Southern Iraq (November 2002 to July 2003)
On my first tour in Iraq I was assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) Civil Affairs cell in the G-3. What started out as a straightforward civil affairs mission to ensure our military operations did not collide with the civilian functioning of Iraq took a strange turn when I MEF assumed responsibility for petroleum distribution across most of southern Iraq.
After the invasion, almost every commodity was in short supply there, including gasoline, diesel, and propane. We found this ironic since Iraq sits on top of some of the largest crude oil reserves in the world. Even more of a problem was that fuel shortages contributed to electrical outages that paralyzed cities and towns, leaving people without power for lights and refrigeration as summer temperatures began rising. Supplies of propane, used by the majority of Iraqis for cooking, had disappeared. Shortages at service stations led to lines of cars that stretched for miles, with family members standing shifts to hold their places in line. Often, chaos broke out when fuel deliveries were made. Refinery outages created some of the fuel shortage, but the situation was aggravated by sabotage and rampant theft.
The problems were becoming severe and something had to be done. At a meeting with then-Lieutenant General James Conway (I MEF commanding general), my name came up because someone remembered that my dad ran a petroleum hauling company in Michigan, and that during some "broken time" before the war I was the terminal manager for Cox Petroleum in Bakersfield, California. As a result of this meeting (that I had not attended), I was now the I MEF Civil Affairs Fuels Officer, and it was my job to figure out a solution to the mess. Within days, someone pinned the call sign "Benzene Queen" on me, and it stuck.
Some things we could fix at once—like providing security at the gas stations. This came first because so much petroleum was being stolen. We turned that around quickly. From the reports of our Marines, we knew that Iraqi spirits were substantially uplifted when they saw a convoy of fuel tankers being escorted into their city by armed Marines. When the fuel shipments arrived, people would line the streets and cheer. It was like a holiday.
Over the next several weeks, the I MEF fuel team traveled on a fast-paced city-by-city tour of southern Iraq. We were on the road constantly visiting refineries, pipeline facilities, distribution terminals, and service stations. We met with high ranking officials, and drove around the countryside searching for answers to many vexing problems.
As a terminal manager in the States, I dealt with driver mis-loads or cross-drops and sought refinement of our satellite-tracking dispatching system, but those issues seemed like child's play compared to managing distribution in Iraq. Just trying to get basic fuel usage data from managers in southern Iraq was a monumental task without a working telephone system. What took a few hours in the States took a few days (on the road) in Iraq.
Another challenge was that the refineries were shut down during the war and were slow getting back on line. Outdated technology—from the 1950s and '60s—was one reason for the slow recovery. I still think it was incredible that the Iraqis were able to keep the system up and running for decades on such old equipment.
Our biggest surprise in the whole evaluation process was the large demand for gasoline. We had calculated demand based on past use. That estimate was off significantly because of explosive growth in automobile ownership throughout the country after the fall of Baghdad. Under the Saddam Hussein regime, private ownership of automobiles was tightly controlled, but now thousands of cars were imported from Jordan and other nearby countries. Gasoline demand soared.
Working from the I MEF headquarters in Saddam Hussein's former Babylon palace, my team worked with the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and U.S. contractors. It was these personal relationships, not the formal ones, that really made things happen for us—to include prioritization of fuel distribution.
In some cases, these meetings didn't work so well. Probably the strangest "quest for fuel" resulted from a meeting with the Iraqi Oil Minister. After weeks of trying to divide limited amounts of fuel among the provinces, whose requirements were growing, the minister suggested "perhaps we could use some of the fuel from the reserve pipeline." We all looked around the meeting room and thought, "There's a reserve pipeline . . . Sweet!" So, we got the maps out and received fuzzy descriptions of the location and vague directions. Because it was in I MEF's zone, my team set out on a two-day mission to find the access point. We finally found it, along with a confused Iraqi "manager" who reminded us of a hung-over frat boy. The access point consisted of a five-foot section of the pipeline that came out of the ground and was surrounded by a chain-link fence. The manager explained through the interpreter that the pipeline was drained "a while ago" by looters or the oil ministers themselves. When we went back to the Ministry of Oil and explained what happened, "looters" were roundly blamed by all—despite lingering suspicions to the contrary by the tired Marines who went on the scavenger hunt.
In spite of the aged infrastructure, lack of a telephone system, and strange forays into the desert, our team felt it made some headway on our piece of the puzzle. I learned that life experiences coupled with some determined Marines could overcome quite a lot. One of my Marines, who logged a lot of miles on the road with me put it more simply: "We did a lot of good in a relatively short time. I believe we accomplished more than most people really expected. At one point during the summer, we even had to stop shipping gasoline from Kuwait because all of the gas stations we supplied in Iraq were totally full."
Ramadi Government Center (March to July 2006)
I returned to Iraq in March 2006; I was assigned to the Provincial Reconstruction Team in downtown Ramadi, the provincial capital of al Anbar. Our mission was to assist the governor and his staff with the development of economic and political infrastructure. I was assigned to the Real Estate and Oil section—the return of the Benzene Queen! But this time, my mission was trying to create an environment in which the Iraqis would develop the infrastructure to manage the fuel again.
My detachment made it to the Government Center in downtown Ramadi after an uneventful trip, and we quickly settled into our new jobs. We spent the first few days with the Iraqis working on projects and learning their way of doing things. I had a little bit of deja vu at one of the meetings—I felt like I was back in Baghdad working with the Ministry of Oil and I had never left: same smells, same translational issues, and very similar buildings.
During this tour, I had two homes. One was at Camp Blue Diamond where the 1st Marine Division was headquartered. Blue Diamond is a very small camp a few miles from the Government Center—less than a half mile long and even narrower in width, which made it a bear to get in a good run, but also made it a hard target to hit. At Blue Diamond, my accommodations were what I considered plush as compared to my expectations. I had half of a trailer with a bed, wall locker, and desk in my room. My trailer-mate had the same in the other half of the trailer, and we shared a head in between. That's right, I had my own head with running water. It was like Club Med compared to when I was there the first time—but also, like Club Med, I was only able to stay there a couple days every month or so.
My second home was the Ramadi Government Center, where I spent most of my time. I had a bunk bed in a shared room with five other women, a co-ed head, very limited showers, and either MREs or junkfood to eat. I ended up surviving on beef jerky and canned tuna for a few months. Still, compared to a lot of Marines at remote outposts in Iraq, I knew I had it pretty good.
Ramadi was dubbed the "Wild, Wild West" by many and it was easy to see why. It was everything you expect an urban war zone to look like—it appeared abandoned, dirty, broken, and infested. We were the subject of the daily updates to commanders all the way back to the Pentagon, because the Ramadi Government Center was targeted so often. Obviously, the foreign fighters were going all out to make sure we didn't stay—al Qaeda had declared that Ramadi would be the capital of its Islamic stronghold in the world.
In stark contrast to my 2003 drives around southern Iraq looking for oil in unarmored convoys, in 2006 we couldn't go outside of the Government Center because of sniper fire. In the first few nights I was there, our building was hit with an RPG, close air support was called in, and somehow a fuel tanker was set on fire, sending black smoke everywhere. These events set the tone for my four months there. The whole building would go to "general quarters" when attacked—civil affairs Marines included.
Life in the Civil Affairs cell was pretty turbulent. You had to combine everything you knew militarily and everything you knew on governance and economics and then emphasize one or the other depending on who you were dealing with. I really enjoyed the challenge, but it could also be very frustrating.
Convincing the governor's staff to come to the Government Center was the biggest challenge. Many of them were hesitant about working with the military, but there were a few that would bend over backwards for us—and sometimes that made us suspicious as well. I remembered my "oil terminal managers" who had been so "helpful" and "vague" during my first tour in Iraq. Nevertheless, over time, we learned more and more about the Iraqi culture, drank a lot of tea, and talked about the future of Iraq.
About the middle of April, I was finally able to get the staff of the Director General of Oil Distribution to come to the Government Center to work with me—and that was the day we were hit with a large, complex attack. While in the middle of the meeting, we started taking mortar fire, which wasn't unusual, but then the points of impact started getting closer and closer, and the windows started rattling and breaking. The Iraqis were getting up to leave, and we told them they couldn't; it wasn't safe. We moved the governor to a secure position and got the rest of his staff in a protected hallway. The Civil Affairs Marines took up posts at the doorways to provide any backup needed to the infantry Marines who guarded the exterior perimeter of the Government Center and to keep the Iraqi staff safe.
After that, understandably, attendance at the Government Center dwindled to almost nothing. The governor's staff wasn't willing to come to the area. A short while later, the governor's vehicle was hit with a vehicle-borne IED, and he was brought into our building to rest and get his bearings. He was obviously shaken from the incident, which killed others in his convoy, but he was relatively unscathed.
During the short time I was at the Government Center, the governor had numerous threats made against him, and some of his staff were killed. The few Iraqis who came to work every day were literally risking their lives to hold on to a hope that Iraq would be better for their children. That's something I hadn't seen in the United States, and although I may have had differences of opinions with them, I had to respect their tenacity.
Shortly thereafter, in May, the Marine Corps offered back my active-duty commission (I had been an activated reservist for much of the last couple of years). Once I accepted the change in status, I was told I had four days to get out of Ramadi and report to Camp Fallujah to work in the MEF G-4. I wasn't necessarily thrilled about leaving Ramadi, as it meant leaving the Marines and a mission that I truly believed in, but I knew this also meant my shorter, seven-month stay in Iraq had been significantly extended (my rotation in Fallujah would last until February 2007). Best of all, I had received the opportunity to "stay Marine."
Planning for the Long Haul (August 2006 to February 2007)
Camp Fallujah was decidedly different from Ramadi. Compared to the Government Center, the threat was minimal, and so I was not required, nor did I feel compelled, to carry two weapons and a K-bar everywhere I went. My time was confined to the camp itself, and my days of working with Iraqis and getting mortared were essentially over.
The members of the MEF G-4 team were very talented, and I enjoyed working with them. My narrowly focused civil affairs job of Oil and Real Estate suddenly broadened to include supporting unit requests for supplies and equipment; working with other sections of the G-4 (food service, maintenance, motor transport, and contracting) to develop logistical concepts of support; and brainstorming courses of action and "what ifs" with the G-3 operational planners. It was familiar territory, but I constantly thought to myself that, while life made more sense in the G-4, I very much missed the blending of a military role and economic mindset required on the Provincial Reconstruction Team.
Most of my days as the logistics planner for G-4 were spent with the G-3 planners in a dark back room called the Operational Planning Team Room. There we received and delivered briefs on items both mundane and exciting. Most tasks called for the stand up of a team for just a couple days to tackle a problem, come up with courses of action, and brief it to the staff. Some tasks developed into standing working groups that lasted for weeks, and the Black Market Fuels Working Group was one of them. It seems I could never get too far from fuel.
Despite the fact that three years had passed since I first worked on fuel and oil situation in Iraq, not enough significant gains had been made to eliminate looters and smugglers from fuel distribution and sales. It was still a thriving enterprise for black marketeers and al Anbar had its share of fuel problems. Regardless of where you are in the world, in the fuel and oil industry, change takes a long time—either to update old refineries, redirect fuel through new pipelines, or change the personnel structure. So it wasn't surprising that there were still problems in Iraq. But progress, however incremental, was continuous.
One of my darker days at Camp Fallujah reminded me that death was never very far around the corner. Over the Christmas season, I learned that one of my fellow Naval Academy grads was killed: Major Megan McClung. She and I lived in the same building at Camp Fallujah, but she had an opportunity to move to Ramadi, so I had not seen her much. Although I did not know her very well, she was respected by everyone I knew, and it was when we talked about her death that we realized how few female Marines had been killed in combat, she being the only officer at the time.
Going Back
As I prepare to return to Iraq in January 2008, I am struck by the fact that I cannot concisely answer for my friends in the States "What is Iraq like?" I have been in that part of the world for almost 20 months total, and I still cannot sum it up in a sentence or two. Iraq is . . . well, it depends on where you were. It depends on when you were there. It depends on what your job was.
For example, the reports coming out of Ramadi today are amazing. The reconstruction team has many more interagency members adding their professional expertise to the mission. What is most remarkable are the reports on the security situation that help the team do its job; not only are the team members able to leave the Government Center and walk around the city, sometimes they do so without body armor. In August 2007, the city actually held its first 5K road race—widely attended and a cause for celebrations in the street. That was not the Ramadi that I saw—same geography but different time, different mission.
But those are just news reports. Like many Marines, I had to go through a kind of transition when I returned home from Iraq. I had to learn that the American press was not going to report on the Iraq that was my day-to-day existence. The progress we made in rejuvenating the oil distribution system or the collaboration between Americans and our local Iraqis on economic development and employment issues just didn't hit the headlines much. At first, I thought, "Iraq changed in the one week since I left!" But in reality, it hadn't—only the lens through which I viewed it had. I am anxious to return and see for myself, "What is Iraq like in 2008?"
It is strange going back again and actually having an optimistic outlook. That might sound odd, but every other time we've deployed it's been to break something, to search out and destroy something or someone, or to fix something we broke. The reports we get now tell a story of hope. Marines don't typically deploy toward hope.