"Balloon Wars: An ISR Operator's Account of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan"

is the working title for a memoir of nineteen months in the war zones, twelve in Iraq, from May of 2007 until May of 2008 and seven in Aghanistan in 2008. Twelve chapters out of one-hundred-eighteen are available here.

Chapters 1 and 2

The first chapter introduces the members of PTDS (Persistent Threat Detection System ) Team 4 and what we were to do in the Iraq War for our employer, Lockheed Martin and our customer, the United States Army. We got there on May 5, 2007 to operate a surveillance system that was unlike anything that had ever been used before, a remarkable camera on a tethered balloon thousands of feet above the battle space that gave the US Army the high ground and a vantage point unlike any in the history of warfare.

We got there at the beginning of the worst month of the worst year of the war for our side. One hundred and twenty six American servicemen and women were killed in May. Contractors like us were dying too. Our first week included a mortar attack and a storm of small arms fire. The rest of that summer, when "The Surge" was in full swing, was much worse for us and still quite bad for the Army.

The blacked out text has been redacted by the Department Of Defense but an appeal to have more included is pending. The blue text was deemed by the DOD to be classified but was later determined to be protected speech.

Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve describes a battle between Sunni and Shi’a in a neighborhood near the balloon site. I was operating the camera just days after landing in Baghdad when the sensors that listen for weapons and explosions "slewed" the camera to five "pax" firing on an Iraqi police station. Before the violence ended a couple of hours later we watched that group and others fire RPGs into homes, launch mortars to more or less random locations and fire AK-47s and other automatic weapons at their neighbors. In the end our team directed the Army to the back yard where the fighters hid the weapons after the fight and watched the patrol climb the wall and find the cache.

CHAPTER 12 EXCERPT . . . "He shot about thirty rounds from the hip, moving rapidly back and forth, never setting his feet. He may have scared the people he was shooting at but I doubt he hit anyone. Some of the mortar teams we encountered were proficient and the insurgents could do a great deal of damage with IEDs. There were some skilled snipers too, but their small unit fighting tactics and methods were poor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they accidentally shot each other quite often."

Chapters 17, 33 and 40

Chapter 17 is about a very important figure in the Iraq War, Shi'a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Chapter 33 details what happened to Ron Laniere and me while we were looking for and repairing holes in the balloon. Shortly after we forgot about the danger that night while in the aerial lift, fifty feet above the wall and without cover, the enemy started shooting at us. And Chapter 40 describes what it was like to watch the mortar team that was firing the rounds that were falling around us and then seeing them killed.

CHAPTER 40 EXCERPT . . . "The camera slewed to a spot near the launch point and Ron had given the grid location to the TOC just before Don and I entered the GCS. Mike hadn’t located the mortar team yet so we all studied the monitor as he panned from place to place. The camera target was just a few kilometers out so the look angle was high and therefor good. A lot of places they could have fired from were behind buildings but there were unobstructed views of good launch sites too. Mike jumped from one to another just as he should have. He only had to go to a few vacant lots before seeing two men squatting next to a mortar tube. One of them was holding the round at the top of the tube and he released it just as Mike zoomed in. Twenty-six seconds later the round hit just inside the FOB’s north wall destroying a fuel tank. Before that second round landed he dropped the third which exploded a little further inside the FOB before he dropped the forth and the fifth."

Chapter 78

There was a UTAMS “base station” on the balloon and sensors on towers around the VBC at Site One and around the FOB at Site Three. The sensors were microphones on tripods. If enough sensors picked up the same sound and the sound matched the sonic signature of a weapon, the location of the sound was determined and a “Service Request” was generated. Our system could be configured to automatically act on the service request and "slew" the camera to the point located by the sensors. So while conducting a routine, boring scan, good for terrain denial but nothing else, the camera would take off on its own to a location miles away in less than a second. Every pixel became a horizontal streak until the camera stopped somewhere in the city, or outside it. Sometimes, the new scene was of someone holding a shoulder mounted weapon or a man kneeling next to a mortar tube preparing to launch the next round, or a cloud of dust and debris and people still in flight from a VBIED or suicide bomber. I’d seen all that, two seconds after hours of staring at empty streets and fields. When such a scene was replaced by war fighting, that quickly, it was exhilarating. It was disturbing too but at those times I could assume the roll of the TV viewing technician and stay emotionally disconnected. That's how it was supposed to operate but maintenance was needed and when the tedious and dangerous tasks weren't accomplished, it didn't work. Chapter 78 is about tending to those tasks.

CHAPTER 78 EXCERPT . . . "Nick Berg’s job was more dangerous and there were others whose jobs involved more risk but tending to equipment on the roof of a guard tower in Baghdad had to rank as one of the more dangerous jobs a civilian contractor could do. The people outside seemed to realize it too because a lot of them called to me, waved or shook their heads."

Chapter 82

My motivation for the big decisions in my life has been to do things I hadn’t done before and to act as my hero, Ben Franklin advised. He said, “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” Attempting to do so necessitated the acquisition of skills and knowledge. In 2007 the US Army and Lockheed Martin needed men who knew what I knew which gave me another chance to do as Franklin would have. I’d worked at all the sites in Iraq and felt I’d seen pretty much everything there was to see there. Afghanistan was next and since more sites were going to be installed in locations all over that country I hoped that I would be able to increase my horizons again. My request for transfer was granted so after a year in Baghdad and three weeks home in May of 2008 I went to Bagram, Afghanistan and then to Waza Kwah, a tiny village on a remote and very high plateau in Paktika Province.

CHAPTER 82 EXCERPT . . ." With daylight the mountains became visible. The Hindu Kush range is north of Bagram and distant peaks ten-thousand feet high and higher are clearly visible. The air is so clean the peaks seem much closer than they are. In places where the more fertile ground meets the barren mountainsides there are villages and they provide the scale needed to judge distance. Without them ten and even twenty miles could be mistaken for five . . .
. . . Going south from Bagram we flew at a thousand feet over the Shomali plain. In earlier times this plateau north of Kabul was a garden and the capital’s source of fruits and vegetables and where city dwellers would picnic on the weekends. There are more land mines there now than anywhere else in the world so picnics are pretty uncommon and most of the twenty-mile-wide plateau is desert. There’s much less growing there now and the trees that could have provided cover for combatants or lumber or firewood for residents have been cut down. Deforestation is a huge problem throughout the country."

Chapters 86 87 and 116

I didn’t fraternize with soldiers much for several reasons. Being older was one and since I was on duty twelve hours a day there wasn’t much time for it and despite our shared, current experience and being citizens of the same country we had little in common. There were a few, minor exceptions in several chapters. Chapter 86, is about two such exceptions. One was a sergeant I worked out with at the gym in Waza Kwah and the other was Captain Ellis, the unit's medical officer. Ellis wasn't a doctor but as a skilled Army medic he had more medical knowledge, skills and resources than anyone in the area. That made him the health care provider for the nearby villages, a roll his commanders in Bagram had ordered him not to accept.

One of the things we saw a great deal of was everyday people just going about there lives. Chapter 116 describes a few of those scenes.

CHAPTER 86 EXCERPT . . . "Captain Ellis, who was the medical officer, was another one I’d talk to occasionally at the gym and elsewhere but he was more serious. He had a good attitude and did his job real well but he saw the worst there was to see.

One day while he and I happened to be at the sinks in the shower house. I was shaving and he was shaving his head. A Specialist came in and told him the people he was supposed to meet at 1400 were at the ECP. He looked at his watch and he said, “Let ‘em wait. They can ‘insha’Allah’.” He said the mandatory Islamic response for anything that one plans to do, which means “if God wills” as if to say, “They can kiss my ass.”

While he continued to pull the razor over his scalp I asked him what was his meeting about. He explained how the pharmacists poison their customers in Afghanistan. They sell medication to the parents of sick children by the color of the pill. Red pills cost more than another color, say blue which are more than another, maybe yellow. No matter the illness or symptoms the patient gets what he pays for, by color.

Ellis told me, “I had a three year old brought to me, a four year old, another kid was 11. A thirteen year old was brought in three times. Every time I had to give him CPR. The last time he died. He was on between twenty and forty different meds. His parents kept buying more expensive colors, ‘till he died.

“I can’t stand this shit any more. I hate the fucking army."

Chapter 79

From much of what's broadcast and posted on Youtube you'd think the tactics used by the Iraqi's that were against us were pretty crude. Most IEDs are simple devices and suicide bombers are the lowest tech delivery system there is. And Iraqi's never mount any kind of organized assault. But they did have some skills and a few ingenious weapons. For example there were some very good mortar men, EFPs (Explosively Formed Projectiles) were used to devastating effect and the IRAM, the subject of Chapter 79, was a VERY destructive munition that required engineering, manufacturing prowess and very careful execution.

CHAPTER 79 EXCERPT . . . "the IRAM is a special kind of rocket. An “Improvised Rocket Assisted Munition” consists of a canister, perhaps a propane cylinder, full of C4 plastic explosive attached to a 107 mm rocket. It’s a heavy payload so the rocket can’t carry it very far. There were seven launchers with two rockets each mounted in the bed of a bongo truck . . . Buildings and vehicles on the FOB were destroyed and there were craters in the extremely hard ground up to 20 feet in diameter and six feet deep. Sixteen soldiers were wounded and three killed. The soldiers who died were on a porch that I sat on everyday after I showered. I had to take cover from mortar attacks twice while on that porch but the men who were hit there that day didn’t get much of a warning, if any."