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Alex Horton’s recent blog posts about his unit in Baqubah in March 2007 were familiar terrain for me. One paragraph in particular stood out:
The day we got to Baqubah and a Stryker had already been destroyed by an IED, I was on a rooftop with a bird’s eye view of everything around. Rockets and tracers were going overhead and buildings were catching fire. I looked at the carnage happening below, with my heart in my throat, and repeated in my head, how are we going to get out of this? How are we going to get out of this? I didn’t even know my friend was dead yet.
It was from Baqubah in February 2005 that I first wrote about the civil war in Iraq, although it wasn’t something that got much attention until the summer of 2006, and even then most of the attention was in the form of debate or denial. Ignoring the obvious civil war, along with having ignored the obvious insurgencies all the way back in 2003, led to uncountable Iraqi deaths and far more Coalition deaths than ever need be suffered. In retrospect, it’s hard to see how anyone missed the growing civil war 2005.
“Army of Dude” ended up in Baqubah in March 2007, writing about a place that I would eventually chronicle as it made a dramatic turn around. The deserved amazement that infused those dispatches from Baqubah shouldn’t obscure the fact that Alex Horton and his friends, along with many Iraqis, paid with their own blood, bones and battered psyches for the lavish ideological lacuna that propped up political agendas in the United States. Baqubah did not need to be and it should not have been allowed to become such a mess, especially so after units such as the 1st Infantry Division had made so much progress in 2004-2005. But the fact that the mess was unnecessary does not and should not detract from the credit due to those whose efforts are now clearing the path for the kind of progress that gets us closer to lasting peace and stability.
We came to Iraq with too few troops and a faulty plan. It got worse from there: insurgencies that were fertilized grew into a civil war. When I took this previously unpublished photo on 28 February 2007 at FOB Gabe in Baqubah, the city had fallen to al Qaeda. While American soldiers were training Iraqi Police and Army on this live fire range, a massive firefight was going on just nearby. When Alex Horton and his buddies arrived there a few weeks later, they would see why I upped my combat insurance before embedding with the Coalition forces that attacked there on 19 June.
I don’t know if Alex read any of my dispatches from Baqubah in the days during and after Operation Arrowhead Ripper, but it is interesting that the first and second place holders for the 2007 Weblog Best Military Blog Award happen to draw much of their work from a place very few have heard of: Baqubah. Alex Horton and his friends might be pleased to know that Baqubah is free enough of al Qaeda for its residents to have a serious go at rebuilding their city. I’m happy for the opportunity to have read some of Alex Horton’s stories from Baqubah.
This writer knows the ground our veterans walked in Iraq, and will forever respect their courage and sacrifice.
