On Combat

A small Vignette in the Washington Post “Two ‘Private Fuzzies,’ Diverted on Their Way to War” by Bill Murphy Jr. provided a glimpse of two young soldiers’ transition from peace to war. Temporarily sidetracked in Iraq during a helicopter flight to join their unit (1^st Cav), the two soldiers try to understand their surroundings, grapple with apprehension, and align their expectations with the reality experienced:

“IED?” Pvt. Ryan Tozour asked his friend sitting astride the next cot, referring to an improvised explosive device, or bomb.

“I never heard an IED before,” Pvt. Stephen Daniel replied. He leaned forward and spat tobacco juice into a Gatorade bottle, just inches from his rifle. “I only saw a video,” part of a briefing a few days before when he and Tozour got to Iraq.

The two privates, artillerymen, had been together since basic training in July, and they had reached this small, dusty base outside Baqubah in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, the night before purely by accident. The helicopter ferrying them to their unit made a quick stop here, and when they got off to let some other passengers out, other soldiers grabbed their bags and jogged away.

…Their unit, a battalion in the 1st Cavalry Division, has been in Iraq since October. Nobody has told them what job they’ll be doing here, but they don’t think there is much artillery in this war, and they expect to be used as infantry

“They call us Private Fuzzies,” said Daniel, 22, because they have no rank tabs on their uniforms — just a soft Velcro patch where an insignia would go if they had one. “Our drill sergeant used to say, ‘You’ll be in Iraq in 90 days.’ We’d say, ‘You’re crazy.’ Guess it wasn’t too crazy.”

They had eaten breakfast at the dining hall nearby and now had nothing to do but wait. They rehashed rumors, worried that the helicopter mix-up meant they would now have to fly in daylight. They argued about where and what kind of helicopters had crashed in Iraq recently.

“When you’re not here yet, you’re like obsessed with here,” Daniel said. “You’re like looking at blogs and looking online. And then you get here, and it gets old within a day. You halfway don’t want to go. But it’s why you joined, so it’s cool. Maybe time will go faster if you’re getting shot at.”

Training, no matter how good, can’t prepare the warrior for everything. The soldiers wonder if an explosion is from an IED.. It could have been an IED, or an airstrike, artillery, rocket, or mortar attack, it could have been incoming or outgoing. Some require reactions, some don’t. With experience, the differences will be learned, but not yet part of a unit, the soldiers don’t have an example to follow or learn from. Uneasiness and apprehension result when reality exceeds one’s training and expectations. Without experience, reactions can miss the mark, opening the rookies open to ridicule. Being called Private “Fuzzies” appears to be a mild form of ridicule.

Challenges of individual replacements are particularly difficult and at first, jarring. Anxiety before entering the battlefield is at a peak. Fresh replacements, without the support of a unit have to face their anxieties alone–they have no leaders to follow, no comrades to emulate, and lack the reassuring presence of comrades. These soldiers attempted to augment their training through information on the web, including blogs, and their speculation on their upcoming helicopter flight was based on news reportage and may or may not have been well-founded. .

The soldiers will have to integrate into their unit once they reach the 1^st Cav. With the division already in theater for four months (since October), their experienced comrades will have seen combat together and the replacements will have to prove themselves. To avoid the difficulties of integrating into a unit in combat and maximize unit cohesion, US ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have used a unit rotation policy. Every 12 months (Army) or 7 months (USMC), entire units rotate in and out of the country instead of the individual rotation policy used in Vietnam. The services view the benefits of unit cohesion to be so important that they have elected to sacrifice continuity with the local population as units rotate to keep soldiers together. This is a significant affirmation of the importance of unit cohesion due to the drawbacks of dealing with an Arab society where interpersonal relations are the basis for most actions.