82nd Airborne getting bored

Michael Totten is embedded with the 82nd in Iraq and has a neat story on their current operation with lots of pictures, many of very happy children.

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I tried to listen in but the kids wouldn’t leave me alone. Finally one of the adults took mercy on me and shooed the children away so I could listen and talk to the grownups. The conversation, though, was mundane. The soldiers were talking and acting like aid workers, not warriors from the elite 82nd Airborne Division.

“Man, this is boring,” one of them said to me later. “I’m an adrenaline junky. There’s no fight here. It won’t surprise me if we start handing out speeding tickets.” So it goes in at least this part of Baghdad that has been cleared by the surge.

“When we first got here,” said another and laughed, “shit hit the fan.”

It was all a bit boring, but blessedly so. I knew already that not everyone in Baghdad was hostile. But it was slightly surprising to see that entire areas in the Red Zone are not hostile.

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Totten's story is not boring. It gives good detail on the relationship of the troops to the Iraqis in the Red Zone in Iraq. These guys are doing a great job of counterinsurgency operations and it would be idiotic to pull them back into a forward operating base the way the Democrats want to before the Iraqi troops are ready to take over. When you look at the reality on the ground and compare it to the caterwauling of the Democrats and the anti war left you get a better understanding not only of Iraq but the paranoid left. Hat tip Larwyn.