Under the Steel Rain: Life at Camp 'Dirty Bird'

Forward Operating Base Eagle is just three blocks east of the teeming Shiite slums of Sadr City.

At 37, Spc. Eric Herron is one of the oldest men in his company -- something he's unlikely to forget.

"Yeah, he was in the Army when Jesus was a corporal," quips Sgt. Ruiz. "He pulled KP [mess hall duty] for the Last Supper."

Herron laughs at the frequent digs at his age. But he is better known at Forward Operating Base Eagle for something few joke about: surviving mortar attacks.

Mortars fired by Shiite militia, mostly 60 or 82 mm, have narrowly missed killing him at least half a dozen times, including one day when he survived three very close calls.

FOB Eagle, nicknamed "Dirty Bird," is just three city blocks east of the teeming Shiite slums of Sadr City. It has been mortared more than any other base in

In May, two rounds fell next to the Humvee that Herron had just parked and exited, peppering the vehicle with shrapnel and hitting the still-warm driver's seat.

"It was close enough for me to hear that bumblebee buzz," says Herron, "when shrapnel whizzes by you."

Herron was headed to another location when he stopped to talk with a colleague. A third mortar round dropped nearby. He was shocked to see where it landed: the walk-up window at the motor pool where he was headed.

Later in the afternoon, a fourth round fell nearby while he was standing outside his barrack's door.

"I decided to spend the rest of the day inside," Herron says dryly.

Herron isn't alone in his experiences. When 400 mortars land in and around a base only about a square kilometer in size, nearly everyone has a story. Remarkably, it's a story they've all lived to tell.

There have been injuries, however. The most serious was only a week ago when a barrage of mortars rained on a large tin-roof maintenance building. One of them pierced the roof and exploded below, injuring seven soldiers. Funding for a new reinforced roof was quickly approved following the incident.

"The worst," says Herron, "is when the first one hits. Then you know there's more coming."

Sgt. Robert Skinner agrees.

"You'd almost prefer to get hit by the first one," Skinner says, "because after that one you really don't know which way to run."


"I watched as one of them flamed up and the shrapnel flew by," he says, "and when I turned to walk the rest of the way to my barracks the last one hit."

It was 3 a.m. when Sgt. Daniel Wood returned to the base from a late-night mission. On his way back to the barracks, three mortars trailed him from a distance of 80 feet, 30 and then 25.
The last mortar was just 15 feet away. A small tractor absorbed most of the shrapnel, likely saving Wood's life. Shaken and unable to sleep afterwards, he spent the rest of the night trying to walk off the adrenaline rush.

Soldiers aren't the only ones in danger. Civilian employees of Kellog, Brown & Root, which provides many of the civilian services on the base, also are at risk. Many food service employees, mostly foreign workers from poor nations such as the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh, say they're very frightened by the mortars.

One man says he sleeps on the ground, pulling sandbags around him. Although the mortars haven't gotten him yet, the sand fleas have. He shows me red bites on his arms.

Four Philippine workers were killed in April at the largest Army supply base in Iraq when insurgent rockets hit their living quarters at Camp Anaconda.

But the camp isn't surrounded completely by hostility.

At dusk in Guard Tower 7, soldiers watch Iraqi boys play soccer less than a hundred yards away. Some Iraqi civilians even live in shacks right next to massive walls surrounding the base.

"Hi, Nora," one of the soldiers says, waving to a shy 10-year-old Iraqi girl who pops her head out from behind a sheet covering the opening to a mud and clapboard shack.

"Hi, Michael," she says in a high-pitched voice, waving then quickly ducking back inside.

Inside the Tactical Operations Center on the base the mood isn't as light. Cpt. Steven Price points to a mass of green dots overlapping each other like a messy pile of poker chips on a map showing where the base is located. Each dot represents a mortar attack; there are 60 green dots so far.

"It's frustrating," says Price, "because we can't really return fire. The area around us is mostly urban and the risk of collateral damage is too high."

Instead, the the 1st Cavalry tries spot the mortar flash, thens send out a quick reaction force to find the shooter. But by the time they get there, he's usually gone.

"They shoot and scoot," says Price. "They don't stay anywhere long enough for us to get to them."

"They" refers to the Shiite militia associated with Muqtada al-Sadr, son of the city's namesake and the radical cleric who the coalition tried to arrest for the murder of another cleric. His Mahdi Army is made up of mostly of poor and disenfranchised Shiites from Sadr City.

Sadr's men were part of the bloody twin insurgent uprisings in April in which Shiites in southern Iraq and Sunnis in Fallujah battled U.S. troops. During that period, Shiites in Sadr City had their own less-publicized rebellion, firing rocket propelled grenades and small arms at any U.S. military vehicle that attempted to enter the city. They also launched hundreds of mortars and rockets into nearby U.S. Army bases. Because it's closest to Sadr City, the "Dirty Bird" got it the worst.

Sadr, however, switched gears with just a few weeks before the transfer of sovereignty, saying he would support the interim government and was going to form a political party to participate in upcoming elections. Local Sadr City mosques, often used to mobilize the populace against the coalition, are now telling people not to attack the U.S. military, Iraqi police or the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

Perhaps because of that, the "steel rain" of April and May has tapered off a bit. But no one's taking off their raincoats yet.

Even in the blazing 110 degree heat, soldiers here are still under orders to wear body armor and Kevlar anytime they walk outside the safety of a building.

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