Summer in the heat of battle

Well before dawn on a day in late July, encumbered by a rucksack, assault pack, helmet and body armor, I waddled out of a boxlike armored vehicle called a Rhino onto the tarmac in Baghdad's International Zone under the watchful eyes of half a dozen heavily armed security contractors. Along with a few dozen journalists, contractors, State Department personnel and soldiers, all of us arriving by Rhino convoy from Baghdad International Airport (BIAP, pronounced "by-op"), I followed the guards' instructions to drop our gear on the pavement in three lines.

While I watched bats flit around under the huge lights illuminating the area and listened to blacked-out helicopters rushing by in the darkness, bomb-sniffing dogs went up and down the lines of gear. The guards looked on, occasionally barking orders to a squad of Fijian soldiers who had also arrived in the Rhinos.

A few minutes after the all-clear order, two journalists and I followed a U.S. sergeant to an armored car, climbed in and made the quick trip to a military building devoted to receiving journalists for embeds. As we drove, we could just make out the shape of Saddam's famous crossed swords memorial in the morning darkness.

Private guards, gray-clad soldiers, the crossed swords — I'd arrived in Iraq.

But why?

My journey to Iraq began less than a year ago when I interviewed David Petraeus GS '85, then a lieutenant general at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for a profile in the pages of The Daily Princetonian.

Since spending a few weeks in Iraq during the summer after my freshman year seems, on the surface, like a pretty stupid thing to do with no experience and minimal training, here's an explanation of my unconventional summer vacation.

Petraeus kept in touch with me after the 'Prince' published his profile in October, since he was interested in hearing about my experiences as a cadet in Princeton's Army ROTC unit, the Tiger Battalion.

Support nonprofit student journalism. Donate to the ‘Prince’. Donate now »

In January, when he was nominated for promotion to his four-star and command of all U.S. forces in Iraq, the general generously cooperated as I wrote two more articles about him and his command.

Then, late in the winter, when Petraeus had been in command in Iraq for a few weeks, I emailed him for help in finding an interesting internship for the summer. His reply: Sure, he could suggest an internship, but wouldn't I rather go to Iraq? Well, of course I would — wouldn't you?

Even with a four-star general's blessing, funding a trip to Iraq ("downrange," as the war zones are called in the military) is complicated.

But I got lucky again when Bill Roggio, a conservative blogger affiliated with the Weekly Standard who knows Petraeus and has embedded several times with Marine combat units, offered to help me get press credentials and navigate the embed process.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

After signing the insurance papers, sending in an embed form, going up to West Point to get CamelBaks and other desert gear, breaking in some new boots, telling my parents and chain of command my plans and checking with the general to make sure the Army would supply body armor, I was good to go.

Kuwait

Getting to Iraq takes time. When I convoyed into the International Zone on that Rhino, I'd been living with the U.S. military for two days, observing firsthand the massive logistical operation that keeps the forces in Iraq functional. They slowly got me to Baghdad, the war's center of gravity.

I flew out of Boston on Monday, July 23, and arrived in London that evening. (I finished the seventh Harry Potter book, released in stores that Saturday, on the flight.) A couple hours later, I boarded another flight and headed to Kuwait, where I arrived early Tuesday morning.

By 9 a.m., when I got to Ali al-Salem Airbase, the sun was warming the place up. The sergeant arranging my transport told me I looked like "a sick turtle" when I first strapped on my armor and rucked up to walk across camp to my tent. On the way, we stopped at a few huge, hangar-like tents to drop off my passport and book me into the military flight system, and by the time we got to my tent I was so tired that I took off my gear and immediately fell asleep.

When I woke up that afternoon and went exploring, it was far hotter than it had been that morning — between 115 and 120 degrees — and I also discovered, as I wandered around the camp, that within moments of stepping outside, everybody gets coated with a very fine layer of dust. Still, sleeping in the armor helped; after just a few hours, I barely noticed the weight.

Since I wasn't able to get my passport back until the next morning, I spent the afternoon and evening poking around, checking my email at one of the various Kuwaiti businesses on the base, watching a baseball game with some 3rd Infantry Division soldiers in an enormous, air-conditioned tent and downing bottle after bottle of water. Occasionally Black Hawk or Apache helicopters, or smaller Kuwaiti birds, flew lazily overhead, en route to or from some other section of the base. By 9:30 p.m., I was asleep.

(Before hitting the cot, I checked out the various forms of latrine graffiti, which ranged from exhortations to "Join the Resistance — Iraq Veterans Against the War!" to scrawled memorials to fallen comrades, unit mottoes, classic Kilroy-was-here's, hawkish rap lyrics and the ubiquitous Chuck Norris facts — e.g., "Chuck Norris killed Zarqawi" or "Chuck Norris has a 120mm Abrams cannon for a dick." Invariably, if a soldier from one unit had left a message or insignia-themed graffito on the latrine walls, a soldier from some other unit would have tastefully altered it: For example, "Rangers lead the way" had been changed to "Rangers Are Gay," and "Chuck Norris was in 1-9 Cav" to "Chuck Norris was in 2-69 Armor.")

On to Baghdad

At five the next morning, the other occupants of my tent — three gray-haired Army doctors finishing up a tour at a combat hospital in Baghdad — and I got up and got ready for 6:30 roll call. After picking up my passport, I killed another four hours by watching "Master and Commander" with a group of bored American, Danish and Georgian soldiers.

At about 10:30 a.m., a contractor from KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton) told me to get my gear and be ready to load up. After reaching the tarmac by bus, I and four other civilians joined a crowd of soldiers, mostly 1st Cavalry and 3rd Infantry Division soldiers, in full battle-rattle (gray uniforms, multiple-piece armor, helmet, ruck and carbine or rifle) and filed into the belly of a C-130 Hercules airplane.

As the propellers started turning, a crewman came out and gave us a safety briefing — much more dramatic than the ones flight attendants give on civilian flights — and then we were off, flying north out of Kuwait, 60 or 70 soldiers and civilians squashed together in their armor with no room to take it off. I'd never sweat so much in my life (though I would again, soon). The flight lasted between one and two hours, and then, as I was peering out one of the tiny windows at the farmlands below us, the Hercules banked steeply once, twice, again, and began a corkscrew descent into BIAP so rapid that I felt like I was being squashed into the airframe.

Upon landing, I collected my ruck from a cargo pallet and joined a bunch of soldiers (led by a very short-tempered lieutenant) on a shuttle bus from BIAP to a camp called Stryker Stables, where I had about 10 hours to kill before catching the midnight Rhino to the International Zone. (The IZ, formerly known as the Green Zone, is a five-square-mile plot of land housing all the western embassies in Baghdad, as well as the Combined Press Information Center and the Iraqi Parliament.)

At Stryker Stables, I dumped my gear, hydrated and got a few hours of sleep before waking up in the evening as the building began to fill with soldiers and civilians looking to take the Rhino, which wouldn't leave for another five hours at least.

I claimed a table, read a short book I'd brought called "Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq in World War II," ate a packaged meal (the Sloppy Joe — my favorite) and then struck up a conversation with a couple of sailors who had just woken up from naps.

They turned out to be good company — all volunteers for Iraq duty, they were Navy media personnel, the people who travel around the country taking dramatic "action" photographs of the troops, and we got into a long discussion about everything from the Maliki government (one female sailor was reading a primer on Iraqi politics) to Lindsay Lohan's arrest (another sailor, male, told me to write a story about it titled "As Lohan's weight loss continues, Iraq morale plunges steeply — for sake of war effort, troops say, actress must put on pounds").

Soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division moved through the area on their way to someplace or other all evening — Stryker Stables is the home of the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division as well as 2-3 Infantry, a 2nd Infantry Division unit that does a lot of quick response force work in Baghdad. Finally, as we watched the same news segments about Lohan and a fire in Texas for the fourth time, a contractor shouted for everyone to armor up, get their gear and file outside to the Rhinos.

It was a little surreal — after we piled aboard, the vehicle went into blackout mode, we all put our armor and helmets on and a security contractor with the typical beard, baseball cap and M4 carbine gave us instructions about how to evacuate the vehicle under various circumstances: if it came under fire, if it hit a small IED, if it was aflame, if it broke down, etc.

Route Irish, the road we were taking, was once infamous as the most heavily ambushed and bombed stretch of highway in all of Iraq, but now, with constant patrols by Humvees so tricked out with armor and IED sensors they look like vehicles from "Star Wars," it seems to be pretty uneventful — I slept most of the way to the IZ, and the only shots we heard at all that day were celebratory gunfire over Iraq's recent soccer victory, though the celebrations were marred by a suicide bombing somewhere in the city just before we flew into Baghdad.

When we all piled out onto the pavement in the IZ, a couple of State Department personnel looked scared out of their minds until a security contractor came over and explained that the whole bomb-sniffing-dog procedure was routine. I could hardly blame them — after the tedium of Ali al-Salem and the chaos of BIAP, the businesslike conduct of the Rhino guards, the lines of hulking armored vehicles, the sheer scale of the IZ defenses and the hardened, expressionless look of many of the contractors and soldiers all reinforced the same point: We were in Iraq, the same Iraq you read about in the news, for the first time. This is the first of a series of articles by 'Prince' staff writer Wesley Morgan describing his experiences over the summer in Iraq. Morgan did a five-week stint as an embedded journalist in Iraq that was sponsored by conservative blogger Bill Roggio and Public Multimedia Co. Morgan is a sophomore from Watertown, Mass., and can be reached at wmorgan@princeton.edu.