High school buddies Rusty Marks and Maj. Todd Harrell atop a Buffalo road clearance vehicle at camp Speicher, Tikrit, Iraq.

I have returned from Iraq. For me, the war is over.

But I woke up in the middle of the night, and a part of me was still 6,000 miles away, walking along the dusty concrete walkways of Badgerville in Camp Speicher near Tikrit.

I can only imagine what it is like for the 100 or so men and women of the 111th Engineer Brigade, who have spent the last nine months of their lives in the dust and heat. Or for the 350 men and women of the Third Infantry Division with whom I shared a ride home on a 747 “Freedom Bird,” who have spent the past 15 months on the front lines.

Or for the sergeant we me at camp Anaconda in Balad, waiting, like us, for the dust storms to lift long enough for a flight. She calmly explained how the two RPG rockets had gone off about 15 feet in front of her, peppering her face with shrapnel.

Her new job is less dangerous, she explained. She now mans a checkpoint. There’s still a loaded magazine in her rifle, but she probably won’t have to shoot anybody.

I did not go to Iraq with the intention of delving into the politics of the war or to examine lofty questions of strategy or tactics. To me, the mission was to link up with fellow West Virginians, and tell the people back home what they were doing and how they were. To that extent, I hope the mission was a success.

There were many times the mission was on the verge of failure, as delay after delay ate into the time I would have on the ground. But fate always managed to intervene to get me a little closer to my destination.

One day in Balad, after waiting days for dust storms to lift long enough to catch a flight to Tikrit, we were all ready to give up. Maj. Todd Harrell, a high school buddy who had helped arrange my visit to the unit, had played every card he had, and pulled a few out of his sleeve we didn’t even know he possessed. We were still stuck, at the mercy of the weather.

With nothing else to do, we decided to go to lunch at the chow hall.

Security at American bases in Kuwait and Iraq has been turned over to the Ugandan army. The Ugandans, in their plain tan uniforms and with their spotlessly clean rifles, are noted for their stern, no-nonsense demeanors.

I carried a passport and a set of orders allowing me access to American bases, personnel and amenities like the chow hall and PX. This was presented to the guards every time I went somewhere on a military installation.

The Ugandan guard took my passport and my orders and regarded them carefully. He looked at my passport, and he looked at my papers. He looked at my passport, and again looked at my papers.

“This passport is fake,” he announced.

I looked at Todd, and Todd looked at me.

A huge grin spread across the Ugandan guard’s face. His joke a success, he waved us through to the chow hall. Somehow, at that time and in that place, the display of humor was what we needed to keep going and continue the mission.

Compared with the soldiers fighting the war every day, or to the men and women of the 111th, my week on the ground in Iraq was nothing, my few hours bouncing along potentially dangerous roads paling in comparison to the dangers they face every day.

I did not spend nearly enough time getting to know the men and women of the unit. I would have liked another week, at least.

But I think I learned enough to determine a few things.

The men and women of the 111th Engineer Brigade — and other West Virginians serving in Iraq — are our neighbors. They are our friends. They are our cousins and our sisters and our aunts, our fathers and mothers and our children. They have been asked to do a job, and they are doing it to the best of their abilities.

They are a family. Like members of any family, they have their occassional differences. They have their spats. There are the favorite sons and the spurned children, those who get the recognition and those who don’t. But in they end they are pulling together for one another.

The men and women of the 111th Engineer Brigade will be home soon. Their year-long tour is nearly over, and they are packing their things for the long flight home.

When they step off the plane, do not treat them as villians or heroes, though the latter they may well be. Treat them as family, for that is what they are.

They are our wayward sons and daughters, lost and soon returned.

Godspeed.

Soldiers wait for flights at Baghdad International Airport.

Getting from point to point takes a long time in the Iraqi theater of operations.

I am currently stuck in Kuwait — again — waiting for a flight back to the United States. There are soldiers here who have been waiting four days for the big bird home.

Military movements are one thing, but individual movements from place to place are almost a nightmare here. It’s rare that a move between bases takes less than 24 hours, and it is not uncommon to reckon flight times between points in days rather than hours.

Last night, we reported at Baghddad International Airport at 8 p.m. for a flight that was to take off around 11. After shuttling back and forth between the different parts of the terminal, we finally took off around 12:30 a.m. We arrived in Kuwait about 2:30 and checked into tents for the night.

These delays have eaten into time on the ground. On Monday, we were in Baghdad to visit the 821st Engineer Co. from Summersville and Spencer, but instead of several days with the unit, we were able to spend only a few hours.

I was able to collect a few war stories and hang out with some of the soldiers. Sgt. Chris Shortall, of Braxton County had told his wife about the blog earlier.

Ashley Shortall had asked the 25-year-old soldier if he’d be mentioned in the blog.

“I said probably not,” he told her. “They’ve got more important stuff to worry about.”

Not really, except for catching a plane out of Kuwait.

Members of the 111th Engineer Brigade’s personal security detail mount up for a mission outside the wire in up-armored Humvees.

There are a lot of ways to get around in the military.

So far on this journey, we have flown on the largest plane in the U.S. fleet — the C-5 Galaxy — and one of the smallest — the Army’s C-23 Sherpa. We’ve ridden in Humvees and armored bomb sweeping trucks.

Earlier today, we set out in up-armored versions of the Humvee general purpose transport, kind of the modern version of the old Jeep. The vehicles have heavy steel armor added all over the frame and chassis, and thick armored glass to protect the crew members. There’s a machine gun turret on top, and the up-armors used by the 111th Engineer Brigade have extra goodies designed to defeat IEDs.

We set out to visit two Iraqi army posts on the outskirts of Tikrit. There, members of the 111th are working with Iraqi military commanders to help explain American engineering techniques and offer different kinds of training. On Sunday, Iraqi soldiers were practicing with a special tracked robot designed to ferret out roadside bombs.

Later, we headed toward Baghdad to visit the 821st Engineer Co., another West Virginia unit. Our method of transport this time would prove to be the army’s CH-47 Chinook, a helicopter for which most soldiers have a much less flattering nickname.

The twin-rotored Chinook dates from the Vietnam War. The bird looks a little like an electric hand mixer and flies kind of like a freight train, but has been a standard mode of transport for the duration of the war. The old chopper rattled and groaned, but got us to Baghdad International Airport (B.I.A.P. in the local parlance, and pronounced “By-op”) in good stead.

Now it’s time for a hot shower and a good night’s sleep. We’ll hang out with the 821st in the morning.

Capt. Amanda Mullins, of Ansted, recently helped work out a T-shirt exchange with students at Ansted Elementary School, where her son Spencer attends school.

The men and women of the 111th Engineer Brigade love getting cards and letters from people back home. But some of the folks in the unit thought it would be fun to do something different to connect with friends and family.

Mullins had previously worked with students and teachers at Ansted Elementary on a unit to help the kids understand the military and what it’s like to be in Iraq. Mullins taught the kids how to salute, and students smeared their faces with baby powder to simulate the fine, powdery dust of the region.

Members of the 111th sent their army T-shirts home for the kids at Ansted Elementary to decorate and send back. In exchange, the soldiers agreed to decorate shirts the kids sent to Iraq.

Mullins is just about ready to ship the shirts home.

We went on a route clearing mission on Thursday.

One of the responsibilities of the 111th Engineer Brigade is sweeping the roads clear of roadside bombs. The men and women of the Eleanor-based unit don’t do the work themselves, but they help coordinate the sweeps, and a medic from the 111th rides along on every mission in case someone gets hurt.

We headed out late Thursday afternoon with a column of South African-designed armored trucks to head south, looking for roadside bombs. Half the column went down one side of the divided highway, and the other half went down the other side, searching for telltale signs of activity. Freshly disturbed earth, suspicious looking roadside objects or wires leading off into the desert all could be clues to a bomb.

Three or four days of dust storms in the area meant insurgents had had three or four days to plant bombs. A bomb went off on the same stretch of road Wednesday, but no one was hurt.

 As we rumbled slowly down the road, the three men in the crew of the armored truck — driver, machine gunner and medic Sgt. Scott Underdonk, a stockbroker from Charleston — chatted about their experiences looking for bombs and the tools they have at their disposal. One of the newest is the Buffalo, a heavily armored truck with a long extendable arm to probe for buried explosive devices.

“Our Buffalo got blown up, so we had to get another one,” Underdonk said at one point.
“That was the suicide truck, wasn’t it?” came the reply.

It seemed nonchalant. They were referring to an event in December, when a dump truck loaded with explosives rammed into a Buffalo. The resulting explosion blew the 17-ton Buffalo all the way across the road.

You never know when someone will plant a roadside bomb, so crews from camp Speicher send regular route clearing patrols up and down the road looking for them. We turned around and raced back toward camp at one point Thursday after someone spotted a suspicous car. It turned out to be a group of people snaring birds, but could have just as easily been a group of people setting up wiring to a bomb.

We turned around again and finished the sweep. On the way back to base, after dark, we spotted what appeared to be a 155 mm cannon shell in the middle of the road, but it turned out to be another false alarm.

Roadside bombs still blow up on the roads to and from Tikrit, but it is rare that anyone gets hurt. The folks out of Speicher have gotten very good at finding and defeating them.

For once on this journey we caught a lucky break. The duststorms broke up late Wednesday afternoon and we were able to catch a late night flight from Balad to camp Speicher near Tikrit. For the second time, the West Virginia-trained Sherpa pilots and crew of the 126th Aviation Regiment came through, flying us out when no one else was headed our way.

On arrival at Speicher, I was shown to my new home, or CHU in the local parlance. CHU stands for Containerized Housing Unit, which is to say I live in a modified shipping container.

Paneled both outside and in, each CHU has a door, a window and its own air-conditioning unit. There’s a bed, a makeshift wardrobe and a few sticks of simple furniture. But I have my own TV and VCR and a sink to brush my teeth. More importantly, just outside are concrete barricades and sandbags.

About 100 men and women of the 111th Engineer Brigade — based in Eleanor back home — live in these CHUs in their own little corner of Speicher. They have dubbed the little village Badgerville. Except for the fact that every square inch of the CHUs are covered in a fine layer of powdery dust, it’s just like staying at the Motel 6.

Each CHU also has its own pallet porch. I have an antique Davenport on mine. My neighbors have to make due with folding chairs.

Gazette reporter Rusty Marks and Master Sgt. Jack Dickerson of the West Virginia National Guard’s 111th Engineer Brigade negotiate a dusty Iraqi afternoon.

If the mission is going to fall apart, today is going to be the day.

The plan was to hop a quick flight from West Virginia to Germany, hop over to Kuwait and take a short jog to visit the 111th Engineer Brigade in Tikrit, Iraq for a couple of weeks.

But the expected three-day journey has turned into a week and a half, and I am still 50 miles from my destination.

A week stranded in Germany with a broken airplane and three days of dust storms in the northern part of Iraq have impeded progress. Weather reports call for the dust storms to continue through Friday.

Virtually all transportation in and out of Tikrit has come to a standstill. The engineers can’t even send a road convoy to pick us up, because the weather is too bad for helicopters to fly if one of the vehicles is hit by a roadside bomb or we come under ambush. So I am stuck here in Balad, wandering back and forth between the passenger terminal and the transient housing units.

“Transient” is a good choice of words. We are gypsies here, wandering through a dusty landscape, sleeping where and when we can. We have not bathed or changed clothes since leaving Kuwait on Sunday, because we spend all our time at one terminal or another, trying to find a flight — any flight — to Tikrit.

We are not the only ones stuck here. Soldiers, contractors and civilians are camped out on the floor of the terminal. We nod and smile in our shared misery, hoping for the next plane or helicopter out.

“Good luck,” we mutter, nodding our goodbyes as they hope for a seat on the plane.

Secretly, we wish it were us. But it would be nice to see SOMEONE get out, at least.

That’s why it’s so heartbreaking to hear the fight cancellations come over the public address system and see our fellow gypsies stagger wearily back inside.

At the moment, we are the lost. But freedom is only a Blackhawk away.

BALAD, Iraq - Visibility was about 150 yards on Tuesday as massive dust storms continued to pummel northern Iraq.

Logistics Support Area Anaconda, a sprawling military base in Balad, was cloaked in a brown layer of airborne dust that clung to clothing and stopped most flights in and out of the military transportation hub.

Things were far worse in Tikrit, a mere 50 miles away.

Read the story at wvgazette.com.

KUWAIT - If you’re flying a short military hop from Kuwait to Iraq or need to get some cargo downrange fast, chances are there’s a West Virginia pilot in the driver’s seat.

Chief Warrant Officer Bob Connelly, of Williamstown, is one of two West Virginia pilots in the 126th Aviation Regiment. Connelly, 50, flies one of the Army’s workhorses, the C-23 Sherpa cargo aircraft.

“I really like this airplane,” said Connelly, a former helicopter pilot and a member of the West Virginia National Guard.  “I really like the mission - getting supplies through so there aren’t too many convoys running up and down the road.”

Read the story at wvgazette.com.

Maj. Todd Harrell (left) and high school buddy Gazette reporter Rusty Marks finally meet up at a military base in Kuwait on Sunday. It’s on to Iraq!

After a week stuck in Germany, I finally flew out late Saturday on a C-17 cargo plane bound for Kuwait. On board were a load of medical supplies, one leaky lavatory and 120 pounds of Starbucks coffee.

We touched down at a base in Kuwait just before sunrise and took a lengthy bus ride to meet my high school friend, Maj. Todd Harrell, who was waiting by the side of the road leaning against a concrete barricade doing his best John Wayne imitation.

Todd greeted me at the bus door and whisked me inside the processing building for a quick rundown on my upcoming trip into Iraq. Significantly, he made me carry my own gear.

The camp is a sprawling conglomeration of tents, barbed wire, boxy latrine trailers and scrubby looking trees. Everything — including people if they stand around long enough — is coated with a thin layer of powdery beige sand. But there’s Internet access, an automatic teller machine and a row of fast food restaurants. No joke; you can get a Big Mac in the middle of the desert.

It’s nearly time to hit the road to Tikrit, so this blog must be short and sweet. Catch you on the flipside….