Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [192]
Water filtration project
Electrical system refurbishment
Village cleanup and sanitation
Road repairs
Improvements to the local clinics
Water main/pipe repairs
Humanitarian assistance—books, soccer balls and nets, classroom supplies and support
The ODA tried to spend as much time out on humanitarian missions as it did on combat/combat support missions. “One way or the other,” the detachment leader told me, “there’s a lot to do, and we stay busy.” The afternoon following the operation, we made the run back to Al Asad. Our Iraqi army scouts element and their Humvees stayed behind, and we made the journey with three Humvees, one of them in tow. There was a mechanical problem with one of the ODA’s vehicles and we had to tow it back to Al Asad for maintenance. Also part of the convoy was an armored LMTV Army truck that carried our twelve detainees. Like the Humvees, there was a ring turret atop the truck cab with a Special Forces sergeant camped behind a .50-caliber heavy machine gun.
I was able to spend time with two other ODAs during my time in Iraq. One of them was also located at the AOB. This team had, in the words of one of the detachment members, “drawn the short straw,” and had to stay with the AOB. They occasionally ran their own operations, but for the most part they supported and augmented the other AOB ODAs. The other ODA I visited in western Iraq also lived in a deserted Iraqi army barracks with minimal services and the steady din of a generator in their little compound. They were colocated with a battalion of marines and a battalion of the Iraqi army, both charged with keeping critical infrastructures safe from insurgent activity.
Again, I sortied from Al Asad with a small Humvee convoy of Green Berets from the advanced operating base. We made this dash and came back in a single day. The trip focused on current intelligence requirements and medical issues. The team we visited was briefed by AOB personnel on updated procedures for operational intelligence collection, and we brought along a dentist to do some extractions for Iraqi army soldiers working with the ODA. For some of the Iraqis, it was their first visit to a real dentist. They came into the treatment room, which was the ODA medic’s small makeshift dispensary, eyes wide with apprehension. The dentist, on loan from the 10th Special Forces Group, lay his first patient down on a wooden bench and went to work, a novocaine hypodermic in one hand and a flashlight in the other. That’s when I left. I don’t do well at the dentist’s office at home, let alone a stone-floored, plywood-sided storage closet in western Iraq.
There were two former X-Rays on this team, both solid performers according to their team sergeant, who went out of his way to praise the new men. Both had interesting backgrounds, but one of them I would have to file in the unique category, or perhaps the uniquely suited category. He was a Brigham Young University graduate, and his two-year Mormon mission to South America had served to refine an ability he seemed to have with languages. Prior to this rotation, he could speak Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, and Tagalog—the latter from Special Forces Language Training. Now, with three and a half months in Iraq, he was getting pretty good at Arabic.
“I do well when I can control the conversation, like when I interview a detainee and can ask the questions—I know, to some degree, how he might answer. When someone questions me, or it’s a fast-moving conversation, I have to ask them to slow down. But I’m getting better every day.”
“It must be nice,” I observed, having been a poor student of languages, “to have a knack for languages.”
“It’s not a knack,” he informed me evenly. “It’s commitment. Anyone can learn a foreign language if they want to. It takes a genuine desire to learn and the discipline to practice. And you have to go out of your way to find and practice with native speakers. The second language is easier than the first, and they get easier