Gen. Petraeus, the Surge and Iraq

General Petraeus and I

I have intentionally avoided going into a lengthy analysis of how the war is going. Analysis is what I do every day over here. Nonetheless, the recent appointment of General David Petraeus to be the new commander of U.S. Central Command is worth noting.

As the architect of the Surge, General Petraeus is the one man most responsible for the dramatic improvements in security we've realized in Iraq in the last year. I don't think anyone realizes back home just how dramatic the improvements have been. Attacks in the West are down around 80 percent. Violence in many neighborhoods of Baghdad are down 60 percent. Cities like Fallujah, whose very name had become synonymous with violence, gunbattles and death, are now quiet and almost back to normal. Parks are open. The Baghdad Zoo is open. In many areas, the shops and markets are full.

Certainly there are tough times ahead. No one has been more honest about this than Gen. Petraeus, who predicted a few spikes in violence even as the trends were going down. But looking at the situation with all that I know, I have to say that I'm even more of an optimist than the General himself. You see, it's not just that the quantity of violence has gone down, but the quality as well. And most importantly of all, we're winning the battle of hearts and minds. Or, more accurately - the enemy is losing that battle. Their brutal ideology of death and more death has changed many Iraqis.

None of this would have happened without the surge, and that is a credit to General Petraeus. By being elevated to his new position at Central Command, Petraeus now will assume overall authority over both Afghanistan and Iraq, and will be able to take lessons from one war and use them in another.

Lest one think that we're being left in less-capable hands, I can assure you that we're not. Because the right-hand man of General Petraeus - the man who implemented the surge on the ground, so to speak, is taking his place. Gen. Ray Odierno is a more pragmatic, nuts and bolts kind of guy than Gen. Petraeus. When Gen. Petraeus sees a glass half full, Gen. Odierno sees it half empty. But rather than conflict, the two seemed to work well together, with a yin-yang kind of symmetry.

I've worked under both of these men and have seen them in action. Certainly, if I had anything negative to say about my superior officers, I would be silent. But I do not, and I am not. I don't think that there could be a better team to take Iraq to the next level. Their experience, their institutional knowledge, will allow the lessons of the surge - good and bad - to be pushed on towards the finish. Because I read the tea leaves every day, and I can tell you that there will be a few dark days ahead, but the road is clearly downhill from here.

Budge the Stress Dog

I had a great opportunity to meet a local celebrity. I had seen him before on T.V. - I think it was CNN or FoxNews - but had never met him in person.

No, it wasn't Toby Keith, although he was here the same day. In fact, as one soldier put it, this celebrity may possibly be bigger than Toby Keith.

He's Budge, the Stress Dog.

Or, to be more accurate, Sgt. First Class Budge, the Stress Dog.

It all came about when some medical folks over at the Combat Stress hospital started thinking about ways to ease the strain on soldiers. Taking their clue from hospitals which had noticed the calming effects of pets on nursing home patients or others in need, they hit on the idea of getting their own stress dog.

Budge - as the TV broadcast explained - goes all over this base and others, visiting the troops. Being petted. And just being a dog. A tough life it must be. And so it happened that a small medical awareness display was set up over at the palace, and budge came along. Walking through the hall, I spotted him and just had to come and say hi. I was star-struck. Celebrities just don't get any cooler than Budge.

So, like an awkward teenager, I begged to get a photograph, and his handler agreed. After that, I played a bit with Budge - tossing his chew toy and playing tug-of-war with it. He was an excited and friendly dog, and as I went back to work, I think I could verify that the "Budge effect" was not just a myth, for I felt no stress at all.

Dust Storm in Baghdad

This week, the City of Baghdad was choked and covered with fine dust as high winds pushed in a sandstorm from the West.

I knew it was coming, since I get a weather briefing every day from an Air Force meteorologist, but it was nonetheless a surprise when I stepped outside and saw a dense, impenetrable fog cast about the horizon.

We've had storms before, but this was the biggest. When most people think of sand storms, they probably think of huge rolling clouds of sand like something out of "The Mummy." And sure, there are some storms like that from time to time, but those are the exception. And they're not really the Baghdad thing. We're in a city - although on the edge of it - and there are buildings, trees and things to dampen the storm's energy.

The other misconception is that it's gritty, sandblasting-type sand. Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, the sand - dust, really - is very fine. So fine that you hardly notice it when you breathe it in. Even though you know you should avoid that as much as possible.

There are as many types of sand here as the Eskimos have types of snow.

There's hard-packed sand after the rains have dried. It's as tough as concrete and is usually packed or rutted in exactly the shape of the last vehicle that passed by when it was wet. In one area, the sand had dried - I'm not sure how - in a kind of undulating, wavy pattern. Driving across this at anything over 2 miles per hour is a teeth-jarring experience.

Another kind is crusty on the surface and harder just below. This usually happens when sand is exposed to a light rain. It kind of reminds me of a light frost on the grass during winter back home.

And then, there's powdered sand. There's a parking lot full of this over by the Pizza Hut and the Turkish press shop (where I tip with such a grand sum - $1.50 - that I'm afraid that the owner wants to arrange a marriage with one of his daughters - if not two). This kind of sand is the consistency of baby powder. I'm tempted to kind of skip across this like Alan Sheppard on the Moon. It leaves a boot-print so perfect that you could probably see the trademark symbol right by the name of the manufacturer.

And that's the kind of dust in this storm. I walked to work through the beginnings of the storm, seeing the sand blow horizontally in the headlights of the vehicles on base. It was still dark, but I could see the buildings fairly far off despite the sand. But as the storm intensified, this became less and less possible. When I finally re-emerged for breakfast, the sky was completely obscured, and the sand hung in the air fog-like, so that I couldn't even see the gate guards from the building door. Stepping outside, I thought I had stepped onto the set of "Dune."

As the day wore on, the storm grew in intensity. Not in wind, mind you, for that was never much beyond a breeze. In fact, that contributed to the perpetual haze, as the sand didn't blow in and blow out, rather it blew in and just kind of hung there, obscuring everything.

The guards at the dining facility wore those paper masks on their faces. They're all from Ghana, so they're probably familiar with bad air. But somebody nonetheless thought of them and got them masks. Of course, no one got me a mask, but I'm only outside for a short period, not standing guard for hours at a time. To be fair to the Army, they did get me something like a sand mask. But it's really like a winter cold-weather protection thing for your face and neck. And with thick, heavy cotton, it's almost impossible to breathe through. At least the Air Force guy below got something better:


I'm sure some readers are about to fire up the old word processor and zip off a letter to their congressman. Something to the effect of: "Our poor men and women are in harm's way and they don't have adequate protection against dust storms. Quick. Spend $62 million to send them hankerchiefs." If that's you. Stop. Push away from the keyboard. Do not continue.

First of all, we can buy that stuff here if we need it. Secondly, I already have enough crap as it is. I brought three dufflebags of junk, and I only use one and a half dufflebags' worth. If I ever find the jerk who wrote congress saying "We should make sure every single one of our troops has a chemical warfare suit" I will be hard-pressed not to wring that person's neck. What do you think? We can carry a chemical warfare suit - gas mask, rubber boots, gloves and the suit itself - around with us everywhere we go? So, at your taxpayer's expense, there are 130,000 chemical warfare suits that have been flown across the Atlantic, up to Iraq, and which now sit in an unopened dufflebag beneath our beds. For our entire deployment. Then they come home and get sold off to Army surplus stores. Yes, folks, that's your tax dollars in action.

But I digress, and we were talking about sand (come to think of it, perhaps I'll dig that gas mask out after all). It's pretty much everywhere here, year round. And there's nothing to hold it down. Grass is an almost unheard of commodity. I have actually seen some in a few spots on base where water faucets leak or rain runoff collects. But such spots are few and far between, and once it becomes sufficiently dry, the sand migrates to and fro, covers your trailer steps, silts over the cars and clogs up the filters on your airconditioner.

When the new folks in my team arrived in February, one of the enlisted guys - on his first trip outside the United States - summed it up pretty well. "This air," he said, "tastes dirty."

Anyway, that's the kind of day it was - or days, since the storm hung around for two. All of the pictures above were taken around 2 p.m. By four p.m., it was worse, and I took the picture below. No, I didn't play with the color, that's what the sky really looked like. Anyway, I didn't hang around much longer. I may indeed die of some bizzarre lung fungus in 30 years, but the sooner I got out of the sand and back in my trailer, the lower my chances will be.

Senator Hutchison visits the troops

Our wonderful U.S. Senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison, came to visit the troops a little over a month ago, and stopped by for a visit to our palace. For those who don't know, I worked for her on her 2006 Senate race. So I ducked out of work for a while and visited with her. Our troops have a lot of friends in D.C., but she's one of the biggest.

75 percent of the way done!

Yee haaa!!!!

My tracker puts me around 70 days left!

Heroes and Citizens

The stirrings of patriotism run deep in all who fight for their country. For many of us, it is a calling and a debt we owe to those who have gone before, as well as to those who are yet to come.

Serving our country is a part of our heritage. Among the many soldiers in Iraq are some who can trace ancestors who fought in the Revolution. Two of my ancestors fought in the Civil War - One North, one South. Almost all have grandparents who fought in World War II. When we raise our right hands, it is honorable, but certainly not extraordinary.

But look deep at the faces, names and backgrounds of many in our military, and you will find another group. Quiet, unassuming. Neither asking for special treatment, nor expecting for anything to be given them without sacrifice. Indeed, if a debt is owed, they do not owe it. If sacrifice is demanded, it is not demanded of them.

Yet they pay.

And they sacrifice.

I first began to get to know these remarkable warriors during my training at Fort McCoy. Training to learn the skills as a Combat Life Saver, one of my instructors urged me on in a strange, thick accent. I had to strain hard at times to understand what he was trying to say. His vocabulary was weak. But you could tell something clearly in the way he taught our group. He had done this before. He had been there. He had been on the front lines putting tourniquets on the legs of wounded soldiers. He had saved lives.

And as I soon learned, he was not even an American Citizen.

There are thousands of soldiers in the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines who daily put on their battle armor, pick up their wrench, or do whatever it is this nation asks them to do, but who have not been born Americans. Soldiers to whom the American dream is not a memory of home left behind, but just a dream of a home to be.

On April 12, a special ceremony was held in the rotunda of the Al Faw Palace in Baghdad. 212 of these soldiers stood forward in rank and file. They had already raised their hand once before years ago to become American soldiers. This day, they raised their hands again to become American Citizens.

Gen. Austin addressing the soldiers who are about to take the citizenship oath.

"These are truly impressive individuals who come from all over the globe," said Lt. General Austin, the Commanding General of the Multi-National Corps-Iraq. "These warriors have already sworn to defend the United States of America, and they have already put themselves in harms way."

Indeed, these men and women who in many cases have worn the uniform of their adopted country for years, are sincere in their commitment, their determination, and their love for America. Over the years, 37,000 non-citizens who have fought for America have taken the oath and become citizens. In the War on Terror, 140 of these heroes have died before they could take the oath.

They come from every continent, every corner of the world. Many come from America's southern neighbor of Mexico. Others come from the Caribbean, Africa, the Former Soviet Union and Asia. In all, 58 different countries were represented at the ceremony.

Indeed, two soldiers recognized at the ceremony come from a country where freedom has long been an elusive goal - but which is only now catching a glimpse of the promise of freedom. For these two men were born here, in Iraq.

One Army soldier, Specialist A., saw three of his four brothers killed in Baqubah, Iraq, following the 1990 uprising against Saddam Hussein. Another, born here in Baghdad that same year, was an infant when his family fled to San Diego, California. In this town, home to one of America's largest Marine bases, he grew up idolizing the men who he saw serving their country - and became one of them. These two men, now returned to the country of their birth are fighting - and translating - for the American forces that are bringing freedom to the Iraqi people.

"These brave men and women before you today understand better than most that American liberties are worth fighting for," General Austin said. "And they're fighting for them."

The soldiers assembled before the General are not the first to become American Citizens here - this was the 11th such ceremony held in Iraq to date. But they were the largest group. In fact, the 212 men and women who stood before General Austin represented the largest citizenship ceremony ever held outside of the borders of the United States.

Citizenship, indeed, is not the final chapter in the lives of these soldiers. It is a new beginning. The promise that the America that they fought for can be an America for them, and for their children. A citizenship, an honor, that they will never take for granted, because they've seen the cost of freedom.

When all the speeches were made and the last echoes of the 3rd Infantry Division Band died down throughout the palace, there was a moment of stillness and calm before a single command was given. As one man, the 212 soldiers stood to attention. A second command, and the men and women of the hour raised their right hands. As an officer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service stood before them and called out the oath, they repeated it in perfect unison:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

When it was finished, the hall rang out with applause. On all sides, crowded and jammed by the columns, straining to see from the balconies on the second and third floors, were another 200 or more soldiers. Brothers in arms who, like me, had their citizenship - had been born with it - but came here to be with their fellow soldiers. To see their friends earn the rights that we so cherish and to stand beside us as fellow citizens.


You couldn't help but be moved. You wanted to call them heroes. You wanted to call them patriots. But as you walked away and went back to your work, you shook your head...and just called them Americans.

Reflections on D-Day

You may ask why, of all places, I chose to go to France for my precious two weeks of leave from Iraq. Certainly, I could have gone home. I could have gone to a lot of places. Of course, I'd been to France before a few years back, but only saw a little bit of Strasbourg and only spent one rainy day in Paris. In a sense, you might think, I was only making up for that.

But the truth is much deeper than that. I live in perpetual awe of the deeds of America's greatest generation - the children of the depression who grew up to be the men and women of an army of freedom. A generation who grew up with nothing, but who gave everything. A generation that fought to restore freedom in a troubled, dark time. Not just for their own sake. Certainly, many generations in human history have fought for the understandably selfish goal of freedom for their own country. Never to this extent, however, have so many fought so bravely for the freedom of complete strangers.

These men, then, are my heroes. They are to me what Achilles and Hector, Diomedes and Odysseus were to the Greeks of Plato's age. They are our knights, but more than that, they are real and human heroes. Not unimpeachable, unreachable myths of greatness, but ordinary men who just did their job. The same old, genial men we pass silently in the grocery store, at the barber's shop or on the highway. Men who did the impossible, but who are impossibly humble. Nothing we do today can compete, though their example can nonetheless make us all better.

France then, was the fulcrum of that time, the crucial moment when these men boldly stepped into harm's way and began the drive to liberate a continent from tyranny. No, it was not Paris that I came to see, though I certainly did that. What brought me to France above all was the place where this great drama truly began. A small strip of coastline on the Western reaches of Europe: Normandy.

In late March, therefore, I visited the battlefield - a series of battlefields, really, stretching over hundreds of square miles - to get a sense of what it was like, and to pay my tribute.

The D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944 began with the dropping of paratroopers behind the German lines. These daring men would isolate the beaches, blocking German reinforcements during the crucial hours of the landing. They were dropped in the dark hours of night in a chaos of confusion that resulted in them being spread across the French countryside. No one arrived where they were supposed to. Many were shot as they came down. Some landed in the ocean or in rivers, and drowned. One of them even landed on the steeple of the old Norman church in Ste. Mere Eglise (See photo below).




But one by one, the paratroopers formed into groups, then companies, and moved towards their objectives. Delayed, but not daunted, by mid-morning of the next day they had seized the key points they were tasked to take and doggedly held their ground as the landings unfolded behind them.

A dozen miles away, the dawn broke to a sight unseen before or since in World History: an invasion fleet of nearly 6,000 ships of all sizes, from the largest battleships to cruisers, to destroyers, transports and small landing craft carrying a dozen men. The German gunners on the beaches, who had survived a powerful - but ineffective raid by hundreds of bombers, prepared themselves. This, their general, Erwin Rommel had told them, would be the Longest Day.



In a chain of bunkers, concrete forts and batteries, they waited. As the first of the landing craft approached the shores, the great batteries, such as the one above, opened fire - and would continue to do so until they were silenced by Naval gunfire, tanks, or infantrymen. As the landing craft drew nearer to the shoreline, German small guns and machine guns - placed in pillboxes at angles to the beach and thus protected from naval shelling - prepared to meet the onslaught with as much death as their operators could deal out.

One of the most dangerous batteries, Allied experts believed, was a series of positions that sat between two of the key beaches. The Pointe du Hoc was a position that could fire on all of the beaches and on the ships in the harbor as well. But despite weeks of bombardment, none of its massive concrete bunkers had even been cracked. Only an assault by determined men could get in and do the job, in brutal, close combat.

But Pointe du Hoc was not an easy target. Perched above a cliff, it could only be reached by land from the rear or by sea by an impossible climb up the 200-foot cliffs under fire. The man who volunteered to lead this impossible mission was the commander of a Ranger battalion, James Earl Rudder, a graduate of Texas A&M University (who would one day return to be the school's president). Defying all predictions, he led his men up the cliff, and in hard combat that sometimes involved troops exchanging grenades with enemy positions only feet away, won the hill. When it was discovered that the dreaded guns were not in fact there, Rudder's men, undaunted, pushed inland despite their small numbers and found the guns, concealed in a secondary position. They quickly destroyed them, thus neutralizing this threat to the beachhead. (Photo: myself at Pointe du Hoc. The craters behind me are the results of the allied aerial bombardment 64 years ago).

Back down at the beaches, the small, flat-bottomed landing craft pushed for the shoreline. There they faced a landscape of ingenious traps set by their German foe to destroy them. Huge logs which were placed below the waterline and topped with mines. Asterisk-shaped steal beams that could tear the bottom out of a boat and send its crew to their deaths. Concrete pyramids topped with mines and large iron gates that could scuttle the craft or trap boats on shore, preventing them from returning for a second trip (see below.

To avoid these dangers, the allies chose to land at low tide - not the high tide that had always been made in invasions past. But there was a cost to this decision, for low tide would dramatically increase the distance that the troops would have to advance, under fire, before the final assault on the German lines on the ridges overlooking the beaches.

(Photo: Omaha Beach - the most bloody spot on D-Day, where thousands of Americans died in the first waves. The houses had been leveled by the Germans and the ridges bristled with barbed wire, machine gun nests and mine fields.)

The landing craft hit the beach and disgorged their cargo of men. Many were struck down in the first moments. Many more were trapped in boats rent asunder with shell fire. The first two waves were ineffective, with barely a handful of soldiers making it across the vast beach, where they crouched in impotence behind a small rock-strewn pile known as a shingle, which provided minimal protection.

This is Omaha Beach close to low tide - how it looked the day allied forces landed. The storm barrier on the left is roughly the spot where the shingle was. American soldiers who made it through the wall of steel across this beach were pinned down in wave after wave there. But soon the tide would turn. Smaller ships out to sea - destroyers - closed the gap and engaged the batteries. Soldiers began peppering the machine gun nests with fire. Soon, the number of troops on the beach began to grow, until like the paratroopers inland, they formed squads and companies and began to assault the German positions.

One by one, the German positions fell silent. But not all. Huge concrete walls blocked all the beach obstacles, and engineers moved forward to blow them up. Late in the morning, troops began climbing the ridgeline.

By the end of the first day, a small toe hold had been made on the soil of France. Soon, from bloody Omaha, and from Utah Beach, Gold, Sword and Juno, the Allies - Americans, British, Canadians, Free French and others - began moving into the countryside. As they moved forward, more men and equipment flowed to the beaches. The paratroopers and the soldiers from the first waves doggedly blocked German counter-attacks as the buildup of forces grew in the next few days.

Before he had launched the most ambitious military attack of all time, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had written a letter. In it, he stated that he regretted that the invasion had failed, and that he had been forced to pull the troops back. The fault for the failure, he said, was entirely his. Late on the afternoon of June 6, Eisenhower finally breathed a sigh of relief. The message would never be sent. D-Day was a success.

The story did not stop there. Over the next few months, the Western Allies pushed through France and liberated Paris, then moved on to Germany. On the eastern front, the Soviet Union launched a major offensive and began the march to Berlin. In the next year, tens of thousands of villages, hundreds of cities and dozens of countries would be liberated. The war would gain new meaning for its soldiers as they began to liberate the heinous Nazi concentration camps.

But it had come at a price. For America, it was a steep downpayment indeed. Within the first two days of landing on the soil of France, more American soldiers were killed than have been killed in five years in Iraq. And the population of America in 1944 was nearly half of what it is today.


These soldiers, and many others who fought for our country lie, in dozens of military cemeteries across the world, as well as in the hometowns where they grew up, went fishing, played baseball and met their sweathearts. But the most moving, and most hallowed of resting places is where they lie together. On a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach is a cemetery. Row after row of white crosses - and the occasional Star of David - stand side by side, as if the dead are enjoying one last formation together.

If you've seen the movie "Saving Private Ryan" you know the place I'm talking about. Moving as these pictures may be, there is nothing quite like the feeling of being there. Seeing the names. Reading the dates of birth, and the all-too repetitive dates of death. Doing the math. 18 years old. 22. 45. From Pennsylvania, Georgia, California. And every one of the crosses is perfectly aligned, facing westward.

Westward to home.

Having finally visited these vast outdoor shrines to heroism, I felt good. Over the course of three days, I had trudged up the hillsides, climbed up the hedgerows and slowly, breathlessly took in the beaches, so peaceful today. I didn't want to live in the past, but just reflect and appreciate what the men of the past have done to build the world that we all enjoy. What these men - our grandfathers and our neighbors - did to keep us free and to free millions of the oppressed.

As I stood on Utah beach in the bitter chill, wearing my "Camp Victory South - Iraq" baseball cap and watching the waves crash in, all these thoughts came to my mind. As I started back, I noticed footprints in the sand. My own. Although I had brought civilian clothes on my trip, I had no proper hiking shoes except my combat boots.

It was these, then, which had left a print. The same boots which had carried me in my journey from the training fields of Wisconsin to the deserts of Kuwait to the rocky sand - and marble palaces - of Iraq. The irony made me smile, and I snapped a picture.

The boots that had trod across this very beach 64 years ago are boots that I don't feel I could ever fill myself. But something, some warm feeling of kinship passed through my mind at that moment. For myself, and all those who serve with me today, are part of a long, unbroken tradition of service. A tradition that was already ancient on that cloudy, heartbreaking day in 1944, and which continues on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and anywhere in the world where Americans stand guard. It is an honor beyond description to count myself a part of that tradition. For myself, and my generation, we can only hope that what we do in our lives uphods it as well as those men who crossed this very beach so many years ago.

That is the debt we owe, and the challenge we embrace.