Stryker Brigade News

On the way back from Sykes, near the Syrian border, the convoy I was riding in was ambushed in the city of Tall Afar.

The Humvee I was riding in was several lengths behind the shooting.

Near the front of the convoy, Spc. Kenneth Smith and Spc. Victor Mobley of Gary were involved in a fire fight, along with one of the Stryker escorts.

Northern Iraq remains a dangerous place. [...]

Mosul on election day

This time, on election day, I toured the streets of Mosul with a group of Strykers, who were part of the intense U.S. troop presence in the city. They were under orders not to go near the polls, for fear of giving the impression that the Americans were running the process.

A Stryker officer offered to drop me off a block away and let me walk to the polls on my own. I didn’t have the proper credentials. I had been embedded for nearly a month at that point and I hadn’t even heard of the media credential process that was going on in Baghdad, until a colleague mentioned it in an e-mail a few days before the vote.

I tried to talk my way through the security, which was being run by the Iraqi National Guard. The first soldier spoke no English, and I know only a few words of Arabic.

I showed him my Post-Tribune ID. I said I was an American journalist, pointed to my camera, and then to the entrance to the polls, which was shrouded in concertina wire.

They didn’t let me in.

When the Strykers with 24th Infantry out of Fort Lewis, Wash., offered to drop me off while on a second mission, I was left off on a crowded street on the west side of Mosul.

I had seen a long line at the same polls when the Strykers had driven by hours earlier. People greeted me as I walked toward the polling place. Some people showed me the purple ink that marked their fingers to show they had voted.

After being patted down for weapons near the outer barricades and after several pantomime-laden conversations, they agreed to let me in the gate. [...]

Soldiers have mixed feelings about why they are in Iraq. Some feel they are part of history, helping to give birth to a new democracy. Many more have little interest in the larger issues that brought Americans to Iraq. They just want to finish their duty and get themselves and their fellow soldiers safely home to Gary, Griffith, Highland, Valparaiso, Michigan City and several other small towns and cities throughout Northwest Indiana.

With this as my second time going into a combat zone with an Indiana National Guard unit, I am always struck by the contrasts between the two experiences.

Before they deployed to Camp Atterbury in November, these people were doing very ordinary things in their nonmilitary lives as a mail carrier in East Chicago, a firefighter in Cedar Lake, a marketing coordinator from Griffith, crane operators at U.S. Steel, cops working a beat in LaPorte and Hobart, and a schoolteacher in Merrillville.

Today, they are halfway around the world, sloshing through mud and going to sleep to the sound of Apache helicopters streaking overhead and .50-caliber machine guns, firing at the front gate.

Suddenly decisions made in Washington and Baghdad are no longer abstract and remote. These were my neighbors and now they have gone to war.