http://dispatch.thirdway.org/articles/2006/01/22/third-way-in-iraq-entry-1 en-us 40 <p>Our battalion arrived in California in early January, after a month of training in Massachusetts. During our first three days, we&#8217;ve been sitting through briefings all day. So far, we&#8217;ve gotten briefings on: the area of Iraq we&#8217;re going to be responsible for; Iraqi culture; the laws of war and the rules of engagement; identifying and responding to IEDs; desert survival; basic combat life-saving skills; radio communications protocols; house-to-house room-clearing tactics; strategies for surviving with honor in captivity; and how to handle the media (evidently, we are going to have reporters embedded with us).</p><p>Our field training starts Monday. We&#8217;ll be heading out to one of the desert training areas and we&#8217;ll be staying out there until next Saturday (which means I may be incommunicado ago for about a week). The week after that, we are going to Camp Pendleton to get refresher courses in our primary MOSs (military occupational specialties). As a machinegunner, I&#8217;ll be getting classes from machinegunners who have recently returned from Iraq on how machineguns are being employed over there and the latest tactics.</p> <p><img src="http://dispatch.third-way.com/files/twii_training_food.jpg" alt="" /></p> <p>That&#8217;s the latest. I must say that I&#8217;ve been pretty impressed with the emphasis that&#8217;s come through in the briefs on the political aspect of the equation. Over and over, the officers that have briefed us have stressed that abuses (both big, like Abu Ghraib, and small, like looking at women the wrong way) have driven people into the insurgency and hence caused more Marines and soldiers to lose their lives than needed to be the case.</p> <p>There has also been a lot of frank talk about how the decision to go in without adequate troops has contributed to the problems the military is facing in Iraq. (There is a general recognition, for example, that the insurgents are armed to the teeth — particularly with the mortar and artillery rounds they need to set off the IEDs that are causing 80 percent of U.S. casualties — primarily because we didn&#8217;t have enough troops to guard the Iraqi armies arms depots, which were subsequently looted.)</p> <p>That’s it for now. Will write more when I can.</p> <p>SB</p> Sun, 22 Jan 2006 21:25:00 -0700 urn:uuid:379bb969-baa5-4079-a133-5ccba08aec7c contact@thirdway.com (Lance Corporal Sean Barney, USMC) http://dispatch.thirdway.org/articles/2006/01/22/third-way-in-iraq-entry-1 Third Way in Iraq Iraq http://dispatch.thirdway.org/articles/trackback/10