FOB Marez, Mosul --- We’re packing up to leave Iraq.
Tony and I were thinking back today to the first mission we covered in Baghdad about a month and a half ago. We ran out of the Stryker, crouching and ducking behind walls, half expecting bullets and rockets to be flying everywhere. That’s not the way it is here, although a sniper did shoot at us that first day.
Much of the time it seems calm on the streets of Iraq. It becomes almost routine and you have to make a conscious effort not to let your guard down. Soldiers say the same thing. You have to remind yourself that most Americans don’t die here in big gun battles. The danger is a hidden bomb or single shot from a figure concealed on a rooftop.
I’m glad we had a chance to go on missions in both Baghdad and Mosul. I don’t think people at home realize this, but they are really two completely different wars. Baghdad is a vicious, no-holds barred war zone where even America’s supposed allies, the Iraqi police and army, often can’t be trusted.
Everything there is about the Shiite-Sunni death match.
In Mosul, there are many more cars on the streets and shops that are open. The Iraqi army seems far more motivated here. I think a lot of that is due to the fact much of the army in this city is made up of Kurds whose families were gassed and buried alive under Saddam.
They have a different outlook on the American presence in Iraq than the Arabs who make up the majority of this country’s population. There are tensions between Arabs and Kurds in Mosul, and I’ve heard of Kurdish families fleeing the city because of threats. But it hasn’t risen to the level of open warfare as in Baghdad.
The police in Mosul do have corruption problems, but they seem a lot more effective than the ones down in Baghdad. The Mosul police have certainly improved since 2004, when they fled their posts en masse and this city of over 2 million was a violent mess.
A correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, Robert Kaplan, wrote an article on Mosul this spring entitled, “The Coming Normalcy?” Kaplan gave the credit for cleaning up this northern city to the 1-25 Lancers from Fort Lewis, who deployed here from 2004 to 2005.
“Mosul is a success story, although the success is relative, partial and tenuous,” Kaplan wrote.
I can definitely see what Kaplan was saying. Baghdad, though, remains a completely different problem.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Insurgent propaganda is something to behold. It’s full of flowery phrases like “Lions of the Blessed Battalion” and the facts apparently are not allowed to get in the way of a good story.
This is what the insurgents had to say about their suicide bombing of a Mosul police station last week.
“Your brother caused (the station’s) complete destruction and brought terror home to the apostates, all gratitude be to Allah. Not one of them escaped; all inside were killed.”
I was at the station after the attack and met plenty of police officers who escaped. In fact, the attack only killed a single policeman. Ten civilians waiting in line to buy gasoline also died in the suicide bombing.
Another insurgent suicide bomber attacked a Fort Lewis Stryker vehicle the same day. No U.S. soldiers died, and the Stryker was able to continue on its mission after withstanding the attack.
Here’s the report on it from the insurgents:
The attack “resulted in it igniting on fire with the crusaders burning inside in full view. Not one of them could retreat safely and all of them died, all praise and gratitude be to Allah.”
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Sgt. Emmet Cullen was looking through his photos the other night and did a double take.
“I knew I recognized that guy,” Cullen yelled.
It was a picture of Fort Lewis soldiers posing with a group of smiling Iraqi policemen. Cullen took it over a year ago when he was in Iraq with the 1-25 Lancers from Fort Lewis.
Cullen’s current unit, the Lightning scout platoon from Fort Lewis’ 3rd Brigade, had just busted that same cop for working with the insurgency here in Mosul.
Other soldiers tell the story of recently capturing two insurgents who used to work for the Americans.
A sergeant recognized one of the insurgents as a guy who had been a barber at a U.S. base in Mosul during 3rd brigade’s last Iraq deployment two years ago. Soldiers say another one of the captured insurgents used to deliver pizza at that same base, FOB Patriot, during the 2004 deployment.
I’m told it was more common to have Iraqis working at U.S. bases back then. Now most of the workers on the base seem to be either Turkish or Filipino.
-- Sean Cockerham

Spc. Nathaniel Cunningham pours his morning cup of coffee at FOB Marez in Mosul, Iraq. (Tony Overman/The Olympian)

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Spc. Nathaniel Cunningham is a coffee nut who came to Iraq from the Northwest. He doesn’t care for Starbucks, though.
This Fort Lewis soldier is very picky about his beans and how they are prepared. So he sure didn’t want to go a year in Iraq drinking the Nescafe’ that passes for coffee at this base.
“That was the first thing I said when I got over here, ‘I’ve got to have coffee,” said Cunningham, who works in military intelligence.
Cunningham got some Velvet Hammer beans from his hometown in Minnesota. A
former soldier who sells coffee beans in California also shipped him beans for no charge.
Now it’s almost like Cunningham has a little Espresso shop in his room. He has a coffee grinder, a frother for his lattes, and a blender so he can make chilled Frappucinos that are welcome when the temperature here is over 100 degrees.
He has various sweeteners and cocoas and creamers. But Cunningham has to make concessions to the fact his operation is in a tiny trailer in a war zone. He uses the Turkish milk they have in the chow hall that does not have to be refrigerated, for example.
“These aren’t the best ingredients but I know how to fix it,” said Cunningham, who used to work in a coffee shop.
Cunningham dreams of opening his own coffee shop in his hometown of Faribault, Minnesota. He has $20,000 worth of investors so far.
Cunningham wants it to be a first class operation, the only place in town with its own roaster.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul --- Tony and I have come to the final week of our time embedded in Iraq. We’ll end with a focus on a small group of soldiers and their lives here.
We’ve been assigned to report on a group within the scout/sniper platoon of the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Regiment.
We’ll spend the next several days with these soldiers, introduce them to readers through stories in The News Tribune and The Olympian, and show what it’s like for them on missions in Mosul.
We’ll also keep an eye on the broader happenings for Fort Lewis soldiers here in Mosul.
This blog probably won’t change much. The intent of it was always more to be personal observations that hopefully complement our stories on the Stryker brigade that appear in the newspapers. There is a link to my stories and Tony’s photos on the right side of this blog.
The idea of focusing the final stories on a small group is to give readers a more personal look at the war and the soldiers asked to fight it.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ There have been a lot of insurgent attacks during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan is supposed to end over the next few days, but Fort Lewis officers tell me the exact date depends on which cleric you are talking to.
I’ve written in the paper about the two recent Ramadan attacks in Mosul. The first was on Oct. 12th and began with a mortar attack on Forward Operating Base Diamondback, which is across the road from this base, FOB Marez.
Fort Lewis soldiers broke up the mortar attack but Iraqi army and police did most of the fighting that night. Then, on Thursday, there were a half dozen suicide bomb attacks in Mosul. The largest of them targeted a major police station and ended up killing 10 Iraqi civilians and an Iraqi policeman.
Police at the scene told me they had no idea why they are being targeted, other than the fact insurgents don’t like them. Fort Lewis commanders told me the night of the attack that Mosul insurgents were trying to make a big splash with the multiple bombings in order to get money from their financiers.
Col. Steve Townsend, 3rd Brigade commander from Fort Lewis, tells me he now thinks the police station was chosen as one of the targets out of revenge.
The insurgents apparently thought they had reached a deal with the police and army to step aside while they attacked Americans, according to an unclassified intelligence briefing I received last night. The insurgents felt the arrest of many of their fighters after the Oct. 12th attack was a breach of that supposed agreement, according to the briefing.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Yesterday was a brutal day here.
Tony and I went to the scene of a massive suicide car bombing that killed at least 10 Iraqi civilians. We were both amazed at the scale of the damage. I couldn’t believe the entire engine block from the suicide truck was actually thrown into a second story bedroom.
The scene was apocalyptic. There must have just been thousands of pieces of glass and metal flying through the air when that bomb went off.
I would have been content to have gone through life without seeing some of the graphic human toll I saw in the street yesterday.
But that is just the reality of what happens in Iraq.
Tony and I have both noticed Iraqis seem more stoic about death than we are. I’ve spoken to people who just had a colleague kidnapped or murdered and they talked about it almost matter of factly.
I asked an Iraqi interpreter for the Americans about this once.
He said that is just how life is here, and people really have no choice but to accept it and move on.
-- Sean Cockerham


An Iraqi boy leaps over garbage and sewage in the street as he sprints to see if he can get a handout from Fort Lewis, Wash., Stryker soldiers on patrol in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday.
Photo: Tony Overman/The Olympian

FOB Marez, Mosul – Little Iraqi kids always get excited when they see U.S. military vehicles going by.

Down in the desert south of Mosul, I saw kids literally sprinting out of their mud brick homes when a convoy of Humvees passed. The kids were waving like mad at the vehicles.

Soldiers weren’t sure whether the children were genuinely happy to see them or were hoping for a handout.

Iraqi boys leap for a bottle of water thrown from the back of a Stryker vehicle while on patrol in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday. Photo: Tony Overman/The Olympian

The bottom line, they said, is it’s a lot better to have them waving than not.

Things are a little different here in urban Mosul. Children often wave and sometimes seem really happy just to get a wave back.

But probably half the time you can definitely tell they expect something. They will hold up their hands in the shape of a soccer ball or point to their mouths because they want a candy bar. Soldiers sometimes toss the kids bottles of water or whatever they have handy on the Stryker vehicle. It's hard not to feel bad for kids growing up here.

But some crowds of kids can be maddeningly relentless in demanding that you hand over your watch or sunglasses. Boys often tend to insist on being given a “football” when it should be pretty obvious you are not carrying one.

There are a minority of times, in certain neighborhoods, where the children will be hostile.

One Fort Lewis soldier had a kid hit him in the helmet with a rock this morning. Tony saw another boy, maybe five or six years old, chuck a rock at a Stryker vehicle today.

The Stryker stopped at a local school to ask why the children were so hostile in that neighborhood. It turned out to be a girls’ school. The teachers said the girls were afraid of the soldiers, but they weren’t hostile.

-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ We’ve returned to Mosul. I can tell we’re back by all the explosions.
Q-West was quiet. That base is surrounded by desert, so there’s really no place for people to hide and shoot mortars at the Americans.
That’s not the case here in urban Mosul. There are explosions pretty much every day. Often they are car bombs or controlled detonations of explosives found by U.S. forces on patrol.
There have also been multiple mortar attacks on the base lately.
I wrote in the paper about an attack last week that caused some injuries. The Strykers found and killed the people who did it.
Most soldiers don’t worry too much about mortars. The insurgents tend not to have very good aim, and mostly hit nothing.
I’ve kind of become used to the explosions. But sometimes the sound of a big car bomb going off in the city makes me jump.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Q-West __ There’s a lot of stuff at this base out in the middle of nowhere in the Iraqi desert.
There’s a Subway, a Green Beans (basically a Starbucks for soldiers), and a Morale, Welfare and Recreation Center that’s full of activities. Last night featured the semifinals of Q-West Idol.
The center also has nearly human sized chess pieces, Internet, television, Playstations, movies, bingo, pool, Ping Pong, and Foosball.
There are also Turkish-run establishments with spelling issues on this base. Soldiers can get a haircut but not a shot of whiskey at the beauty saloon. Jackets are on sale at the lather shop.
Soldiers can also buy gold jewelry, tailored suits and Turkish kebabs here. One place is called Dejavu, “where all your dreams come true.” The sign says it sells t-shirts, puzzle boxes, watches, alterations, and any kind of special order.
There’s even a place where you can get a “massege.”
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Q-West __ This base is only about an hour south of Mosul. But it’s an entirely different world.
Long roads seem to lead forever through featureless desert. There are no real cities, just villages where people in mud brick huts tend sheep.
Fort Lewis soldiers from the 1-37 Field Artillery are stationed here. There are IED’s but not nearly as many attacks as Mosul.
It looks like there are some interesting things going on around here, and we'll spend time with soldiers from 1-37.

-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ If anybody’s wondering what the rooms for enlisted soldiers look like here, Tony took this picture.
“It’s about one and a half times a jail cell,” said the soldier in the picture, Pvt. Chris Walters.
It’s pretty small, but still beats living in a tent with cots.
Walters is a 20-year-old from Carson City Nevada. I’ve mentioned him before in a story.
Walters married his wife, Sarrah, right before deploying from Fort Lewis to Iraq. He downloaded Internet phone software so he can call her and get voice mail messages on his computer.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Fort Lewis soldiers doing counter-IED work in the streets of Mosul say there is a strange rumor among the locals.
Apparently people are saying that the Americans are planting the IED’s themselves to justify staying in Iraq longer. When pressed by Fort Lewis troops, Iraqis tend to admit they know this isn’t true. But somebody keeps spreading the rumor around anyway.
Fort Lewis soldiers I’ve talked to find it amusing that people think they are doing things to stay in Iraq. They’d like nothing more than to finish this and go home to the U.S.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ It is really hard here to keep up with what is going on in the world.
Internet access is very limited. There are sometimes copies of the Stars of Stripes newspaper around, but they are a week old at best.
I’m vaguely aware there is another Congressional scandal going on. Even the news from elsewhere in Iraq is hard to follow.
I get the sense that it’s the same for most of the soldiers. They might catch a few minutes of Armed Forces Network news between missions, but prized Internet time is often spent emailing instead of checking out the news.
Some events, though, do grab people’s attention. Everyone was talking about the small plane that crashed into a New York high rise.
Fort Lewis soldiers all wanted to know whether it might be terrorism. It turned out not to be. But, for obvious reasons, it’s a possibility people here are pretty highly attuned to.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Holidays don’t mean a lot here.
I haven’t been in Iraq for Thanksgiving or Christmas, which I imagine involve something special at the chow hall. But most days are the same.
Everyone who’s been to Iraq has heard the cliché lifted from the Bill Murray movie --it’s Groundhog Day every day here. Soldiers constantly lose track of what day it is. It’s not like it really matters, they don’t get weekends off.
Birthdays also aren’t much different from any other day. I turn 34 today. Tony will have his birthday here in just over a week. I might grab an extra bowl of Baskin Robbins ice cream at the chow hall to celebrate. I expect I’ll get emails from my wife and parents.
I don’t imagine it’s much different for the soldiers, all of whom will turn a year older in Iraq.
Far more important is that today is the memorial service for Carl Johnson, a Fort Lewis soldier killed by an IED in Mosul on Saturday. He won't get to have his 22nd birthday.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __We went tonight to an Iraqi army post on the east side of the Tigris River to have dinner with Iraqi soldiers.
Briefly continuing the food review theme of the last post, it wasn’t bad at all. There was lentil soup, almond rice and the excellent flat bread they make all over Iraq. It tastes a lot like Nan, that bread you can get at Indian restaurants.
This was an entirely Kurdish battalion. A lot of the soldiers are former Peshmerga who had bitterly fought Saddam Hussein for over a decade.
The lieutenant colonel who leads the battalion survived Saddam’s poison gas attack on the Kurds. Many of his family members didn’t. Other relatives were buried alive by Saddam.
Two Fort Lewis soldiers live at the post with the Kurds. Their company commander, Capt. Brent Clemmer of Steilacoom, has dinner at the post just about every other night. The Kurdish soldiers call him their brother.
These soldiers loved having their picture taken. Everywhere Tony went with his camera, they called out to him,”take my picture!” Then they’d look at the view screen on the back of his digital camera with delight.
“Good, good.”
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Living conditions for Fort Lewis soldiers in Mosul are definitely better than those faced by their comrades in Baghdad.
Soldiers in Mosul live in small trailer units that have actual mattresses. It is close quarters, and soldiers tell me sometimes their roommate gets on their nerves. But it’s nothing compared to the living situation in Baghdad.
Soldiers in Mosul groan with sympathy when they hear Fort Lewis troops down at Camp Liberty are still living in tents and sleeping on cots.
The food is a lot better here in Mosul, too. It got to the point at the Camp Liberty chow hall where Tony would get the buffalo wings for every meal. It’s the only thing he could trust.
Tony loves to grill back home in Tumwater and was profoundly disturbed by what the KBR contractors did to meat at Camp Liberty.
They boil T-bone steak, Tony says with disgust. A note to contractors at Camp Liberty: Just because you slather barbecue sauce over a piece of meat doesn’t make it barbecue.
The KBR guys here at FOB Marez in Mosul do a much better job. It might sound kind of trivial. But the quality of chow is a big deal to soldiers in a war zone. Soldiers have to eat this stuff every single day for an entire year.
It gives them something to look forward to when they’re heading back to base after dodging bullets and IED’s in the streets of Mosul.
I haven’t heard any complaints about the chow hall in Mosul. They have a mean Mongolian grill and most things seem pretty good.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ I spent the day at the combat support hospital in Mosul. The hospital is staffed by the 47th CSH out of Fort Lewis.
They take care of all American soldiers wounded in northern Iraq, as well as Iraqi army and often civilians. They looked like a highly competent group with state of the art equipment. I’d feel confident in their hands if something happened to me in northern Iraq.
Tony and I were talking about how different it is from the MASH television show. There’s no Rosie’s bar here, romantic monkey business can get you in a ton of trouble, and nobody has a still set up to make homemade booze, at least not that they admitted.
Doctors do have a shack where they can relax by watching DVD’s, and apparently there’s a little fake putting green set up someplace.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ A Fort Lewis soldier was killed in Mosul yesterday. He is the first since Tony and I arrived here from Baghdad last week.
Internet and phone access is immediately shut off on the base when a soldier is killed. The reason is to give the Army a chance to notify family members before the identity of the soldier gets out.
The Army doesn’t release the soldier’s name until everyone is sure the family has been notified. No one, including the newspaper, wants a family to find out through the news that their loved one is not coming back from Iraq.
The Army has turned the Internet access back on. So the family has presumably been told. The Department of Defense will release the name of the fallen soldier in the next day or so.
Tony and I will cover the memorial service here in Mosul. It’s grim to think that a soldier who might have been eating lunch at the chow hall with us yesterday is suddenly gone.
-- Sean Cockerham

Hakar Saed, director and studio manager for IMN-TV in Mosul, stands in the station's studio on Thursday. Saed was once kidnapped and threatened with beheading for being a journalist. "They held a knife to my throat," Saed said. "But this is my job. I don't know anything else."
Photo: Tony Overman/The Olympian

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Being an Iraqi journalist is a good way to get yourself killed.

Tony and I yesterday visited the Iraqi Media Network television station in Mosul. One of its employees had just been assassinated by insurgents.

This is not unusual at the station. It presents a lot of government programming, including a “Most Wanted” program, which shows the faces and rap sheets of insurgents wanted by the government.

The IMN-TV station will soon add a new satellite station to carry their message of free press to the rest of the Middle East and Europe. "The first show will say 'We are here and we are not going away'," said station manager Ghazi Faisel, who keeps two AK-47 machine guns in his office for protection from terrorists who oppose the station. Photo: Tony Overman/The Olympian

Employees live at the station for their safety. Station head Ghazi Faisel has a bed and two AK-47’s propped up against the wall of his office.

A platoon of Fort Lewis soldiers used to guard the station. But now the area is part of an Iraqi army base. Still, station employees must leave sometimes. The man who was murdered this week had gone out to buy bread.

I met the studio director, Hakar Said, who was kidnapped by insurgents two years ago in Tal Afar.

“They were going to cut my head off,” he said. “They showed me the knife.”

He got away only because the insurgents panicked when a large U.S. patrol came nearby.

The station is about to go satellite, so it can be seen throughout the Middle East and Europe.

“The first (satellite) show will say, ‘we are here and we are not going away,”’ Faisel said.

The station is important to the Fort Lewis soldiers here. They say it’s the best way for people in Mosul to hear about construction projects and see their local government at work.

-- Sean Cockerham

LEFT: Hakar Saed, director and studio manager for IMN-TV in Mosul, jogs up the stairway of the station's dilapidated building on Thursday. Saed was once kidnapped and threatened with beheading for being a journalist. "They held a knife to my throat," Saed said. "But this is my job. I don't know anything else."
RIGHT: Ghazi Faisel talks on the phone in his station manager office for IMN-TV, where he keeps two AK-47 machine guns for protection from terrosists who threaten and have killed his reporters. Faesel is excited about a new satellite station he is adding that will reach all of the Middle East and Europe. "The first show will say 'We are here and we are not going away'," Faesal said. Photos: Tony Overman/The Olympian

FOB Marez, Mosul __ The wind was cool coming off the plane from Baghdad, or at least it seemed so to us.
The heat in Baghdad was merciless. The sun radiated off the ground and baked us in a temperature that felt hotter than the posted 106 degrees. Here in Mosul, in northern Iraq, a welcome breeze was coming from the direction of the mountains that divide Iraq and Turkey. Of course, it’s still like 95 degrees out.
We finally made it to Mosul on Wednesday after staying up all night waiting for our plane ride. Arrowhead brigade troops from Fort Lewis are everywhere at the base here. The clocks in the Tactical Operations Center give Mosul time and the time back home in Tacoma.
We’ll spend the next few weeks here reporting and hope to make it out into the city tomorrow. The makeup of this ancient city is far different than Baghdad. It’s mostly Sunni Arab and about 25 percent Kurdish.
There are very few Shia here. So you don’t have the kind of Shiite-Sunni warfare as in Baghdad. But the insurgency is active here, and there are some tensions between Kurds and Arabs.
-- Sean Cockerham

Camp Liberty, Baghdad __ This will be the last night at Camp Liberty for Tony and me. We’re headed to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
Mosul, the second largest city by population in Iraq, is where most of the Fort Lewis soldiers in this country are posted. A lot of
Fort Lewis blood has been spilled in Mosul since 2003.
I’m told the Iraqi army and police are better developed in Mosul than here in Baghdad. But insurgent snipers are proving deadly up there. I’m interested in seeing the difference between Baghdad and Mosul, and reporting on what Fort Lewis soldiers face in northern Iraq.
I will file a couple more stories in the coming days with Baghdad deadlines. They’ll be based on reporting I did here while embedded with the 1st Battalion of the 23rd Infantry Regiment. There’s also the possibility we might come through Baghdad again before I return to Tacoma and Tony to Tumwater.
Thanks to 3rd platoon of Comanche Company for sharing a tent and cots with us. Those soldiers have seen the worst imaginable.
They told us before we left that the cot I slept on had belonged to a soldier wounded in combat. Tony’s belonged to one who died.
That does a lot to bring the reality of the war home.

-- Sean Cockerham

Camp Liberty, Baghdad – These are some excerpts from the journal of Wes Floeter, a 19-year-old private from Spokane. He was on the same military flight that brought Tony and me from Tacoma to Kuwait two weeks ago. Just a few days ago he joined the 1st Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Regiment in Baghdad.

“The time zone has thrown me for a loop, and I can’t get my girlfriend’s face this morning out of my mind. I think she really gets this. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope not. It’s so easy to plan a future and build it in our imaginations... I guess we’ll see how it all pans out for us.”

“We took some small arms fire flying over Mosul, nothing too serious anyway. Mortars were the main threat. The lights from the city loomed out beneath us, as the flight line is perched above the town. They seemed to hide thousands of hateful eyes, and I felt as if any minute bullets would crackle into the concrete barricades around me. The tension here is real. It’s like a blanket that suffocates the environment.”

“I am being sent to 1-2-3, in Baghdad…All I know is that Baghdad is the most dangerous place I could go. I hope I’ll be Ok, and when I told Britt, she cried. She’s been doing that a lot lately, and I hope that she’s alright…I’m actually afraid. This seems so strange, what with me being sent so far away from all that I know, again. All my friends in 2-3 will remain in Mosul while I go and brave the worst city in the world. It’s foreboding.”