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.”