ride across Irish, things had improved dramatically. First of all, attacks had dropped by over 60 percent in Baghdad. Sure, there had been a recent flare-up about a week before, but that was in Sadr City, across town. The last major spurt of activity on Irish itself had been over two months before.

The Rhino, from Wikipedia.

I sat on the bus with an odd assortment of passengers, a kind of surreal greyhound. There were a mix of Army, Air Force and Navy personnel, along with a number of contractors. All wore body armor. One of the contractors was a bearded guy with all black body armor and an all black Kevlar helmet. His armor had a big yellow Batman logo across the front, and that apparently, was his nickname. We all chatted as we had waited in the assembly area for the bus to arrive, but as we got on and neared the gate, all chatting stopped.

I sat on the left side of the bus, which in theory would be the safest, since the right shoulder is closer to the vehicle and most IEDs are buried or concealed in trash along the side of the road. But insurgents have learned to vary their attacks, and we've learned to drive in the middle or even on the left side of the road, and the upshot is there is no safe place to be. The turret gunner on all the vehicles is in the most danger, and the first and last vehicles get hit the most. Other than that, all bets are off.

Beneath my window there was a small hole, with a steel plate covering it. You could slide the steel back like a vent. A little sticker was placed above this. It was like those stickers for airbag safety, only this one said something to the effect of, "In case of direct fire, open this and shoot back." I had a little laugh imagining myself sticking the short nose of my 9mm pistol out of this hole and plunking away as I tried to aim from behind the bullet proof window. I figured if it really came to that, I'd let one of the enlisted guys with an M-16 slide up to the window and take his chances.


After a series of checkpoints I won't describe here, we finally faced open road. With a pair of Humvees in front and a pair behind, our driver gave it some gas and the Rhino - the aerodynamic equivalent of a brick - surged forward. Topping out around 40 mph, we began the 12-mile run to the International Zone.

Keeping a sharp eye out for threats in my sector, I cautiously eyed everything that went by. Irish at this point is a divided highway, with a large sand median between the lanes, big enough to fit a soccer field into. Weeds, reeds, trash and palm trees were scattered throughout. Old abandoned billboards - mostly painted with new propaganda messages calling for Iraqis to unite against violence - stood, wind-battered and silt-covered. A few abandoned cars were there too, and I wondered if they could possibly be Vehicle-Borne IEDs (VBIEDs), but then this road was cleared every day by route clearance teams, and any IED that had been placed between then and now was likely small: a 155mm artillery shell wired to a cell phone or a disgarded milk jug or two - harmless trash at first sight - that was filled with homemade explosive and rigged to a wire strung across the road. The worst, of course, are EFPs - Explosively-formed Projectiles - which are designed specifically to target up-armored vehicles like the one I was riding in.

It seemed impossible that anyone could spot anything in all that mess, but the truth is, more than half of the IEDs that coalition forces encounter are spotted and cleared by the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Teams without exploding. Iraqi tips, vigilance and continual pressure on the insurgents which prevents them from spending the time necessary to elaborately conceal their bombs all contribute to this astounding level of success.

When an IED is spotted, of course, movement comes to a halt, and this is perhaps even more dangerous. An obvious IED or a hoax - a dead dog with wires stuffed into his mouth, for example - can be placed to stop a convoy at a precise spot in order to get the vehicles into a "kill box" where hidden secondary IEDs can be placed to maximum effect, often "daisy-chained" off the same detonation wire. Or an IED could halt a convoy in a pre-determined ambush spot for insurgents armed with heavy machine guns or RPGs. Or it could be a combination of both.

But neither we nor our escort vehicles spotted anything and we continued on our way. We passed depressing appartment complexes with cracked-plaster walls the color of sand, their laundry flapping in the morning sun, narrow alleys filed with filth that reminded me of Matamoros, Mexico when I was a kid. Cars minus their wheels, propped up on cinder blocks. The same, but without the cinder blocks.

There were overpasses which rose up in front of us. In some cases, a kid will stand on one side of the overpass, waving cheerfully, while subtly timing the vehicles and giving a signal to another child on the other end, who will drop a grenade, hoping to make it into the exposed hatch of a gun turret. The kids, if they're successful, are paid a pittance by their brutal terrorist handlers, and if our troops fired back and killed the kids, the terrorists win double - they make us look brutal and they don't have to pay the kids. But these particular overpasses had their sides lined with a wire fence to discourage such attacks. We scanned the bottom of the overpass - a difficult spot to emplace an IED, but it was known to happen. Nothing. We continued on.

We passed across an overpass ourselves, with torn and twisted guardrails and on the other side, huge holes in the ground where previous IEDs had exploded. As we drove onward, we were leaving the suburbs behind and entering the heart of Baghdad. More appartment buildings, but now some shops and actual pedestrians, just off the road, behind a metal wire fence. Some odd, smelly smoke seemed to come out of some holes in the ground. Burning trash, perhaps, or a fire in part of the sewer.

Finally, we entered a stretch of the road surrounded by massive concrete blast walls, 12 feet high. A line of cars waited ahead - Iraqis working in the area waiting to have their cars searched. Off to the side, a similar group of pedestrians. Just before this checkpoint there were a few clever hawkers, running the Iraqi equivalent of roadside Taco stands to sell breakfast to these Iraqis, who were taking their lives into their own hands to come and work for the Americans or the Iraqi government in the IZ.

Finally, after an agonizing wait as we passed the cars - and wondered whether any were filled with hidden explosives waiting just for our vehicles to pass by, we entered the safety of the International Zone. As we drove into the massive area of Baghdad, we saw old bombed out Iraqi palaces, the famous crossed swords at the Iraqi Army parade grounds (below) and - to my utter surprise - more neighborhoods where Iraqis lived and raised families inside a secured U.S. base.

The return trip the next day similarly went without incident. If I didn't know what I know about Route Irish, I could almost think that it was an ordinary drive across an ordinary third-world country, not the 20 minutes of adrenaline-filled suspense. But within a few days, I heard of another attack on the road. Still a vast improvement from the heyday when it was attacked two or three times a day, but not a Sunday drive either.

Driving across Baghdad is not the everyday life for me, because like those mechanics, that's just not my job. And if I made it sound overly dramatic, that underscores just how much in awe I hold those soldiers who go out, day after day, and put their lives on the line on these roads. 30 percent of the soldiers in Iraq probably face about 90 percent of the danger. For them, the soliders who daily face danger on Route Irish, Route Pluto, MSR Tampa, or the many dangerous roads of Iraq, we should all be in their debt. They're paving the way for a different kind of Iraq. Their sacrifices have made the surge work and have made major strides in this country.

For them, every day is a drive out on the highway of hell, and every day brings new risks and new rewards outside the wire.