Author’s Note: I wrote this for my county newspaper, the Pickens Progress.
My name is Trevor Snyder and I am a sergeant in the Georgia National Guard.
Recently, my life has been uprooted in the service of my state and nation. My new surroundings are quite different from the rolling hills of rural Pickens County, and the beautiful pastoral scenes that I’ve grown to love are fading memories. The red clay has been replaced by brown sand. I’ve traded refreshing thunderstorms for choking dust storms. My three bedroom ranch house in the country and beautiful wife have been temporarily replaced by a tiny trailer outside one of Saddam’s former palaces in the heart of Baghdad, which I share with another Georgian citizen soldier.
I am a public affairs specialist – my mission is to refine and produce information for internal and external audiences. In plain English that means I am part of a unit filled with soldiers who have specialized technical training. We produce military newspapers. We run military radio stations. We take pictures. We shoot video and produce newscasts. We escort the civilian press and try to facilitate their access to other soldiers and servicepeople in theater, so they can tell our story and the story of Iraq to you folks back home.
Most of our days here are the same. We live routines that repeat themselves. Danger encircles us. It sometimes reaches out and attempts to touch us, but thus far it has missed the mark. The insurgents shoot mortars randomly into the area where we live and work. Sometimes they fire rockets too. I’ve stepped out of a building to see a rocket fly over my head, missing the top of the building by a few feet and landing somewhere behind it. I’ve felt the thud of a mortar in my chest as it impacted close enough to make me duck but not close enough to be seen. On Christmas Day, 2005, I found out that people without body armor on can run much faster than I can when I’m wearing it. The attacks, when they come, are over almost as soon as they begin. They are only exclamation points at the end of the sentences that make up daily life for an information warrior in Baghdad.
I have a rifle and a pistol but I haven’t fired them since we got off the C-130 that brought us here. We have Internet access in our offices and even in our tiny rooms. It’s not fast, and it doesn’t always work, but this is the first war America has fought where the privates and enlisted soldiers could e-mail their families and tell them what is happening halfway around the world in real time.
I could forget I live in the middle of a war if it wasn’t for the fact that I live and breathe the stories that make up this war. Every death passes across my desk in black and white letters and I am reminded that could be me. I know that person was someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone who will be missed somewhere back home. I think about why I am here and whether or not we are winning this war. I think about what winning means. We hear explosions in the distance almost daily. Sometimes they are far away. Sometimes they are close enough to shake the room I work in and I’m glad that I have concrete walls around me and a thick concrete roof over my head. Sometimes my heart starts racing when the boom goes off and sometimes I don’t have a reaction at all and I just keep doing whatever I was doing before the explosion.
Inside tall walls, protected by concrete, concertina wire, tanks and multiple layers of men with guns, I hear, feel and smell the war. I write about the war and the war changes the thought patterns inside my head. My war is fought mostly with a keyboard and a camera. This war will be won or lost based on public perception and reporting. What you see on TV is often disconnected from the reality of daily life here.
If you want the unedited truth, I suggest visiting these resources: Milblogging – http://www.milblogging.com and Mudville Gazette – http://www.mudvillegazette.com/. In this modern age you can get your information straight from the horse’s mouth. The guys who are carrying out their orders at the risk of their own lives are also writing about it, and you can get your news directly from them. I highly recommend doing so.