Stryker Brigade News

“Then once in a while you get yay-hoos like that,” he says, pointing to a white sedan driving in reverse down the highway shoulder just outside the fence line. “But you can’t really say what he’s doing is wrong because there are no motor vehicle laws in this country.”

Welcome to another afternoon of tower duty for some of the Fort Lewis soldiers assigned to Forward Operating Base Marez. Everyone has to “pull guard” every few days, switching off between the dozens of sentry towers, the perimeter gates, chow hall and occasional convoy runs for supplies outside the wire. [...]

From this west-facing viewpoint, you can see Iraq’s main highway as it threads through a traffic checkpoint on the southern end of Mosul, past billboards for Siemens and Hitachi, and into the farm country beyond. It disappears over the horizon, running 250 miles south to Baghdad and another 300 miles to the Kuwait border.

For the first few months after the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division arrived last October, the towers provided a good place to look for insurgents ramping up their attacks before the Jan. 30 elections.

Pfc. Carlos Johnson points to an area of smashed pavement where he saw a piece of unexploded ordnance land within a few dozen yards of the tower’s base.

“It was still spinning,” recalls Johnson, who fixes generators. “That’s probably the weirdest thing I’ve seen up here.”

But Bravo’s tower is mostly a place for marking time. Someone from the 1st Brigade’s predecessors – Fort Lewis soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division – drew two calendar pages on a wall, crossing off each day in September and October 2004 before they finally got to return to Tacoma.

“Good luck, 25th!” says a parting message to their replacements.

This second group of Stryker soldiers is halfway done with its deployment – not quite far enough along to count down calendar dates. They just mark time in their heads and in their conversations, to keep from getting sleepy. They long for hometowns and family activities – for Johnson, it is Savannah, Ga.; for McDonald, Greensboro, N.C.

During the day, they watch for suspicious vehicles, enemies who might be laying roadside bombs or potential trespassers getting too close to the fence line. After dark, they put on their night-vision goggles, look for curfew violators and swat mosquitoes.