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.”