Guardsmen Adapt to the Mideast’s Wild West

Three men careen toward a checkpoint in a car with no plates. A soldier -- it’s midnight and too dark to tell which one -- gives the heads-up: “Here we go.” The sedan spurts to a staggering stop before a dozen tense soldiers on alert for attacks.

Wearing a broad grin, the driver stumbles out, red-eyed and reeking of liquor. His two passengers smile and wave at the Rhode Island National Guardsmen leveling M-16s at their heads. As the car pulls away, a guardsman shouts in a thick New England accent, “Don’t drink and drive -- you might spill yuh drink!”

Meet the soldiers of the 115th Military Police Company of the Rhode Island National Guard. They are the only guardsmen in Fallouja, the Wild West of the Middle East. The part-time soldiers who patrol the meanest streets in Iraq don’t enforce the 11 p.m. curfew. And they don’t bother with drunk-driving statutes.

There is no Iraqi code of justice to guide them, just military law. And enforcing it is often more an art than a science, with potentially lethal consequences. With the Army straining to meet demands in Iraq, the Pentagon announced Wednesday that two National Guard brigades will be deployed next year after six months of training.

As the New England MPs acknowledge, many guardsmen bring a less-than-gung-ho attitude to their duty.

Unlike their active-duty colleagues from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, who grouse about being stuck in Fallouja but remain largely supportive of the Army, the boys from Rhode Island freely acknowledge that they had planned on wearing their uniforms only on weekends and would rather be back at their jobs selling advertising, policing colleges and detailing cars.

“There’s some lying recruiters out there,” Spc. Patrick Camp says.

“They told me it was one weekend a month,” Spc. Christopher Oldham adds.

This night, the guardsmen are looking for cars full of men and guns. They have been told that military intelligence sources -- often Iraqi detainees and snitches -- say that 30 men plan an attack to mark the anniversary of the 1958 coup that toppled the Iraqi monarchy. But they are skeptical.

“The intel is rarely good. It’s only been right once -- when it said they were gonna hit us at the police station,” says Staff Sgt. Matthew Hayden, 34, who normally works as a campus cop at Johnson & Wales University.

A rocket-propelled grenade soared across the wall of the police station compound that night, and a second missed the patrol by 40 feet after it left. The third RPG hit, and the boys from Rhode Island returned fire. “The next day, the police came out and said, ‘We’re gonna quit if you don’t get out of there,’ ” Hayden recalls with disgust.

This night’s patrol gets off to a tense start. A former Iraqi military compound housing the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry has been hit by seven mortar rounds, which struck without injury, by the time the guardsmen begin their 10 p.m. patrol, a guardsman reports.

The Americans insist that they are liberators, not occupiers, but the nuance is rejected by the guerrillas the MPs face nearly nightly.

In the moonlit sky around the base, one can see sporadic flares, a well-known method the guerrillas use to communicate the whereabouts of troops. Red flares are for armored vehicles, green for light vehicles. White flares track American troops from one spot to the next, and a series of red flares designates a kill zone, where guerrillas have drawn blood.

Attackers also use whistles and enlist confederates at local power stations, soldiers say. As the guardsmen slow down to set up a checkpoint a few miles east of Fallouja, a neighborhood just off the highway suddenly goes dark, then lights up again.

“See how fast that grid went down?” Hayden asks. “That’s pretty common. As soon as they see coalition forces in the area, they shut the grid down.”

Keen-eyed drivers, accustomed to running into new checkpoints, rarely get stopped. “Usually they’ll just turn around if they see us,” Hayden says.

The guardsmen have had just one casualty, a battalion commander whose finger was severely injured when an RPG hit his Humvee. They don’t count the time Cpl. Scott Keegan took shrapnel from an RPG that struck the asphalt near him -- a flesh wound. But they have taken repeated fire from AK-47 assault rifles as well as RPGs.

As four guardsmen speed off for the night’s rounds, over the squeaking transmission of a 20-year-old Humvee, all say they’d rather be back in Rhode Island than drawing bullets in Fallouja.

“Rabbits, that’s what we are,” Sgt. Frank Newton says. “They send that rabbit out, and when they shoot at us, we come back and the next day they go looking for who shot at us.”

As the guardsmen establish the second of three checkpoints for the night, a driver pulls up and carefully lifts his white dishdasha robe to reveal a weapon, then a permit from the mayor’s office. The guardsmen shrug, search his trunk and wave him on.

“That guy had a freakin’ Beretta SMG 9-millimeter,” one guardsman says, referring to an automatic pistol.

“Somebody should shout, ‘Gun!’ when you see that,” another says.

A third examines the bullet he’s pocketed from an ammunition clip in the trunk.

“You take that bullet?” a colleague asks.

“Why not?” the other says. “He’s not gonna miss it.”