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Long hours, lost time

I am never one to complain about long hours. If you are passionate about what you do, it usually takes time.

We have been putting in long hours, but I must say I am so impressed at how hard everyone works here. Being around it can be kind of addictive. This is definitely a place where you don’t keep track of time at work. It is more appropriate to keep track of the number of hours you slept the previous night.

Every day seems to be a long day here, and it continuously bleeds into the next. It is hard to put a finger on time in Iraq. The nine-hour time difference, the long days, and living life behind a bunker in the middle of nowhere. Everyone counts days.

How many days till I can get back to loved ones, some sense of normalcy, our way of life? My son has a soccer game Saturday. A game and a time and place I will never get back. The soldiers here have missed those same things since December and will not revisit them till late this year.

Life on the base is definitely like living in a bubble. Every time you leave the main gate and the gunner test-fires a 50-caliber gun above your head, you quickly understand the reality. We rumble along in the desert cocooned in armor. We get to the destination and complete the mission at hand. There are no roadside visits with the locals. The Iraqis wave, and the soldiers wave back. I think everyone hopes for that day when it will be safe to stop.

But now is not the time. All you need to do to remind yourself of this is walk through the main headquarters at Camp Duke and see the wall of fame honoring five killed in January by an IED.

Posted by Michael Mulvey  at 3:06 PM (E-mail this entry)

What happened? Who knows

Najaf, Iraq
April 7, 2006

There's an old saying about war reporting that truth is the first casualty. That assumes the truth bothers to show up in the first place.

Consider yesterday's car bombing in Najaf. When it happened, I was a couple of miles away, having lunch with U.S. military officials and the governor of Najaf, in the governor's office. If the governor got any news about 12 people being blown apart on his streets, he kept it to himself.

Iraqi authorities decided to handle the bombing aftermath, so American soldiers took no part in the cleanup or the investigation. Today, a U.S. military commander met in Najaf with an Iraqi military intelligence official and asked him who was responsible for the bombing. The Iraqi's answer: Could be terrorists. Which terrorists? Not sure, exactly.

And by this afternoon, a U.S. agency - not the Defense Department - was saying in secret memos that the governor of Najaf had blamed coalition forces for the car bomb. This allegation against the governor apparently had no truth - there's that word again - to it whatsoever.

Probably the only person who could straighten this out at this point is John LeCarre.

Posted by Doug Swanson  at 12:09 PM (E-mail this entry)