Soldier's Home : Summer '03 to Summer '08

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David Botti

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An Introduction to Bravo Battery

2:08 PM, July 16, 2008 | Comments (5)

Bravo Battery soldiers during downtime. Photo: David Botti I've begun my embedding with Third Platoon, Bravo Battery 5-25 FA, 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division, a field artillery unit out of Fort Polk, Louisiana. Downtown Baghdad these...

Pat Tillman's Legacy Four Years On

1:58 PM, May 9, 2008 | Comments (0)

Trying to Modernize the GI Bill

10:41 AM, April 29, 2008 | Comments (0)

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Summer '03 to Summer '08

David Botti

For the next several weeks I'll be blogging as an embed with various U.S. military units operating in Iraq (posts will come as Internet is available). As you may know from reading this blog, I was a Marine in Iraq during the 2003 invasion and left later that summer as my battalion rotated home. I haven't been back to the country until earlier this week when I landed in Baghdad in the belly of a C-130 cargo plane, this time as a reporter.

The moment the back ramp of the aircraft opened and a hot wind blew across the dusty tarmac, I was prepared to begin comparing today's Iraq to my own experiences in the country five years earlier. The truth is, however, that after five years this is essentially a different country and a different war. The differences are so obvious that they hardly seem worth mentioning, and I'll need time to fully comprehend that I've returned to a country I never thought I'd set foot in again.

A Marine patrol at sunset in An Nasiriyah, August 2003 / Photo: David Botti

Before a few days ago, my time in Iraq existed as a defining moment of my life--a time now frozen in photographs and memories that are already beginning to fade. I do remember, however, how I once viewed those soldiers and marines entering the country as I prepared to leave. I pitied them in some respects. They'd missed the historic events of the invasion, and were now left to "clean up" what little there was left to do. Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Now I've come to Iraq again at a time when many here point to the relative calm that's come over the country. A recent graphic in The New York Times illustrated how the statistics break down over the years. The number of U.S. troops killed, for example, fell from 126 in May 2007 to 19 in May 2008.

I've been in Baghdad for two days and have yet to hear a burst of gunfire, or the explosion from a rocket. The large-scale violence I was expecting suddenly seems to have disappeared -- albeit perhaps only for a temporary time. After all, I left the city of An Nasiriyah in the middle of the night five years ago, sitting on a pile of camouflage netting in the back of an open truck. I entered Baghdad early this morning in a convoy of armored "Rhino" buses.

Perhaps that's one comparison worth noting from the start.

The War, Iraq, Marines

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