My year in Iraq

My year in Iraq
By Spc. Spencer Case

When I got word that I would be deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2005 I wasn’t sure what sort of adventure to expect – I had seen apocalyptic images of car bomb blasts on TV, but I had also heard veterans say the media made things look worse than they really were.

Now fast forward to July 2006. The deployment is over. Things feel pretty much like they did before except sometimes a vestigial impulse will arise and I will look around to see where I put my M-16. It has occurred to me that some people might ask me the same questions that I had last year. That has me uneasy. I am a soldier, not an analyst; what can I tell them?

The truth is I can’t answer the deep, political questions of the war without extrapolating just as much as the next guy. However, I can provide something else that is lacking in our national dialogue—a straightforward account of one soldier’s experiences in Iraq.

This article is that account.


On the sweltering day of Aug. 2, 2005, a C-130 cargo plane whose passengers included a detachment of 20 troops landed at Logistical Support Area Anaconda, Iraq. The troops belonged to the 207th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, a Denver-based Reserve unit with troops barrowed from across the country. Their primary mission would be the production of two media products: a broadcast program, Newsreel Anaconda, and a weekly newspaper, Anaconda Times.

As a private first class of barely 20 years, I was the youngest and lowest ranking of the group, but I was eager to write.

I expected my first moments in a combat zone would be a psychological plunge into cold water. They turned out to be less dramatic. LSA Anaconda, with its Burger King, two swimming pools, Sustainer Movie Theater, and regular dance activities, was disarmingly normal on the surface. One sergeant I interviewed summed up my feelings succinctly: “It’s hard to believe you’re at war when you’re seeing Harry Potter tonight.”

Yet even at the base outsiders dubbed “Camp Disneyland” you could never completely escape the war. Within the first two minutes of our arrival we had to take cover from one of the base’s frequent mortar attacks. After all, LSA Anaconda has another nick-name: “Mortaritaville.”

There were other things to remind you of the war, too. Medical evacuation helicopters bringing in new batches of injured troops to the Air Force Theater Hospital constantly droned overhead. Once I heard a loud crack from off-base and later learned that it was a bomb that killed 60 civilians.

Gradually, the little glimpses of war seemed less like intrusions into normal life and more like part of normal life. The sounds of military machinery became as familiar to me as the sounds trains make on their way through southeastern Idaho back home.

Some troops will tell you that the big installations are like prisons; others say they are closer to amusement parks. Depending on your perspective, they can be both. Those who spend their entire tours inside the perimeter fences of the big bases feel left out of the adventure, while those stationed at smaller bases, away from the hot meals and USO tours of the main posts, feel disenfranchised. The tension between these groups has left its mark on military vernacular as troops spawned words like “pouge” and “fobbit,” rib those with cushy jobs.

For the most part, I found myself happily in the middle of the spectrum, neither stuck on post nor in danger from constantly being off post. Though I stayed on LSA Anaconda much of the time, I regularly left the perimeter with two or three teammates to provide coverage for far-flung units. These trips could last anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.

On account of the roadside bombs, flying was the preferred mode of travel. In Black Hawk helicopters and “vomit comet”C-23 Sherpa planes we’d fly so low that at first I was afraid we’d hit power lines. From that height you could see interesting things on the ground: kids at play in a dirt field stopping their game of soccer to wave; or millions of satellite dishes—banned under Saddam—sprouting from Baghdad rooftops like mushrooms after rain.

Sometimes we had no choice but to travel by road to get to our destination. Things like IED craters and bombed houses made the war seem closer than ever. Even innocent things seemed sinister from the ground. If my convoy approached a suspicious-looking piece of trash I would brace myself for impact. If I saw a man on the side of the road with the hood of his car up I would wonder ‘is that guy just fixing his car, or is he going to blow himself up?’ Then, after we passed him without incident, I would feel a little guilty.

Some of my most harrowing experiences happened on convoys. Once, one of the trucks in my convoy struck a landmine. Another time, two or three insurgents fired upon my convoy with small arms and rocket propelled grenades. As far as I know, no one was hurt in either incident, but I still gained respect for troops who do convoys regularly like Pocatello’s 1016th Quartermaster Company.


Traveling certainly had its hazards, but it paid off in the end. Doing stories throughout the country gave me an overview of coalition operations in Iraq that was rare for someone of my rank. The subjects of my story ranged from Bosnian explosive experts safely disposing of a weapons cache in southern Iraq to U.S. troops in northern Iraq who were working to fine-tune the Iraqi Army’s logistics system.

One thing that did not vary from place to place was benevolent intentions of U.S. troops. Every base that I visited had a civil affairs contingent to “win the hearts and minds”—if you’ll forgive the cliché—by building schools, providing medical aid and repairing infrastructure. Even units unrelated to the “hearts and minds” mission would routinely go out of their way to distribute school supplies mailed from home to local schools. Indeed, “school drops” were so common that after covering five or six of them in two months I began to complain that they were too common to be newsworthy.

Between my coverage of civil affairs missions and occasional overnight stays at Iraqi military bases I got a fair amount of exposure to Iraqi culture. The thing that stands out most in my mind is how incredibly camera-friendly the Iraqis were. I have seen a dozen Iraqis huddle around a single servicemember with a digital camera, trying to identify their images on the LCD screens. My large Nikon D1X was such an attraction to the locals that whenever they saw me they would stop working and pose for a photo, whether I wanted them to or not.

Many troops were surprised to discover how much more the Iraqis knew about us than we knew about them. Even the kids know enough fragmented English to say “Mister, mister, give me football, I be your friend.”

If I have made the war seem unnaturally rosy so far it is because the Army wanted me to seek out exclusively positive material. I was not exposed to the most hellish aspects of war. Still, there were a few occasions when I caught passing glimpses of a darker side.

One instance stands out in my mind. I was providing coverage for an infantry unit that was conducting cordon and search missions in a dusty, war-ravaged town near the Syrian border. The squad I was with kicked down the door of an unoccupied home and began searching for contraband. One of the Soldiers accidentally knocked over a cupboard of dishes, which broke on the floor. He didn’t seem overly concerned.

I, on the other hand, must have seemed hysterical to him. True, a few broken plates is a small price to pay to be free of Saddam. But what if they were your plates broken on the kitchen floor in your absence? I demanded that he help me put the cupboard back in place, but we didn’t have time to pick up the dishware before we had to move on to the next house. I didn’t know what else to do so I snapped a hasty picture of the mess. I still have it.

Due to the language barrier, the opportunities I’ve had to talk to Iraqis about the issues affecting their country have been limited. Those I have spoken with expressed appreciation to the United States for getting rid of Saddam and helping to rebuild their country. However, many were wearied by the continued military presence and the ineffectiveness of their new government. A schoolmaster of a village in southern Iraq complained to me, “When Saddam was here there was water in the village, now there is no water in the village.”

I would like to end the article on an upbeat note with one last story.
On May 29, I was on guard tower duty with a soldier from a different unit, Sgt. Jason Baldwin. As we were scanning our sector, two Iraqis, evidently a father and a son, herded sheep immediately outside the perimeter wire. After a while, the man broke into a jovial Arabic song. With nothing better to do, Baldwin started singing the song back in what was surely the most execrable Arabic imaginable. Both locals thought his performance was so hysterical that they gave him an encore.

That is the Iraq that I want to remember most.