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Baquba - It’s early morning and there is the incongruous, cheery sound of birds chirping as this street rings with the bang of metal gates being kicked in and locks being wrenched apart – a grating sound like teeth being pulled out with pliers.
Purple bougainvillea spills from the high walls in front of the houses. The sunshine hasn’t begun to burn yet as soldiers from the Strykers 5th battalion 20th Infantry Regiment go from house to house looking for fighters and weapons in neighborhood thought to harbor al-Qaeda. There are no polite knocks. They operate on the assumption that when the gate or the door swings open there could be gunmen behind it.
At this house they’re met at the gate by Selma and her two eldest daughters, determined to leave for school despite the soldiers and armored vehicles in the streets and the possibility of getting caught in crossfire. The girls, dressed in black skirts and flowing white blouses with blue headscarves covering their hair, are more worried about being late. They’re sitting for high-school exams and the school was closed for the last two days because of fears by the government the students would be kidnapped.
“It will take us an hour to get there and we want to be on time,” says Yasmine, who is 17.
She and her sister Sabreen want to be teachers.
There are no taxis in the part of town and no cars in the street. Many of the families have fled to safety for Syria or northern Iraq. The girls’ father, a farmer, is too ill to take them to school. The phones don’t work and there is no local radio or TV station to tell them whether the school will be open.
“It won’t be dangerous for them?” her mother asks me. “I’m so afraid for them. Should I tell them it’s alright to go?” she asks me to ask the soldiers.
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The platoon commander, 1st Lt Thomas Gaines tells her it’s fine. He radios to his soldiers moving through the neighborhood to let them know that the girls will be walking through the area.
‘”Thank you,” Yasmine says solemnly in her high school English. “Goodbye,” says Sabreen, enunciating each syllable.
Selma, watches them as they walk away. “I’m so afraid for them,” she tells me.
The soldiers usually stay only a few minutes in each house – as long as it takes to quickly go through each room checking anywhere there may be people or weapons hidden.
But they started out long before dawn and now they’re looking for an overwatch – a house that’s protected but high enough to provide visibility of the street and the surrounding houses.
Selma’s house, with its high walls and rooftop, seems to be it. She has five daughters and a son – two of them are still sleeping.
“Could you tell them they need to all stay in the bedroom,” Gaines asks me. “It’s for their own safety.”
The soldiers have no interpreter and I’m the only one among them who speaks any Arabic. The instruction would normally be communicated with gestures.
When I pass the message on to Selma, it becomes apparent to her the soldiers aren’t leaving anytime soon.
“If you stay here, they will say we were cooperating with the Americans and they will come and attack us,” she says.
“Tell her I was just through that entire village over there. I’ve been down this road, I’ve been up this road I’ve been in all sorts of people’s houses,” Gaines says.
Selma imagines she has a choice in whether the solders stay and Gaines is prepared for a while to let her believe it.
She offers tea. Her youngest daughter brings out a plate of apricots grown in their garden and then brings me a gardenia – its white blooms partially dried but still intensely fragrant.
Waiting for the soldiers to leave – and worrying what happens when they do
Selma worries: “When you’re finished here you’ll leave and what about tomorrow? We have no neighbors, there is no security here.” She tells me her uncle was kidnapped four months ago – they paid the ransom money that was asked – all the money they had she says – but they still have no news of him.
“We’re caught in the middle here,” says her husband. The middle, for families like this, is between the largely Shiite national police and hard-core Sunni insurgents. He’s grown oranges and dates for years but this year he wasn’t able to spray the trees – his wife shows me a fig with worms in it.
Gaines sits down on a wooden bench and waits. It’s a simple house – the rooms radiate out from an interior courtyard with benches cushioned by folded quilts. The huge poster of Mecca favored by Sunni families with a young girl in white praying is neatly taped to the wall. A ceiling fan powered by an electrical line they’re run from a nearby government building moves the still air.
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The kitchen is a propane gas stove in one room and a refrigerator in the other with plastic dishes stacked in the sink to dry.
The family has grown oranges and dates for years but this year the government hasn’t sprayed the orchards in their area. Selma tears open a fig with her fingernail – showing me the tiny worms in it.
“There’s no police in this neighborhood – no Iraqi national guard. How am I not supposed to be afraid?” Selma asks.
Gaines has heard this before. “They say that because they don’t want me to hang out here. The terrorists know these people don’t really have a choice and we can use whatever house we want and she doesn’t really have a choice either. So really what she needs to do is move in that room for her safety and we will be out as quickly as we can be.”
He tells her the family can leave if they like while they use the house.
“Where would we go? My relatives live a long way from here. This house is the only thing we have.”
It turns out though that her brother-in-law lives near by. Selma and her husband worriedly discuss it and finally decide to leave.
“How will we know when we can come back?” she asks.
“When the Strykers are gone from the street then you can come back,” Gaines says. They pack up small loaves of bread and food in a plastic tub and go.
Gaines stays near the radio. The soldiers who aren’t posting guard stretch out to sleep.
Gaines, with the responsibility for a dozen men on his shoulders, is 24 years old.
I ask him whether he was prepared for this. “There’s never really any way to tell someone you’re going to have to be in so many places at one to make so many decisions but really it becomes kind of easy for me because I have squad leaders that give me good advice.”
It isn’t the intense danger or extreme discomfort that fazes them - what many of them aren’t prepared for are being separated from their families for so long.
Gaines, from Knoxville, Tenn. says he’s spent five weeks with his wife since they were first engaged two years ago.
“I love the Army but I love my wife too. Some people aren’t like that – they love the Army more than their wives – but maybe that works out for their wives too – I don’t know.”
We leave a few hours later – there were no reports of anything happening to the girls – We don’t know whether the school was open for exams. Fixing Iraq
The family – an elderly couple and their teenage son – are sitting in the back bedroom. They later move to the kitchen. The mother is too shy to talk to the American men but there is the Iraqi requirement of courtesy to guests, even if they’re uninvited soldiers – and she sends her husband, Khalil, out to ask if they want something to eat. Her eldest son, who ran to the neighbors when the soldiers came, has reappeared. Unafraid of the soldiers now, he sits and watches them in fascination.
I wonder aloud how Americans would react if soldiers came into their homes like this and took it over.
“We talk about that too – about what it would be like if someone came into their house,” says Miller, letting me know that just because they’re soldiers doesn’t mean they’re not sensitive to what’s happening around them. In fact they defy stereotypes is collection of non-commissioned officers and enlisted men defy stereotypes
“Back in March when we first started going into houses people didn’t know how to take us. They were told Americans will come and kill you. Slowly we’re gaining trust but it’s a slow process.”
One of the soldiers sprawls on the floor reading a Harry Potter novel. Another pores over a book of inspirational sayings.
Twilight turns the sun honey-colored. The birds outside are chirping and a woman next door is hanging laundry on a line strung across the concrete block walls of a tiny courtyard. Joe Donnelly is posting guard. Rosy cheeked and blue-eyed, he looks like a cherub in body armor. “I always wanted to be a soldier since I was little,” he says. He taps his foot nervously as stares out the window, seemingly from the strain of wanting to do well. He’s been in Iraq all of five days. He says it helps that another of the soldiers, Sergeant Chris Garrett, is also from Chicago. Garrett seems to be looking out for him.
Sergeant Andrew Higgens asks me what I think about the war. I tell him I honestly don’t know – that there had seemed to be so much promise after Saddam was toppled that Iraqis would have everything they were denied for so long. And maybe that’s part of the problem.
Even if there had been electricity the soldiers are keeping the house in darkness. I pick up the conversation with Sergeant Higgins to ask what he thinks of the war. This is his third deployment here in five years – the last time he was embedded with the new Iraqi Army.
‘Daddy always said if you broke something you’ve gotta fix it. So we’re trying to fix it.”
“What did we break?” asks one of the young soldiers.
“We broke Iraq. We blew it up,” says Higgins, who has 10 years in the Army.
Word comes on the radio that the soldiers will move out of the house and back into the streets at 3 a.m. to continue clearing the neighborhood.
“You get tired of war,” Higgens says.Platoon Sergeant Joseph Miller is
