'I Want to Go Home ... Especially on Memorial Day'
At Combat Outpost 881 in southwest Baghdad, every day is a sort of Memorial Day.
BAGHDAD, May 26, 2008— -- At Combat Outpost 881 in southwest Baghdad, every day is a sort of Memorial Day.
"One of my best friends got killed here in 2005," Sgt. Robert Scott told ABC News from his small bedroom. "Several friends got killed, actually. I think about them every day."
"One of my really close friends, Spc. Tucker, he was a good friend of mine," Pvt. Matthew Brown told ABC News, sitting in the outpost's mess hall. "I got the news about him, and that was really hard. But you know, I'm just trying to live my life the way he would and not think about how he went out. I think about how he lived."
On this day, just like any other day, these twenty-somethings who fight for the U.S. Army in Baghdad remembered their friends, their colleagues, the men who they fight, eat and sleep next to.
But it is not a holiday for the more than 150,000 troops stationed in Iraq. Today was just another work day -- a day during which the Raider Brigade of the 1st Battalion of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, which is based at 881, did what it does every day: went on a foot patrol.
"We want to earn their trust. So they know we're here to help them," Staff Sgt. Michael Singleton told ABC News while walking through the al Furat neighborhood of western Baghdad. It is a Sunni neighborhood, home to non-commissioned officers under Saddam Hussein. "We're not here to, you know, shoot everybody."
What he and the rest of the company were there to do was talk to Iraqis and hear their complaints. There is only one hour of electricity, the Iraqis told the Americans. "We don't have jobs," they said. "We need the sewage to be removed."
"Two years ago," Singleton said, referring to his first tour in Iraq, "it was pretty much just fighting, IEDs (improvised explosive devices). And now, they have crews that are cleaning up the streets. It's all about jobs. If we can get them jobs, keep them occupied, they'll have trust and faith in their government to do the right thing."
No one knows for sure how much of Baghdad is unemployed. Estimates range from 15 percent to well over 50 percent. In the al Furat neighborhood, which is located in the southwest just southeast of the airport, it is jobs and electricity that residents are worried about most.
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