COMBAT OUTPOST CAHILL, Iraq - Two years ago, then-Pvt. Brian Weber sat at a battered picnic table in a bomb-blasted compound in Bayji, Iraq, 125 miles north of Baghdad. He still was nursing wounds suffered during a suicide truck-bomb attack just three weeks before.
"I got the Harry Potter scar," he joked then, about one small, fading injury on his forehead - visible, but actually the most minor of the serious injuries he had sustained. "It ain't so bad. I'd stay here for five years, so my brother and his kids don't have to come."
Two years later, and now Sgt. Brian Weber will be about halfway to that five years when he ends this second deployment, at 27 months spent in Iraq. He's served with the same unit both times - Charlie Company, 1st/505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.
His latest mission, near the small farming city of Salman Pak, 25 miles south of Baghdad, has been vastly different than the first.
Weber, 27, from Gratiot, still nurses those wounds from the June 25, 2007, attack his unit came under. He has nerve damage to both legs, three compressed vertebrae, and feet that tingle painfully if he doesn't keep moving. As a gunner in a Humvee's turret, some of the repetitive stress might be from bouncing against the turret's metal shell for days and weeks on end. The infantrymen of Charlie Company, but especially those on second or third deployments, all are battered and bruised, Weber maybe more than most.
It's enough to keep him off the line, and he doesn't go on patrols like he used to - but if anything, his workload has increased. He now serves as the "mayor" of the rugged little outpost Charlie Company calls home.
The title is not imaginary. With U.S. bases and compounds spread all across Iraq, most have a designated "mayor" who handles the infrastructure, maintenance and any issues a small-town politician in the U.S. might deal with. Weber, with a few years of farming and lots of time spent around tools and heavy equipment, was a good pick.
In his bedroom that also serves as an office, he has put up a wall of his power tools, each stenciled and outlined so it's easy to tell which goes where.
"A lot of the tools I got, guys were going to throw away cause they were broke," Weber said. Soldiers unfamiliar with Iraqi electricity had used plug adapters in outlets, without taking into account the different voltage. "Guys fried all the tools. I had to tear them all apart and rewire them."
Then, he's off and moving again, overseeing a local Iraqi contractor digging out a test-fire pit, so the unit's Mine Resistant Ambush Protected trucks can have a place to fire their turret-mounted machine guns. Or, he's watching while another crane lifts and moves 12-foot-tall and four-foot-wide concrete T-Wall barriers to create a safe perimeter around the tents the soldiers live in.
"I was supposed to have this crane for a few more days," he said. "But as soon as the weather clears, it's leaving today, so we gotta move to get this done."
He says a day typically starts at 3:30 a.m., when he wakes up and starts planning. He wakes his guys at about 6 a.m. He just got back from leave, and he jokes that his men had it easy while he was away - "they all looked like they got back from frat parties at 4 a.m."
"But I got it easy too. I practically had a full beard yesterday," he said.
It's not really easy, it's just different. During the first few months of the deployment, he said it was "just like 2007," and as an infantryman, he went on the 12-hour patrols and constant missions. At the time, Charlie Company was within Baghdad itself, before moving to this quieter rural region.
"I lost about 30 pounds, got down to 200," he said, and the old wounds were taking a toll. "I haven't been 200 since high school. First sergeant was saying 'he's going home,' but I'm like 'I'm not going home.' I'll do it as long as I can."
He'll be leaving the Army when the deployment ends this November. He plans to get married, and has been tentatively checking into private contracting.
Inside Cahill's main headquarters building, Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Flinner jokingly chides one soldier who leans against a wall while talking to Weber. "What are you doing? That's the mayor you're talking to."
The other man, Staff Sgt. Paul Beliel, tries to get to attention, but then laughs - "How do I stand for the mayor anyway?"
Weber laughs with them. It's not that kind of position of authority, despite his responsibility for $150,000 worth of improvements from one project alone.
"If you give him a hammer," Flinner says, "he'll fix anything."
When the unit needed an advance party to begin improvements to what would be its new home here, Weber was sent ahead to COP Cahill.
COP Cahill, which is just a few old buildings behind a perimeter of T-Walls and several guard towers and in the rural region away from Salman Pak, is unlike the Joint Security Station in Bayji that Charlie Company lived in during the 2007 deployment. That small base was an old police station within the city of Bayji itself. It was mortared constantly, and snipers wounded and killed soldiers on the roof, in the guard towers and in the Bayji city streets.
When the suicide attacker hit, it was just the worst of many attacks. Weber was lying on his cot that morning, waiting for the next mission.
"I remember everything except the first 25 minutes. Spent four hours in surgery, and I guess when they morphined me up after surgery, I thought I was fit for combat so I was fighting with the surgeon. I didn't know where I was," he said. "I had a whole wall come into me. When it blew, the shock wave hit me, shot me across four bunks, then the wall came in, crushed the cot.
"Lucky to be alive," he said.
Twenty-seven Iraqi policemen were killed, when their adjacent barracks collapsed. Amazingly, no U.S. soldiers were killed. "Lord was looking over us that day."
After the suicide bomb exploded, a group of insurgents attacked the Bayji compound. They eventually were repelled, but it was a brutal morning. In July 2007, a few weeks after the attack, Weber had remembered the minutes while he waited for medical help.
"I'm the only guy in the middle of a firefight lying on my back, sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette," Weber had said.
He had remembered asking another soldier for a blanket to cover up, surprisingly calmly, but probably not quite all there.
"I'm a little busy right now!" the other soldier, then Specialist (now Staff Sgt.) Josh Sullivan, had yelled back, since he was returning fire at the time.
"'I'm a little busy,'" Weber had repeated, chuckling at the memory. "That was pretty funny."
Another soldier chimed in with another anecdote - "You told Sully, 'I'm feeling a little indecent.'"
"Yeah, that's right," Weber laughed. "A little indecent."
- Nathan Webster of Stratham, N.H., recently returned from a trip to Iraq as a freelance embedded reporter.
"I got the Harry Potter scar," he joked then, about one small, fading injury on his forehead - visible, but actually the most minor of the serious injuries he had sustained. "It ain't so bad. I'd stay here for five years, so my brother and his kids don't have to come."
Two years later, and now Sgt. Brian Weber will be about halfway to that five years when he ends this second deployment, at 27 months spent in Iraq. He's served with the same unit both times - Charlie Company, 1st/505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.
His latest mission, near the small farming city of Salman Pak, 25 miles south of Baghdad, has been vastly different than the first.
Weber, 27, from Gratiot, still nurses those wounds from the June 25, 2007, attack his unit came under. He has nerve damage to both legs, three compressed vertebrae, and feet that tingle painfully if he doesn't keep moving. As a gunner in a Humvee's turret, some of the repetitive stress might be from bouncing against the turret's metal shell for days and weeks on end. The infantrymen of Charlie Company, but especially those on second or third deployments, all are battered and bruised, Weber maybe more than most.
It's enough to keep him off the line, and he doesn't go on patrols like he used to - but if anything, his workload has increased. He now serves as the "mayor" of the rugged little outpost Charlie Company calls home.
The title is not imaginary. With U.S. bases and compounds spread all across Iraq, most have a designated "mayor" who handles the infrastructure, maintenance and any issues a small-town politician in the U.S. might deal with. Weber, with a few years of farming and lots of time spent around tools and heavy equipment, was a good pick.
In his bedroom that also serves as an office, he has put up a wall of his power tools, each stenciled and outlined so it's easy to tell which goes where.
"A lot of the tools I got, guys were going to throw away cause they were broke," Weber said. Soldiers unfamiliar with Iraqi electricity had used plug adapters in outlets, without taking into account the different voltage. "Guys fried all the tools. I had to tear them all apart and rewire them."
Then, he's off and moving again, overseeing a local Iraqi contractor digging out a test-fire pit, so the unit's Mine Resistant Ambush Protected trucks can have a place to fire their turret-mounted machine guns. Or, he's watching while another crane lifts and moves 12-foot-tall and four-foot-wide concrete T-Wall barriers to create a safe perimeter around the tents the soldiers live in.
"I was supposed to have this crane for a few more days," he said. "But as soon as the weather clears, it's leaving today, so we gotta move to get this done."
He says a day typically starts at 3:30 a.m., when he wakes up and starts planning. He wakes his guys at about 6 a.m. He just got back from leave, and he jokes that his men had it easy while he was away - "they all looked like they got back from frat parties at 4 a.m."
"But I got it easy too. I practically had a full beard yesterday," he said.
It's not really easy, it's just different. During the first few months of the deployment, he said it was "just like 2007," and as an infantryman, he went on the 12-hour patrols and constant missions. At the time, Charlie Company was within Baghdad itself, before moving to this quieter rural region.
"I lost about 30 pounds, got down to 200," he said, and the old wounds were taking a toll. "I haven't been 200 since high school. First sergeant was saying 'he's going home,' but I'm like 'I'm not going home.' I'll do it as long as I can."
He'll be leaving the Army when the deployment ends this November. He plans to get married, and has been tentatively checking into private contracting.
Inside Cahill's main headquarters building, Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Flinner jokingly chides one soldier who leans against a wall while talking to Weber. "What are you doing? That's the mayor you're talking to."
The other man, Staff Sgt. Paul Beliel, tries to get to attention, but then laughs - "How do I stand for the mayor anyway?"
Weber laughs with them. It's not that kind of position of authority, despite his responsibility for $150,000 worth of improvements from one project alone.
"If you give him a hammer," Flinner says, "he'll fix anything."
When the unit needed an advance party to begin improvements to what would be its new home here, Weber was sent ahead to COP Cahill.
COP Cahill, which is just a few old buildings behind a perimeter of T-Walls and several guard towers and in the rural region away from Salman Pak, is unlike the Joint Security Station in Bayji that Charlie Company lived in during the 2007 deployment. That small base was an old police station within the city of Bayji itself. It was mortared constantly, and snipers wounded and killed soldiers on the roof, in the guard towers and in the Bayji city streets.
When the suicide attacker hit, it was just the worst of many attacks. Weber was lying on his cot that morning, waiting for the next mission.
"I remember everything except the first 25 minutes. Spent four hours in surgery, and I guess when they morphined me up after surgery, I thought I was fit for combat so I was fighting with the surgeon. I didn't know where I was," he said. "I had a whole wall come into me. When it blew, the shock wave hit me, shot me across four bunks, then the wall came in, crushed the cot.
"Lucky to be alive," he said.
Twenty-seven Iraqi policemen were killed, when their adjacent barracks collapsed. Amazingly, no U.S. soldiers were killed. "Lord was looking over us that day."
After the suicide bomb exploded, a group of insurgents attacked the Bayji compound. They eventually were repelled, but it was a brutal morning. In July 2007, a few weeks after the attack, Weber had remembered the minutes while he waited for medical help.
"I'm the only guy in the middle of a firefight lying on my back, sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette," Weber had said.
He had remembered asking another soldier for a blanket to cover up, surprisingly calmly, but probably not quite all there.
"I'm a little busy right now!" the other soldier, then Specialist (now Staff Sgt.) Josh Sullivan, had yelled back, since he was returning fire at the time.
"'I'm a little busy,'" Weber had repeated, chuckling at the memory. "That was pretty funny."
Another soldier chimed in with another anecdote - "You told Sully, 'I'm feeling a little indecent.'"
"Yeah, that's right," Weber laughed. "A little indecent."
- Nathan Webster of Stratham, N.H., recently returned from a trip to Iraq as a freelance embedded reporter.