Slow action not to Fairbanks Stryker brigade's liking

In a teleconference with Alaska reporters from his headquarters at Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Diyala province, Col. Burdett Thompson said Iraq remains a dangerous place, with suicide bombers, insurgents and militiamen trying to disrupt security.

But it's also long past the day when American forces regularly patrolled on their own or faced complex, coordinated attacks on their forward bases, at least in Diyala, just to the north and east of Baghdad, Thompson said.

"The days go by extremely slow sometimes, but the weeks seem to be flying by," he said.

Now his troops regularly support operations by Iraqi soldiers and police, he said, while his soldiers have not seen the kinds of multi-prong attacks that occurred with regularity before the surge in forces two years ago. Some of his younger soldiers in particular have complained about boredom, he said.

"They came here expecting it to be more of a fight," Thompson said. "But we got our hands full doing governance and essential services. That is the fight. We've got to be capable of doing everything from pulling the trigger to washing windows. That's our mission."

The 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Wainwright, has suffered two combat fatalities since its deployment in October. Two soldiers have also died in noncombat situations, one recently during a leave home in Tennessee, a brigade spokesman said.

The brigade normally has about 4,200 soldiers, but with the attachment in December of an armored battalion from Germany, it's now around 5,000 strong, Thompson said.

Diyala, a Maryland-sized province that borders Iran on the east, contains a volatile mix of Sunni, Shiia and Kurds that created some concern during provincial elections Jan. 31. Thompson said the elections generally went smoothly, though there was an increase in violence in the period leading up to the polling. The brigade helped Iraqi forces guard 358 polling stations, he said.

Results have not been announced yet but everyone expects power to shift from a Shiite-controlled provincial government to Sunni, he said.

The Sunnis boycotted the previous election in 2005 with the unsurprising result that they lost power, even in their strongholds.

"The Sunnis promised themselves that never again would that happen," Thompson said "They did show up and they took the voting seriously."

Thompson said his soldiers are bracing for trouble if the Shiites don't bow out gracefully. But he hopes the new strength of the Iraqi army and police will assure a peaceful transition.

The brigade has recently participated in the final American payment to the Sons of Iraq, the largely Sunni force of tribal militias credited with reducing the threat from Al Qaeda in Iraq. Thompson said the brigade finished registering some 12,000 members of that irregular but effective force, paying some 9,000 of them for their work in December.

Starting last month, the national government has been in charge of bringing some of the Sons of Iraq into the regular security forces and finding jobs for the rest. Thompson said brigade forces will monitor the transition and report any problems up his chain of command.

Morale for his force has been good, he said, in part because of how easy it is for soldiers to stay in touch with folks back home by phone, the Internet, and postal mail.

"Every day these soldiers are going out on patrol. But unlike any time I've ever deployed, you've got capabilities, technology wise, that allows us to stay connected," Thompson said. "There's no excuse for a soldier not to be talking to his family back in the rear."

But Thompson acknowledged one source of grumbling. For the Super Bowl, the commander of the multi-national force in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, issued a temporary waiver of the ban on alcohol in General Order No. 1. He authorized two beers for every soldier for the game.

Not the Strykers, though. Thompson said he didn't want any casualties weighing on his mind that could have been prevented if soldiers weren't drinking, even for the Super Bowl, which started around 2 a.m. Iraq time.

"Even with the Super Bowl, we didn't stop combat operations," Thompson said. "We get mortars here, we get rockets here."

Find Richard Mauer online at adn.com/contact/rmauer.