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The Stink of Tarmiyah

Sep-20-2007 » Filed Under: 4/2 SBCT

Noah Schachtman of Wired magazine is beginning a week-long embed with the 4-9 INF, 4/2 SBCT. His first dispatch is titled The Stink of Tarmiyah. Excerpt:

We’re in an ugly, overgrown village called Tarmiyah, about 25 kilometers north of Baghdad. It is an extremely bad place. A professional-grade sniper has been terrorizing the town, killing two members of the 4-9th Infantry Regiment stationed here, and wounding seven more. 4-9’s Comanche company, primarily responsible for holding the town, has handed out 25 Purple Hearts in just five months. That’s about a fifth of the men in the company.

To keep from handing out more Purple Hearts, the soldiers here go out as little as possible during the day. They do their work at night. And they sometimes take over local houses to crash out, in between missions. (Especially during times like these, when an extra company has poured into Tarmiyah, and all the cots at the local patrol base are full.) In the next room of this slapped-together building of concrete and brick, a dozen G.I.s are draped over couches, t-shirts covering their faces to keep the flies away. At least there’s satellite TV, so they can zone out to the X-Files before their next mission. Not so bad, then. Better than the platoon down the road, which has taken over a smaller house; several of the soldiers have to sleep outside under the laser-like sun.


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