Recently, the staff of Invasive Thoughts was contacted by a United States Army Officer. This officer will soon receive training in the Arab language, culture, and in combat operations techniques, tactics, and procedures. After training he will be deployed to Iraq to join a military transition team, where he will effectively become one of seven to eleven American soldiers who are embedded in an Iraqi army battalion of 1,000 soldiers. In this manner, the American soldiers hope to gain the trust of their Iraqi army counterparts while operating with them at traffic control points, in raids, in personal extractions under fire, and in combat patrols. American soldiers will fight side by side with Iraqi soldiers and they will die side by side with them to show that they are working toward a similar goal. There is no doubt that assassination attempts will be made on the lives of those Officers; that kidnapping, racketeering, extortion, money laundering, and prostitution will be vices that each soldier must battle against as they operate separate from all other American assets, miles away from any U.S. outpost. These soldiers will essentially become the American whisper in the heads of the Iraqi army in an extremely challenging and dangerous assignment developed to provide the needed transition for Iraq. This Officer has agreed to share his reflections on his experiences with the readers of Invasive Thoughts dot com. In the coming months, we will publish these reflections as they come to us.
