Part 3: Venturing ‘outside the wire’ in Baghdad

I don’t know if we should have come here in the first place, I really don’t, but I do know we are here and more importantly, I know that I am here, so I am going to make a difference even if just a little bit at a time each and every day.
— Excerpt from an e-mail message Tom Deierlein sent from Baghdad on May 27, 2006

Laura T. Coffey Contributing editor • E-mail

Once he arrived in Iraq, Tom Deierlein sometimes wondered whether he should have stayed home.

For one thing, his status was a little galling.

Here he was, a captain. If he had stuck with his military career, the 38-year-old would have been a lieutenant colonel and a battalion commander by now. Instead, he had a junior officer rank that most West Point grads attain by about age 26.     

He tried not to dwell on it, but it grated. As chief operating officer of a Manhattan media company with a passion for getting things done quickly, he knew he had many layers above him in the chain of command, many procedures and protocols to navigate.

Plush accommodations ‘inside the wire’
Still, after an exhausting 48-hour journey, he arrived in Baghdad with a sense of relief. He was happy to see his room at Forward Operating Base Loyalty, which had a clean bed, air conditioning and Internet access. He had to share the room with three other officers, but that wasn’t so bad. Their bathroom had four private shower stalls, and they also had a small kitchen with a microwave and refrigerators for the many, many water bottles they needed to withstand the desert heat.

If he was pleasantly surprised by the accommodations, the food blew him away. “The mess hall is AWESOME,” he wrote in his first e-mail update from Baghdad in May 2006. “Some of the best food I ever had. The selection is huge and no limits to portions.”

He soon learned that when soldiers were at the base — a fortified, heavily defended camp — it was called being “inside the wire.” Leaving its safety zone and traveling through the streets of Baghdad was dubbed going “outside the wire.”

Deierlein’s rank may have been frustratingly low, but the task his commander gave him was enormous — and it was one that required him to spend most days of the week outside the wire. Deierlein was given responsibility for Sadr City, one of Baghdad’s poorest areas and a stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Tom’s Journal ‘ThunderCat6’ gets to know Baghdad “Where do I start? I left Fort Bragg and traveled for basically 48 straight hours. But, the good news is at the end of that two-day period I was already at my new home in Baghdad, FOB Loyalty.”

The Mahdi Army was playing a pivotal role in the sectarian violence engulfing Iraq. The vengeful retaliations between the country’s majority Shiites and minority Sunnis seemed never-ending. A primary tactic of the Mahdi Army: Shooting Sunnis execution-style and leaving their corpses out in the streets of Baghdad, often with their hands still bound. A main tactic of Sunni groups: Coordinating destructive suicide car bombings in predominantly Shiite areas.

‘Like the Wild West with automatic weapons’
“I roll down the street and see all kinds of people in all kinds of uniforms, with all kinds of weapons,” Deierlein wrote of one of his early forays out into the city. “Scary ... like the Wild West with automatic weapons.”

More than 2 million Shiites lived in Sadr City, an 8-square-mile expanse of slums. Many residents used whatever materials they could find — oil canisters, cardboard, pieces of concrete, corrugated metal — to fashion makeshift dwellings.

Basic services, such as garbage collection and sewage systems, were almost non-existent when Deierlein arrived. Trash was piled up everywhere, and sewage pipes got so clogged with garbage that raw sewage backed up into the streets. Sometimes the ghastly black liquid puddled in pools here and there; sometimes it formed lakes a foot deep.

“It’s disgusting,” recalled Drew Corbin, a captain who trained with Deierlein at Fort Bragg and worked alongside him in Baghdad. “You roll through it and it creates a wake.”

In this blighted section of Iraq’s capital city, Deierlein was given the job of leading a four-member team whose mission was to coordinate reconstruction efforts and the restoration of utilities. He served as the main liaison between U.S.-led forces and Sadr City’s District Council, or local government. In that role, he had to coach and mentor the mayor, the mayor’s staff and District Council members, and also work with contractors handling projects carrying an overall price tag of more than $400 million.

Deierlein had traveled to Third World countries and witnessed abject poverty before, but what he saw in Sadr City alarmed him. He was especially affected by the neighborhood’s children. Many of them weren’t wearing shoes, and their shabby clothes didn’t fit them. He noticed dirt in their hair and on their ill-fitting outfits. Most of the kids looked far too small for their ages. And one particularly horrifying moment kept haunting him: the day he saw children swimming and splashing in a pool of sewage.

Deierlein wanted to help. He wanted to see more schools, more hospitals and clinics, new water systems and a functioning trash service. Such efforts were in the works when Deierlein started his job in Sadr City, but he wished they could move faster.

MORE FROM CHARITY BEGINS AT WAR

Charity Begins at War Section Front

Part 1: From executive suite to Baghdad Journal: Called back to active duty — ‘No joke’ Day 2: Minimal training for a huge task Journal: Readying for ‘very dangerous job’ Part 3: Venturing ‘outside the wire’ Journal: ‘ThunderCat6’ arrives in Baghdad Part 4: It all comes back to garbage Journal: Goodbye Baghdad; hello bed rest Part 5: Charitable spirit survives Journal: A new foundation Charity Begins at War Section Front   Add Charity Begins at War headlines to your news reader: