Nebraska News

Looking Back On Iraq

By JOSHUA R. RUSSO
Chadron Record

June 01, 2004

CHADRON – A month after returning from Iraq, two members of the 1057th Light/Medium Truck Company spoke about their experiences and thoughts from the war in Iraq.

SFC Loren Kickland and SSG Morgan Muller were two of over 150 soldiers mobilized in January of 2003. After three months at Fort Carson in Colorado, their unit was flown to Camp Arafjan, Kuwait on the day after Easter. Four days later, an advance party made the trip to Iraq and arrived at Tallil, an old Iraqi air force base which was as far as the U.S. soldiers went during the first Gulf War.

During the deployment the unit operated out of Arafjan, Kuwait, Tallil, Iraq and Al Hillah, Iraq.
Muller and Kickland were surprised with the attitude of the Iraqi military. Because of a lack of communication, the Iraqi army had a distorted view of the capabilities of the United States. Muller said people did not have communication methods such as television and cell phones, because of international embargoes and fierce governmental control.

“They believed their army was invincible,” Muller said. “They had no concept of our technology.” Muller added that at one point, some Iraqi soldiers thought that the U.S. soldiers could not be killed.

The 1057th encountered its share of problems.

Kickland said Camp Arafjan was under construction at the time they arrived and the occupancy of the camp should have been 5,000 soldiers. There were 25,000. Also, the unit’s trucks were not designed for the long cross-country trips in Iraq. At one point, 75 percent of the trucks were broken down.

They addressed a variety of questions about their service overseas.

The first question was about the heat in the Middle East. Muller said that it took some time to get used to. He said that the soldiers felt temperatures of close to 150 degrees because they had to wear body armor and later showed a picture of a thermometer at its max temperature of 120 degrees. He also said that the soldiers could not touch their weapons without gloves and they could not hang their arms out the side of their trucks because the metal on the trucks could give them second-degree burns.

Muller said that it was hard to sleep with the heat and they did not have air conditioning at first. The soldiers lived in either eight, 16 or 20 men tents with wood floors and the air conditioners were industrial size, so they had comfortable temperatures.

The terrain of Iraq was also discussed. Muller said that Kuwait is a yellow-sand desert and Iraq is a silt-dust desert. With periodic dust storms, the dust would block out the sun and would give the soldiers trouble.

“We’re probably still hacking dust out of our lungs,” Muller said. He added that there are a lot of scorpions, fleas, lice and flies.

Muller said that Kuwait is a modern country and the people have a formal government. Muller said that Iraq was completely different.

“Saddam did not take care of his people,” Muller said. “He was clearly a deranged tyrant that needed to go.”

Muller and Kickland said they were well-received by the Iraqis and they did not experience the same problems that soldiers faced in cities like Fallujah. Kickland said that the Iraqis were in good rapport with the soldiers and it was not the same for the Italian soldiers, who abused some Iraqi citizens.

Kickland said the U.S. soldiers did a lot of commerce with the Iraqis and they were reasonably friendly, with some of them knowing English and Arabic.

The system of commerce was something the soldiers needed to get used to. Muller said that all commerce in the country is barter. He said that the soldiers would have to dicker with the vendors and the soldiers were told to never let the vendors know how much money they had.

Muller and Kickland said they saw a difference in the Iraqi economy in the time they were there. Muller said that when they arrived, there were very few consumer goods because of embargoes with the country. He said that as the United States became more involved in commerce, the limits were lifted and at the end of the unit’s service, people could buy a variety of goods including televisions and heaters.

The soldiers also saw a change in the traffic through the country. Kickland said that in the first part of July, civilian traffic was far out-numbered by military traffic. At the end of their service, Muller and Kickland said that the civilian traffic was picking up in the country.

And the types of vehicles the civilians were driving also caught the soldiers’ eyes.

“You name it, from medieval times forward” Kickland said of the types of vehicles he saw. He also said that gas was three cents a gallon in Kuwait and in Iraq, the gas is rationed and there are no pumps. Gas comes in five gallon tanks.

The final questions from the crowd dealt with the rebuilding effort and current news of the torture and exploitation of Iraqi citizens.

Muller said that he is not sure if the country will be ready to take over on June 30, but the U.S. will follow through with the deadline. Muller said that peace needs to be attained with the several fighting factions in the country, and when it is attained, peace will come quickly.

But with the religious factions, such as the Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Kickland said that there will never be a true peace between the groups because of years of fighting.

Unity will also be hard to attain because the people do not have a true view of ‘country.’ Muller said that at the end of World War I, England drew the borders of several countries in the Middle East and no designation was given to what group lives where. Religions and tribes were not taken into account. Groups of tribes and peoples were grouped together as a country regardless of whether the people could live together.

With news coming from Iraq on the torture and exploitation of Iraqis by American soldiers, Kickland and Muller were deeply upset.

“The American army will pay a terrible price for the actions of seven or eight people,” Muller said. “What they did was inexcusable.”

“There is no way anybody from a civilized culture would do something like this...we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.”

Muller also said that the claims made by the soldiers that their command ordered them to do the acts are unfounded and the same excuse was used during the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Muller said the punishment for the actions should be serious.

Near the end of Muller’s and Kickland’s presentation, they showed a slide show of photos from the Middle East, showed items they brought from Iraq, including money, and briefly talked about the soldiers adjusting back to civilian life.