Back to Iraq one more time Back to Iraq one more time (July 09, 2004)

by Jeb Bing

A rmy Specialist Jim McGuirk heads back to Iraq today for what he hopes will be no more than two more months before being reassigned to Stateside duty for good. McGuirk, a 2001 graduate of Foothill High School, spent that summer in Pleasanton before enlisting in the Army. Like so many in his generation, he was uncertain over future plans and thought the military would give him training in specific career paths and, in his case, college funding, which is best with a four-year enlistment. So McGuirk signed up on Sept. 9, 2001, just a week before the terrorist attacks, an event that changed America and McGuirk's future along with it.

Sent to Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training and also paratrooper practice, he was assigned to the 10th Infantry Mountain Division in upstate New York. That outfit, as its name implies, trains soldiers for ground combat on foot in the mountains, and many in the 10th were sent to Afghanistan when the U.S. entered that conflict. For McGuirk, who was still training, he was held back and then sent to Iraq last September. Since then, he's been on combat duty mostly in Falluja, one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq and one that McGuirk finds is also the most hostile toward Americans. Traveling with his seven-man squad in and around Falluja, many Iraqis give the group a "thumbs down," and their armor-plated Humvee cargo carrier takes plenty of flak from hostile fire along the way. A driver and technical aide look for trouble ahead while two other spotters sit at the back of the vehicle watching for unusual or dangerous objects along the route. With so much garbage strewn up and down Highway 10, the main thoroughfare in Falluja that connects to Baghdad 45 minutes away, it's the daily patrols like McGuirk's that repeatedly case the roadsides so well that they can spot fresh trash immediately and stop to check it out.

McGuirk reports that while Falluja looks like it might have been an attractive city long ago - well before either of the Gulf Wars - it lost its luster, with buildings and streets now crumbling. Because of the extraordinary dangers facing foreigners in Falluja today, it lags well behind other Iraqi cities in repairs to its electric, sewer and water systems and building construction. Faced with a daily routine of raiding suspected insurgent locations, McGuirk and his fellow soldiers in the 10th Mountain Division stay close together, only calling on Iraqi civilian police for help if absolutely needed. Frankly, he says, no one trusts the local police whose members are sometimes insurgents themselves.

Armed with a submachine gun at the start and now carrying an M-4 carbine, McGuirk suits up each morning with 40-50 pounds of body armament that add another 15 degrees to summertime temperatures that are often 115 degrees and higher. The only cool place is his barracks, a concrete facility once used by Saddam Hussein's army, and now surrounded with razor wire and guard towers. Meals are mediocre at best, with the food being shipped in from the larger and better bases in Baghdad and other more secure cities and then reheated for the Falluja-based units. That's why McGuirk appreciates the packages he is now getting from school children at Walnut Grove Elementary School, who launched a program last fall to send Pleasanton troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan "care packages" that include candy, beef jerky and other treats, as well as letters, pictures and posters that they have drawn. The effort is part of a campaign by Pleasanton Military Families Support Group, which his parents Jamie and Hal McGuirk, have joined to help Pleasanton soldiers and their families. Along with the Pleasanton Weekly, which we send him every week, McGuirk looks forward to mail call and messages from home. You can write him at: Spec. Jim McGuirk, A Company 1-32, 10th Mountain Div., Camp Chosin, APO AE 09371.

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