This week, New Hampshire Public Radio presents the views of people who have spent a significant length of time in Iraq.
Yesterday we heard from a National Guardsman who served there and believes the U-S presence is helping.
Today, we hear a different view.
Staff Sergeant George Sprague spent most of 2004 in Iraq.
He is 30 years old and a member of the National Guard who lives in Hillsborough.
He experienced Iraq as a truck driver in military convoys.
NHPR's Dan Gorenstein produced this report.
T.8
:09 when I first got into country the company we were replacing...they said that for the year they were there...they were there during the invasion and up through March of 2004, only just recently, maybe Jan-Feb of 2004, had they seen an increase of the IEDs and the road side bombs and those type of things.
1:08...We were in Kuwait reading the news, thinking, this isn't going to be so bad. I think it was our second week...(collects himself)...maybe our second, or third, it was a short amount of time...we lost...we lost a guy.
10:26 when I first got there you could see the roads were in pretty decent shape and by the time we left, certain stretches of road were destroyed. They were going to plant the IED at the edge of the pavement, so they were going to dig a little hole in the ground, so when that thing blows up it's is going to blow up half a hole of pavement, and half a hole of gravel...and some of these craters, we didn't stop ot measure them but they were four or five feet across and a couple of feet deep. Even while we were there, the holes were getting deeper and there was a lot more holes.
T.10
:50 when we first got there, we had a policy that nobody passed our convoy. The gun truck in the rear of the convoy he would make sure no one passed our convoy, however he had to do that...including shooting at people. we had the five S's, I don't remember what they all are shout, show, shove, shoot, or something like that.
Sprague said he typically spent 40 hours on the road a week.
He guesses his convoy drove off a car an hour during his year-long tour.
After the handover of authority from US to Iraqi leaders, the US military issued orders that truck convoys be less aggressive on the roads.
Don't drive down the center of the road, pick one lane.
Let drivers pass the convoy.
The US, came the command, was now a guest of the Iraqi government.
T.10
5:30 we did try that, but guys just didn't like it. they said you know what? I don't care who's policy this is...he is not out here, he is not driving this truck, and he is not looking at this car. So I am going to decide if the car needs to be shoved off the road. And they did.
As Sprague watched the kilometers roll by, he wondered how the behavior from his convoy would play at home.
T.10
8:42 if you were the local guy, if this happened here, how would you feel if your roads were being taken over. And I'll just use the roads b/c that's what I am most familiar with and many times we would stop our convoy...so we are stopped in a defensive posture, and then we are not going to let anyone else pass...so the highway is shut down. What would happen if rush hour traffic, coming out of Boston shut down, regularly?...if this happens everyday...
T.17
:20 I think there may be a lot of Iraqis sitting on the fence to trust us or not trust us...and they are waiting to feel us out. You had a guy on the fence and he gets run off the road. And maybe that is enough for him to decide, maybe I don't like these guys. What he does with that dislike, he may take that to an extreme and start fighting us, or he may be cooperative.
