Chicken feed and city council, working civil affairs in Iraq

Tikrit, Iraq-
From checking in on chicken farmers to city councilmen, it takes a lot of patience to work on a Civil Affairs team in Iraq these days, more so because there are signs of progress.

Captain Carlstein Lutchmedial, originally from Trinidad, asks a ton of questions. When the village catfish farmer tells him he only has a thousand fish in his pond at one time, Lutchmedial asks why he can’t breed more. When the water plant operator says he needs more gas to keep the generators going, Lutchmedial asks how much more he needs. When Tikrit city council members say they want a new clinic, Lutchmedial asks them to recall what happened to the last clinic. He asks about rent, cost of living, fuel and jots their answers down in his green book.

The Captain has learned that Iraqis have to invest their own time and money to keep things working here. It's easy for Iraqis to view US forces as a free bank that can shell out endless amounts of money for projects, and US officers are wary of creating a culture of dependency and waste, which probably already existed under Saddam.

The locals always seem to say they need more, understandable when unemployment hovers at 20-30 percent across the country and GDP lies somewhere under $3,600 per person. The larger US bases must seem like lifestyles of the rich and famous to Iraqis who never venture inside. But Iraqis are far from helpless.

After a farmer told Lutchmedial he couldn’t raise more than a 1,000 fish at a time because of feed costs, he admitted that he had 5,000 chickens out back. A man who runs a power plant, said he needed more gas, but admitted he also gets an allotment from the Iraqi government, Lutchmedial said. “Sometimes they hoard gas.”

At Tikrit city council, Lutchmedial tells me that the Americans role is to observe the Iraqi process. “But as you can tell everyone runs up to us for project claims.” He is immediately swarmed by men looking for contracts. Civil affairs recently invested $100,000 in a water project.

“We were there and the sheiks said it needs more work,” Lutchmedial said. “To us it was pretty good. We need to verify.”

(Capt Lutchmedial listening at Tikrit city council.)

“Whatever we come up with, we submit to higher (command), and whatever we do, Iraqis have to come in on,” said Sergeant First Class Dan Benedict, who also worked a Civil Affairs mission during his previous deployment to Iraq. “Now Iraqis are more receptive,” Benedict said. “There was a lot of running and gunning back then.”

At city council on Sunday, several sheik-looking councilmen began the ad-hoc session with long speeches exhorting the Americans for more help to build an outlying clinic. “We desperately need a clinic and there are too many checkpoints, a person is already dead by the time he gets to Tikrit,” one of the men said.

“Is this a complaint session or we’re her to observe?” Lutchmedial asked.

“Before we can help, we need to see work through the Iraqi system,” said Lisa Bachiller who works on the State Department-funded Provincial Reconstruction Team.

“You are the masters of the world here…”another council member said to the Americans, and began again on the clinic.

(Sgt. 1st Class Dan Benedict aims a sling shot an Iraqi boy presented to him in an outlying village.)

Sgt. First Class Benedict is suspicious. “They have the money, they just want us to spend it.” He said that two years ago the US funded a good-sized clinic, but months later the Iraqis said they still didn’t know how to use the X-ray machine. When US forces went out there to help, they saw the machine’s components hadn’t been unpacked yet. “They don’t maintain their stuff,” Benedict said, “They expect us to do it.”

“There’s 20-something city council members,” Capt Lutchmedial said across the smoky room, “There’s only a couple here. Where’s the health council, so we can have a meaningful discussion? There needs to be a commitment of all city council members. This is their show.”

“We think maybe they’re having that meeting just for us,” said Lt. Matthew Podolack of the 1st/101st STB, who works with Capt. Lutchmedial, implying that the meeting might be a way for Iraqis to funnel their bids for American funds and that the actual "Tikrit city council" meeting might take place behind closed doors.

If you take the chairman aside and talk to him one-on-one, he’s usually more open, said Captain John Gabriel, also of the 1st/101st STB who helped train Iraqi Army officers on his last deployment. You try not to poke them in front of others, or they might say yes or no to any decision.

Still for all the frustrations and spinning of wheels, Lt. Podolack said that Civil Affairs is making ground in this area which seats the provinicial capital.

“Capt. Lutchmedial, he’s got the contracts going. He turned the water project around. The brick and trash project are 75 percent there. He’s got contractors emailing him their reports. He stays on them. A lot of times it’s the follow up, so we don’t spend money on the same project,” Podolack said.