Free Embedded by Wesley R. Gray Page A

expensive technology), command wires are an insurgent favorite. The added bonus of CWIEDs for insurgents is that they eliminate the issue of accidentally blowing up their neighbors. Yet there are drawbacks to CWIEDs. Insurgents have to sit and wait for a target, which takes time and manpower, not to mention that sitting in the searing heat for hours on end is no fun. Also, CWIEDs are difficult to hide—concealing two thousand meters of copper wire is not easy!
    The final category of IED is the RCIED, also an insurgent favorite, consisting of explosives connected to a modified electronic receiving device. Examples of RCIEDs receiving devices include Sanyo base stations,cell phones, and Motorola radios. These devices can be programmed to detonate explosives at the insurgent’s desired time. The RCIED is the lazy man’s IED. Imagine an insurgent sitting on his patio smoking his hookah pipe. When he sees a convoy passing a few miles away, he dials a special code on his cell phone and detonates the IED, goes back into his house, collects a five hundred dollar check from Al Qaeda, and takes a nap as if nothing ever happened. The chances of the Marines finding this guy? Zero.
    What the insurgents can achieve with IEDs is amazing. Roughly 20 percent of every American’s tax bill goes to the defense budget. And yet a bunch of relatively uneducated sheepherders with twenty bucks can kick our asses all over Iraq. Luckily a new electronic countermeasure device called the Chameleon is now employed on every Humvee in Al Anbar. At one hundred thousand dollars per Chameleon, these devices are worth every penny. The Chameleon blocks every radio-controlled device. What this means in Al Anbar is that the RCIED threat is gone. The insurgents are left with the PPIED or the CWIED, both of which are difficult to emplace and are easily seen. Because of the Chameleon the challenge of emplacing IEDs has become more difficult for the insurgents.
    The Leave Run Process
    After checking that our Chameleons were fully functional, we left for our first IED-dodging convoy to Al Asad Airbase, the “Club Med” of Al Anbar Province, located thirty-five miles south of Haditha Dam. The mission was to conduct a leave run (“leave” is the military term for vacation). I am still trying to figure out the peculiarities of how the leave run process works. Apparently everyone in the IA works twenty days and then takes ten days of leave to see their families. This is the standard set by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. The Iraqi army makes the French work schedule look like a Chinese sweatshop.
    Every ten days a leave run was required. All jundi going on leave from 2nd Brigade, 7th Division Iraqi army, which included our battalion in the Haditha Triad as well as battalions in Hit (an insurgent hotbed forty miles southeast of Haditha) and Rawah (a small town located thirty miles west of the Triad), converged at the 2nd Iraqi Brigade headquarters camp on Al Asad Airbase. From there the jundi were jammed onto civilian buses, integrated into a U.S. military convoy, and moved southeast from Al Asad, where the convoy picked up other IA soldiers going on leave from various divisions in Al Anbar.
    The buses moved through some of the more treacherous areas in Al Anbar Province. Their first “scenic” city along the drive was Ramadi, which was followed by another “tourist attraction,” Fallujah. If the buses survived they skirted south of Baghdad and moved south toward Najaf, the final destination. Najaf is a large city in southern Iraq and is midpoint between Baghdad and Basrah. It is a reasonable destination for our brigade, as more than 90 percent of the soldiers in 2nd Brigade are Shia Muslims from the southern areas of Iraq.
    Under the current method of operations this generous leave schedule means every ten days the MiTTs are risking their lives so the jundi can see their families every twenty days. Remarkably, Iraqis were angry