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JAD_333 · 04-01-2008, 10:34 AM

Military units serving in foreign countries adopt local customs and even come to consider their posting as "home". I didn't spend very long on active duty outside the US to develop that sense of "home". I would be interested in hearing the recollections of those who have felt "at home" in Iraq or elsewhere, now or in the past.

Quote:

Five years on, the US military is now owned by Iraq
By Lawrence Kaplan
Commentary by
Tuesday, April 01, 2008

General David Petraeus elicited a few chuckles when, testifying before the United States Congress last September, he inadvertently referred to Iraq as "home." But in the constellation of American bases that loop around the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys, in the spectacle of young Americans knowing Iraqi neighborhoods as well as they know their own, in the profound and sometimes disquieting sense of ownership the US armed forces have had about this war - in all of these things there is evidence that Petraeus meant exactly what he said.

Over the years, I've watched the same scene in western and southern Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi, Sinjar and Tall Afar: American units slowly melt into the landscape, becoming in effect the most powerful of their area's tribes. Absent a functioning government, the US military administers nearly every visible facet of the state, above all in the role of honest broker.

Not unlike the Americans in Vietnam and in the Philippines a century ago, the US military in Iraq has even acquired the flavor of its surroundings. These are not the units that reside in the city-states otherwise known as Forward Operating Bases, with their Pizza Huts, traffic cops and morgues. Officers in the "Grand Army of the Tigris," as one of its senior officers calls the American force, dine with local elders at "goat grabs," greet them with "man-kisses" and routinely punctuate their own conversations with the casual "inshallah."

The vernacular has even followed the American military home: In the halls of the Pentagon, where nearly every army officer has served at least two tours in Iraq, officers ask whether this or that official has "wasta" - Iraqi shorthand for "influence" or "pull," though with a slightly more corrupt tinge.

The military has immersed itself so thoroughly in Iraq that senior officers back in the United States worry that the force is "out of balance," as US Army Chief of Staff General George Casey put it, and is too fixated on counterinsurgency. But there is another way to view this: Just as the US military that punched through Germany in 1945 bore slight resemblance to the amateurish force routed in North Africa three years before, the hardened units that America fields in Iraq today know the terrain in a way the military of 2003 and 2004 never did.

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The Daily Star - Opinion Articles - Five years on, the US military is now owned by Iraq