Baqubah Iraq

Baqubah Iraq was a very dangerous place...

One of the major hot zones in this country is Baqubah, Iraq. I spent eighteen months there at Camp Warhorse and we took a ton of incoming mortars, rockets and sniper fire.

Let me share some of my "near misses" with you.

It was January of 2004 and I had been in Iraq for three days. I was in a car that was part of a military convoy, headed for Baqubah.

Back then, things were not quite as bad as they are now so we used civilian vehicles on military convoys. This practice stopped in April of 2004 when the insurgents got out of hand.

As we drove along, I was amazed at the poverty, the filth, and the stench. But there was beauty as well--so many palm trees in the area--everywhere you looked there were gorgeous palm trees.

We arrived in Baqubah around 3pm.

Dinner was served early there at Camp Warhorse, around 4:30, so everyone can get back to their area of the base before dark. Under cover of darkness, the insurgents would start their fun.

So we unloaded our gear and had dinner. At 7 pm we were getting a safety briefing when, all of a sudden, three loud explosions shook the ground.

There were two bunkers in our area of the base and we immediately headed for the closest one. We spent the next thirty minutes in the bunker until the all clear was given.

Two people on base died that night from mortar fire. It was the only time during the eighteen months I was there that mortar fire killed anyone on the base. This was my welcome to Baqubah Iraq!

About two weeks later, two guys were injured by a mortar round that hit a hooch. Just moments before it was hit, two other men had been in the hooch (living quarters) but they left just before the round was dropped. Talk about miraculous timing.

I soon started a morning prayer group to cover the camp at Baqubah Iraq in prayer. We would meet each day at 6:30am. We never missed a morning except when we went on R&R.

We did lose one other person on the post in Baqubah Iraq. It was daytime and I was riding on my little 3K forklift when there was a blast. The concussion almost knocked me off my ride.

An insurgent had hit our front gate in a suicide bombing. One American captain was killed, along with eighteen Iraqis who were working for us. The explosion sent body parts everywhere.

Try as they might, Hollywood comes no where close to depicting what the real thing looks like.

Twelve months later, we were still finding pieces of body parts.

What was left of the victims was scraped up and put into trash bags, taken to the dump, and burned. It was truly horrible.

Later that day, we (civilians) found ourselves working side by side with the military to build defensive positions. This was because a lot of our fighters had been sent to Fallujah to help take it back from the insurgents. At the time our guys were sent, there was no worry about anything happening on our base other than the usual daily barrage of incoming.

The suicide attack at the gate of the Baqubah Iraq base changed that way of thinking. Later, towards evening, our guys took note of a group of insurgents moving towards our defensive parameter. A 500 pound bomb took care of them.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi city of Baqubah was under attack. Insurgents were trying to take the city. Iraqi and US forces fought to hold it. At that time, there were tall towers on the base. We climbed them and saw the action. (We later took them down.)

Apache helicopters would swoop in and attack and pull out. Funnels of smoke were rising all over the city. Baqubah Iraq looked just like a World War II movie set in Germany.

Just before dark, our camp manager, who was a retired lieutenant colonel from the Army, said we had just received military intelligence stating we should prepare for a gas attack. We prepared.

We broke out our protective masks and put the filters on them. Some of the civilians on base were terrified that night and a lot of them quit their jobs during the coming days and went back home. Some were walking around, physically shaking. Seems they did not quite understand what their companies meant when they were hired by saying "you are heading into a hostile area where people die."

Why was that so bad? We had to do their jobs in addition to our own. We had to pick up all of the trash on base and deliver water. Plus there were many other jobs that the Army had contracted with us to do.

Half of our Iraqi crew were dead and the other half were too afraid to come back to work. They were now getting notes on their doors saying that if they went back to work on the base in Baqubah, their heads would be cut off.

Al Sadr calmed down and said he would play nice. The United States was duped. We should have taken him out right then and there. He just laid low, built his forces up, and stockpiled weapons. Now he is causing us major problems.

For the insurgent, there is no such thing as peace between two fighting parties. There is either victory or death. Nothing in between. Of course, that day in Baqubah Iraq, we did not understand the thinking of the enemy.

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