Capt. Kevin Capozzoli, commander of Company A, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry, questions an Iraqi laborer about Monday’s shooting of a Company A soldier Monday near Ramadi. (Joseph Giordono / S&S)
Capt. Kevin Capozzoli, commander of Company A, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry, questions an Iraqi laborer about Monday’s shooting of a Company A soldier Monday near Ramadi. (Joseph Giordono / S&S)
A 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry soldier rounds up a group of Iraqi laborers to question them about the wounding of another soldier. (Joseph Giordono / S&S)
Capt. Kevin Capozzoli, commander of Company A, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry, hands out election information to an administrator at the University of Anbar. (Joseph Giordono / S&S)
A Ramadi man looks at election information handed out by U.S. troops. (Joseph Giordono / S&S)
An Iraqi laborer waits to be questioned by U.S. troops after an infantryman was shot and wounded near a construction site. The man claimed he didn't see or hear anything during the incident. (Joseph Giordono / S&S)
TAMIM, Iraq — Many of the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq find themselves wearing a number of different helmets during any single day. Any mission may start out according to plan but take an entirely new direction a few minutes later.
While their official job title may be infantryman or supply specialist, troops find themselves working as election boosters, detectives and medics all during the same shift.
On Monday morning, soldiers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry — a unit that deployed from South Korea with the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division — planned to hand out election information and paste up posters encouraging Iraqis to vote.
Before they could get started, though, a radio call came in that one of the company’s soldiers had been shot and wounded while manning an observation post near Ramadi. The soldiers with the election material turned into a quick reaction force, converging on where the shooting occurred.
The wounded soldier, who was shot in the hip, was evacuated to an aid station near Ramadi, where he was later reported in stable condition.
The other soldiers rounded up a group of young Iraqi men working nearby. “We just got shot at. Where did the shots come from?” Capt. Kevin Capozzoli, Company A commander, asked each of the men through an interpreter.
Capozzoli questioned each member of the group individually; each pleaded ignorance. Finally, two of the young men admitted to hearing the shot and seeing three men leaving a nearby building right after the incident.
“Sometimes this is almost like police work,” Capozzoli said. “These guys were right here, they heard the shot. But they’re either afraid to tell us, or they know and they don’t want to tell us.”
Union delegates
Earlier in the day, the soldiers escorted a pair of U.S. civilian contractors to a police station in Baghdad to offer police leaders a developmental course. The contractors, who work for private firms hired by the Pentagon to retrain the Iraqi police, were instead questioned by the police about pay.
The cops had not been paid for weeks, and the police chief reported that his men would walk off the job if they weren’t paid in two days. The contractors and soldiers explained they had nothing to do with their pay, but promised to ask again.
A closer look
The previous night, Company A soldiers learned that in Iraq, two plus two sometimes does equal five.
While on a night patrol through the streets of Tamim — a section of Ramadi just across the river from downtown — the soldiers heard a burst of heavy gunfire from within the town. They investigated and found that a group of gunmen had fired on an Iraqi police station; the police had returned fire but hit nothing.
According to the police, two or three men in a maroon sedan had fired at the station, then fled into a nearby neighborhood. The soldiers got back into their Humvees, turned a few corners and — to their surprise — found three men in a maroon sedan.
Everything seemed to add up. It was the right number of men, acting strangely, out after curfew in a vehicle that matched the description given by police. The soldiers questioned the men and wiped them down with swabs to test for gunpowder residue on their hands and faces, which would indicate they’d recently fired weapons. But there was none.
A few other soldiers searched the house where the men said they lived. Inside, they found an assault rifle and ammo. A teenage boy inside excitedly showed them pictures of a shot-up BMW; none of the soldiers were sure why.
But after at least 30 minutes, much pantomiming, and attempts at breaking the language barrier, one of the men produced a weapon’s permit issued by Company C, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry. They were bodyguards for a local sheik and had been granted permission to carry the weapon. One of the men pulled out a cellular phone and called the sheik.
After a little more discussion and a call to headquarters to check the men’s names, the soldiers handed out tip-line phone numbers and asked the men to report any suspicious activity.
“Everything pointed at these being the guys,” Capozzoli said. “If they’d come up positive for gunpowder, we’d have taken them in.”
