Gen. Petraeus

I met David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, for the first time today. Actually, I spent a very long, very hot, very dusty day following him around Taji and the surrounding area. The already brutal day was made more so by a couple of particularly hellish helicopter landings. Most notably, our pilot noticed an IED on the road we were about to touch own onto, so we hit the ground for a split second and shot straight back up. It was especially unpleasant for those of us with weak stomachs.

I attended a briefing with Petraeus, who has pulled off the unbelievable feat of being wildly popular while being in charge of a wildly unpopular war. I have to admit, I see the appeal. He's relatively young and very charismatic -- the kind of guy who manages to convince everyone that he is their best friend. He's clearly pretty brilliant, too -- 10th in his class at West Point and a master's and Ph.D from Princeton, and it shows.

I watched Petraeus take questions from a handful of reporters, which was an interesting experience. Most military officials (or politicians, or CEOs) will assure reporters immediately that everything is rosy and any tiny little problems are far overshadowed by the successes. But like I say, Petraeus is brilliant, so he realizes cynical reporter types will see right through that. So instead, he starts with the problems. He says things like "I'm not going to tell you everything is perfect, because it's not. We've got problems x, y and z." By the end of his spiel today, he had still talked far more about the successes than the problems, but the reporters were less inclined to totally dismiss everything he said because he lured them in with a tiny bit of what they wanted to hear. Smart move.

All in all, a totally fascinating guy I would like to know more about. I can highly recommend this article about him, by a guy who ended up writing his biography.

Violence

This is the stuff that many of you don't want to hear about. Maybe skip this post and assume I'll write about puppies and rainbows tomorrow?

My company has never had any of its people killed in Iraq--that's 90 people. That being said, there have been a number of close calls, several recently. One of our guys was with a troop unit yesterday when mortar shells began to fall on their camp. He kept hearing them explode, coming closer and closer to where he was sleeping, and then his window shattered. When the violence stopped and he looked out his window, he saw a shell less than 10 feet away. He walked away without a scratch.

A couple of weeks ago, another one of my colleagues got caught downtown as one of the soccer games was ending. Traffic stopped and hordes of shirtless young men with AK-47s descended on the cars. Because my colleague is male, he can't cover himself up and look more or less Iraqi, so if someone had noticed he was American he could have been killed on the spot. Eventually he and the driver had to park the car and walk home, through crowds of people shooting into the air and fighting each other (and this was after a win...).

Eight car bombs have detonated in our neighborhood in the past month, killing well over 200 people and giving our house a pretty good shake each time. One of them, earlier this week, exploded on the road I take to the Green Zone about 15 minutes before I left. One day last week, four car bombs went off--all at intersections or checkpoints I had been at around those times the day before. While on the way to an appointment, my driver suddenly swerved, then pointed to an oil can he had narrowly avoided. "IED," he said. "Hit it, it goes boom."

The nature of this war is lots of random violence, which makes it occasionally scary to be here. We take every possible precaution, but there's still some luck involved. So here's to a bit more of it.

If I only had a s'more...

Hazardous duty training feels like some warped summer camp. We eat terrible food at a long picnic table in a big room, we walk sweatily from one activity to another, we use outhouses and wear hiking boots. The rhythm of life feels very similar as well. The main difference, of course, is that instead of shuttling from the arts and crafts tent to canoeing to the campfire, we go from first aid to land mine spotting and back to first aid.

Today I learned more than I ever wanted to know about land mines and IEDs. The main lesson? Almost any household item can be fashioned into some sort of explosive device with a bit of gunpowder and a basic understanding of electrics. The point of teaching us about specifics seems to be giving us an understanding of potential risks, not giving us the tools to do anything about them. There are some tricks that might help someone recognize a potential minefield, but if someone is sitting 500 yards away with a remote control ready to activate a buried IED, there's not much to do. It's all about avoidance.

On a brighter note, we also learned how to fashion stretchers out of almost anything, how to stop arterial bleeding and how to administer CPR. Tomorrow is all about broken bones--and guns. In 24 hours I will be able to distinguish an AK-47 from an M14, but I still won't have a cool lanyard to show off to Mom and Dad.