December 12th 2008 | home
Sandbox 1
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Christopher Schrieks got a promotion of sorts when he left Lodi earlier this year and journeyed to this war-ravaged city as a soldier in the New Jersey National Guard.
Schrieks, a captain in the detective bureau of the Lodi Police Department, suddenly found himself three months ago with the new job of the security chief in Baghdad's Green Zone, the 6-square-mile patch that is home to the U.S. military and diplomatic corps as well as numerous international representatives and several thousand Iraqi citizens.
In plain language, Schrieks is now a police chief. But he's not the only New Jerseyan with a key job here.
When 2,800 soldiers from the state's National Guard units deployed to Iraq in September, Pentagon military planners assigned a select group to run Baghdad's governmental services in the Green Zone, formally known as the International Zone.
"The best analogy is that we're a small city government," said Maj. Jon Powers, a spokesman for the Guard in Baghdad and a detective for the New Jersey Attorney General's Office back home. If a pothole needs fixing amid the rubble of a Baghdad boulevard, someone from New Jersey gets the call. The same is true with fixing electrical outages, unclogging muddy sewers, signing construction contracts, overseeing payroll budgeting — even retraining Baghdad's firefighters and chasing down undocumented workers.
While mundane perhaps and hardly akin to the tough combat of a hot war zone, the role for the state's National Guard could not be more critical, nor come at a more sensitive time. With the signing of a recent agreement to downsize the U.S. military presence in the coming years, American authorities have speeded up the transfer of civil power back to the fledgling Iraqi government. For the New Jersey National Guard, this means serving on a new kind of front line.
Now, not only do New Jersey's citizen soldiers have to run a piece of Baghdad's government, but they have to teach Iraqis how to take over. The task requires that they carry a gun — and act like a diplomat.
"This is a very important, strategic time to be here as we turn over operations of the country to Iraq," said Col. Steven Ferrari, the overall commander of the state's National Guard in Iraq. "It's a delicate line of security and sovereignty. Everything we do, we have to be very careful."
Adds Maj. John Tumino of Emerson, an FBI counterintelligence agent back in America and the coordinator of government ID badges in the Green Zone: "We're nation building."
"It's not revolutionary," said Tumino. "It's evolutionary." And sometimes, this evolution can have some surprising results.
Recently, the New Jersey National Guard upgraded street lights for a small corner of Baghdad that was used as a staging area for combat patrol teams. What seemed like an ordinary task turned into a point of national pride for Iraqis.
The neighborhood also is home to Iraq's Unknown Soldier Memorial, so the upgrade meant Iraqis could turn on the lights at the memorial – with the help of a donation from a wealthy Iraqi. "It was a happy accident," said Sgt. Bill Addison of Brick.
But the serendipity comes with a sobering dose of wartime reality. The Iraqi benefactor did not want his name publicized. To work with Americans — even on electrical upgrades — could place Iraqi citizens in danger from insurgents who, while diminished in their lethal capabilities, are still a force, especially for those living beyond the relative safety of the Green Zone, in Baghdad and beyond.