Soldier speaks of fighting

in Iraq

Sgt. Nathan Phillips has spent the past several months being mortared and rocketed at his base in central Baghdad, Iraq.

The 30-year-old U.S. Army sergeant is the son of Sisters Elementary School librarian Marie Phillips. He is serving as a medic with the 282nd Field Artillery Unit, 1st Cavalry, based in the international zone (formerly called the Green Zone).

He's in the middle of his second tour in Iraq. He was in Central Oregon this week on leave.

According to Phillips, he's found his second tour more risky than his first, when he was with a team hunting for chemical weapons during the initial invasion of Iraq.

"It's worse than it was during the invasion," he said. "Midway through the invasion, things were pretty calm."

He said it seems that insurgents get a fresh infusion of personnel and weaponry periodically and attacks spike up. The insurgents seem to be tactically adaptive.

"If we do something new, they seem to match how we move on them," Phillips said.

The sergeant noted that the insurgents have frequently switched tactics, such as moving to car bombings as IED (improvised explosive devices) became less effective. They also use unarm- ed observers to pinpoint vulnerabilities.

"They send out observers; you can tell who they are," Phillips said. Sometimes they are pedestrians who linger in a particular spot; or they may be a garbage truck driver parked in an unusual spot.

"As I drive my ambulance, if I see something funny I'll bang on the gates and get the guards out," he said.

Usually, the observers are simply chased off. He said he does not know if any are detained.

As is reflected in nightly news reports, Iraqis themselves are becoming the favored targets for insurgent attacks. Phillips and his comrades occasionally get caught up in those attacks.

"We're next to an Iraqi target that they like to hit," he said. "They bomb us with mortars and rockets. It's mostly stray.

"It's a pretty rare occurrence that they try to attack us (directly)," he noted.

Attacking Iraqis is simply a lower-risk proposition for the insurgents.

Phillips said he was surprised to see a large number of foreign mercenaries working for coalition forces in Iraq.

These include Nepalese Gurkhas -- legendary fighting men who served the British Empire for more than a century.

"They're special forces types; they're very tough and intimidating," Phillips said. "They protect the (coalition) civilians and palaces and stuff."

Phillips said he believes the 12 Nepalese "contractors" who were executed by insurgents recently were mercenaries.

There are also Chilean mercenaries. They are called Ali Babas by the populace, Phillips said, because the populace considers them thieves.

The mercenaries also have access to female "comfort workers" Phillips said. He does not know where the women come from, though their guards are Filipino, he said. The women never talk, according to the sergeant. The men speak for them.

Phillips acknowledged that he and his comrades are glad in a sense that the mercenaries are there because they do jobs that would otherwise fall to overworked troops.

Phillips also noted that there are also American security contractors at work in Iraq that don't behave like the others he calls mercenaries.

"They're very legitimate," he said. "They don't go out and steal stuff and have comfort workers or anything like that."

Phillips said that morale among the troops fluctuates, often with the casualty rate.

He said there are all varieties of opinions among the soldiers about their mission. Some are for it; some think it's a war against Islam, some think it's a war to help Halliburton. In all cases, the unit works together so that the soldiers can do their job and make it out safely.

"It seems like an endless cycle," Phillips said. "It seems like most people are just doing their time to get out."

Phillips, who enlisted in 2001, prior to the 9-11 attacks, said he was "neutral" on the question of whether he would do it again, having had the experience of war. He does not plan to re-enlist.

He said that when he initially went into Iraq "I thought, like most American people, that there was a high probability that they had chemical weapons (based on Saddam Hussein's prior acts)."

In fact, the personnel on his chemical team were terribly frightened at the start of the invasion, because they thought the weapons would be used. After four months without turning anything up, doubts crept in.

"We also realized that most of the contractors were from Texas and we started thinking maybe this wasn't real, that maybe it's just an economic or political thing," he said.

Phillips questions why contractors such as oil field firefighters from other states besides Texas are not in action (as far as he sees), since all states have troops on the line in the field.

Phillips assumed the U.S. would take on North Korea immediately after Iraq, to eliminate Weapons of Mass Destruction.

However, he said, "equal treatment for the same offense doesn't seem to apply."

Phillips believes American citizens should be asking questions about the war and particularly about the role of contractors in Iraq.

He noted that, if everything is on the up-and-up, "that will come out."

"Maybe I'm disappointed that Americans are not more agitated and asking more questions," he said.