Necessary Roughness

For Veteran’s Day I was able to take advantage of an opportunity to interview a friend of the family who had been home for rest and recreation.

Dan at NR: Just a reminder, anything you say can and will be used against you.
Sgt Bulmer: Well, that’s good, because that’s the stuff that I do, so I should know.
DNR: You’re in media relations?
SB: No, intelligence.
DNR: What is your rank?
SB: E-5, Sergeant.
DNR: And you’ve been in the army how long?
SB: 3 years, 8 months.
DNR: That’s a long time. Does it go by any quicker over there?
SB: This whole thing has actually gone by quickly.
DNR: What caused you to join?
SB: Honestly, 9/11 did.
DNR: 9/11? But you joined what, a year after 9/11, then?
SB: Yeah. I had to do a couple of things before I joined. I had to have eye surgery, because I don’t want to wear their eye glasses.
DNR: You did radial keratonomy?
SB: I did LASIK. After that, they made me wait so long until I could join.

DNR: Was intelligence something you chose?
SB: When you go in, you take an ASVAB. They basically print all the jobs that you are best suited for. A whole bunch of them popped up, fourteen…
DNR: Well, that’s good!
SB: I won’t say I was the smartest in the pack, but…that just happened to be one of them that popped up that tickled my fancy.
DNR: Where did you go for basic training?
SB: Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
DNR: I know where that is, I went to school to Rolla. I’ve been to the P/X there.
SB: I’m at Fort Lewis now, in Washington state. It is absolutely fantastic for an outdoors guy. You can go camping and stuff.
DNR: You do a lot of…woods training up there? (at this point I’m thinking, why, when there’s no woods in Iraq)
SB: I don’t. It’s just a good place for a readily deployable unit. We can get on a ship, or we can fly out of McChord Air Force Base. We fly out of McChord everywhere we go.
DNR: I travel a lot, and I can’t imagine you have much better than Southwest Airlines for that long a trip, do you?
SB: The trip over wasn’t very fun, because you have all your gear. You have to wear your vest, your weapon, and all that stuff. They stack all the stuff in the aisles. They chartered a plane from United, if I remember right. After making pit stops, you meet in Kuwait. We get our stuff together and spend a week there just to get acclimated to the weather.
DNR: Just a week for that? It takes me that long just to get used to Houston!
SB: When we went to Kuwait, it was in June, and it was about 130°.
DNR: And you’re in full battle fatigue.
SB: Yes.

DNR: What were your duties in Mosul?
SB: I have a couple of duties. I’m the brigade security manager, responsible for security clearance. That’s kind of a desk job. The actual battle, or NCO, job that I have is, we work at brigade level, which is the highest that we have in Mosul, and we battle track. We’re analysts for the entire brigade…
DNR: That means lots of computer gadgets and video screens…
SB: …and a lot of that stuff I can’t really get in to. (laughter) I’d have to put the cuffs on myself. We predict or forecast what’s going to happen in the next 24-48 hours, what the enemy’s going to do, who they are, what tier they are, a Tier 3 versus a Tier 1.
DNR: So you prioritize your targets.
SB: Yes, like Bin Laden would be a Tier 1.
DNR: Sadr, number 2?
SB: Yeah. We have different targets, too. We have Al Qaeda targets, which are number one for everybody, but then we also have targets for just our brigade, our AO (area of operations). We have a tracking roster that’s pages long.
DNR: Are you doing the same thing when you get to Baghdad?
SB: Everything will be the same because our entire brigade is moving. I’ve been the security manager ever since we deployed, and I’ll stay until we get out.
DNR: Was there ever a typical day in the life?
SB: Our hours just vary. We talk to our officers who work with us, and I’m the NCOIC, the Noncommissioned Officer In Charge of my shop. We all got together and decided what shifts we were going to work. Typically we work 12 and 12, and my shift is from noon to midnight. After that we have 5-6 hours of security manager work. It’s a really long day.

DNR: Do you have much involvement with the press? Are there any embeds?
SB: We have a military reporter; I think she’s Air Force. In the TOC that I work, the Tactical Operations Center, where the brigade command and everybody hangs out, we have Army, Navy, and Air Force guys. We use their aerial assets, such as helicopters. She does various reports on certain things and puts her spin on whatever she needs to put her spin on.
DNR: What do you like about your duties the most? (SB hesitates) You can’t say.
SB: A lot of the stuff that we work with is really cool. Where you’re not deployed, you don’t get to see a lot of high-speed stuff. Over there, it’s a little different.You get to see a lot of cool stuff, and you actually get to work with it.
DNR: Were you out on the battlefield any?
SB: No, my job doesn’t allow that. We carry our weapons everywhere we go. I rarely pull guard because of my job, but when someone pulls guard, they are locked and loaded.
DNR: Did you have any situations like the Muslim soldier who blew himself up in the barracks?
SB: Not this time, but last time. I wasn’t deployed at the time.
DNR: Were there special rules because you were in Mosul? I would think Baghdad would be more intense.
SB: Baghdad is much more violent.
DNR: Did you get any Saddam info? (pause) Okay. Well I wanted to ask you because I’ve read Robin Moore’s book, Hunting Down Saddam.
SB: I was not one of the guys who found Saddam; however, we get information, not only information that we’ve collected but that other people have collected throughout the entire country and throughout the entire world. They put it on various databases, and we have access to all of that. I think it was our brigade that directed the infantry guys where to go.
DNR: I read the tales of all the data sifting.
SB: It’s numbing. Every day you have to go in and look through them.

DNR: I know when you’re over there, you see all the media that comes out of the area. I know from the web reporting and the military blogs that things are different than what the big media chooses to report. What would you say would be the biggest media distortion?
SB: That things are not going well.
DNR: How do you define that?
SB: We get every single news station over there. We have AFN, Armed Forces Network. It has a lot of the major news networks: Fox, CNN, MSNBC, all those big ones. We also receive a couple of magazines and newspapers. Every single day, we read the bad stuff. Everything is negative.
DNR: Is there a single event that sticks out in your mind?
SB: No, it’s just the same thing day to day, this person blew himself up and killed so many people. Our FOB (forward operating base) got attacked on 12 Oct, and I was there. They attacked with an unprecedented 150 bad guys, a lot of people for Al Qaeda to coordinate. Not only did our FOB repel them (that was expected), but the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police detained 85 of those 150 bad guys. That’s huge. We got all these weapons caches. That’s a big deal, because now they have to wait until Syria, Iran, or whoever traffics more weapons to them. That’s a positive thing for the country of Iraq and for their internal security forces. You never see the good stuff that happens.
DNR: Were there any good things that you were shocked to see in the media?
SB: I have not. It might be out there but I haven’t seen it.
DNR: Do you see any of the big photojournalists over there, such as Michael Yon?
SB: No. A lot of those guys want to go to Baghdad because that’s where the action is and that’s where the news is. Baghdad, for reasons that are known above my pay grade, has restraints on where they can and can’t go, and what they can and can’t do. There’s a Sadr City, which is in the northeastern sector of Baghdad, that’s just a bad place. Before a Striker brigade got there, the military wasn’t even allowed to go into Sadr City because it was so bad.
DNR: Sounds like they should just glass that place.
SB: That’s what I said. (Laughter) I told my lieutenant colonel, “JDAM, JDAM that place.” He laughed, but I was serious.

DNR: Speaking of higher-ups, you told me on the phone that the troops liked Secretary Rumsfeld.
SB: Yes. The ones I’ve talked to, certainly.
DNR: You’ve talked to people who dealt with him directly?
SB: Two that I know of have. My colonel and my lieutenant colonel have both talked to him because they are both brigade commanders. My lieutenant colonel, who is the XO (executive officer) and third in command of our brigade, is very personable and will shoot the breeze with you. He talks about that sort of thing, and they seem to have a positive attitude towards him. That could be a smoke screen or just them being professional, I don’t know.
DNR: We get a lot of feedback here about people not knowing what the mission is in Iraq. Did you have a defined mission? Did you know what it was?
SB: The overall mission in Iraq, that’s on them (the higher-ups). Our brigade’s mission, and each brigade has a mission, that mission is straight up. Our mission is very clear. Nobody has any questions about it: stop the bad guys. We know how to do it. We listen, we look, we go out on cordon and knock on doors, we search houses, we set up booby traps, you name it, we do it, coordinating with Iraqi security forces, their police and army. It’s not simple, but the mission is very clear. Nobody ever in our brigade questions what they’re doing. Maybe why they’re doing it, perhaps. (chuckle) Everybody understands what they are supposed to be doing.

DNR: Were you over there when they had any entertainers? USO?
SB: There was a fellow that came, I think it was DMX.
DNR: Oh, the rapper?
SB: Yeah, the rapper. And there was somebody else too, maybe a country singer.
DNR: Let’s see, Toby Keith’s been over there.
SB: Toby Keith.
DNR: I’m not even a country fan, and I respect that.
SB: It’s nice to see those guys come over, really. I know there were some cheerleaders that went down to Kuwait, too.

DNR: Do you still continue your marksman training?
SB: Yes, we carry our guns everywhere we need to go.
DNR: What marksman certification do you have?
SB: “Expert”. You have to hit targets between 50 and 300 meters, 38 out of 40 times for Expert. Marksman is the lowest, 22 out of 40. If you pay attention to the people that are instructing, it’s very simple. Everything in the army has guidelines. If you follow their instruction, you can do it just like that.
DNR: Seems like the army wants everyone to excel. Are there incentives for individuals?
SB: Yes, there are incentives. The better you do at certain things, which is why I made E-5 in 2½ years. Typically you don’t make E-5 for four or five years. If you can fire, if you’re proficient at your job, if you have discipline or can instill discipline, you make rank a lot faster. Right now I can shoot, up to 100 meters away, repeatedly, a Gatorade cap.
DNR: I know that everyone is issued standard weapons, but are there things you do to make it your own?
SB: Yes. Everyone’s sight picture is different, and they adjust their sights according to how they hold the weapon. My weapon is adjusted to me. If someone took my weapon and fired it, they’d hit the same spot repeatedly, but it wouldn’t be on the bull’s eye.

DNR: Where did you do AIT?
SB: Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Pretty close to Tucson.
DNR: What’s your favorite MRE?
SB: Sloppy Joes. And the MRE’s have gotten much better even in the past 3½ years I’ve been in. The mac and cheese was not good years ago. Now, especially if you have Tabasco sauce, it’s golden. Food is better at the FOB. Sunday we have steak, lobster, and crab legs.
DNR: Do you still do Physical Training?
SB: My shop is so small that we do it on our own.
DNR: Yearly physicals, still?
SB: Mosul is more strict, every three months.
DNR: Did you freeze when you came back?
SB: Yes. It’s not bad there now, the highs are in the 60s, and it gets down to the 40s at night. It’s rainy now.
DNR: When does your tour end?
SB: It was supposed to end in June 2007, but they’ve extended me to September 2007. Three months stablization.
DNR: What number brigade are you in?
SB: I belong to 3^rd Brigade, 2^nd Infantry Division.
DNR: 2^nd ID? We hear about the vaunted 4^th ID. Are you jealous? Do they get all the cool hardware?
SB: We do OK. (laughter) We’re a Striker Brigade. We were the first Striker Brigade in the army, ever. We don’t get first pick, but we get all the new stuff. Some new stuff we got includes armor that stops rocket propelled grenades from tunneling first before exploding, which keeps us safer. We were the first ones to get them. Our intel stuff is pretty high-speed, NSA-type stuff.

DNR: How long are your tours?
SB: One year.
DNR: You re-upping?
SB: Not this time. I need to be back home with my boys.

Thank you, Sergeant Bulmer, for your time and service. I thoroughly enjoyed the interview and hope you did too.

Happy Veterans Day!