Free Embedded by Wesley R. Gray Page B

at their twenty-days-on, ten-days-off schedule and threatened to quit if they did not get their leave. This was ridiculous to us, considering all MiTT members were on tours ranging from seven to fifteen months.
    The leave process did not lend itself to minimizing risk for MiTT members or the IA. Leave operations were especially convoluted for our battalion, which was spread between five locations in the Triad. A MiTT joke was that the primary objective of the MiTT is not to train, support, and advise the IA on how to conduct counterinsurgency operations so we can leave Iraq but to gather jundi throughout the Triad so they can go home to see their families every twenty days.
    The easiest way to understand the leave process is to think of it as a school bus. The school bus gets the kids from school and drops them off at their bus stops. Similarly, the first stage of a leave convoy involved convoying to Al Asad to pick up Iraqi soldiers coming back from leave. We typically went one day prior to the jundi arriving and spent the night in Al Asad so we could take care of any business we needed to conduct there. The following day the jundi arrived, at about 0400 to 0500. After the Iraqis inventoried who was returning from leave, the convoy headed north, back toward Camp Ali (see map 2 ).
    Our first two stops on the route back to Camp Ali were Baghdadi, home of 3rd Iraqi Company, and Haqliniyah, 1st Iraqi Company’s base. In the respective locations we dropped off the jundi coming off leave and picked up jundi who were ready to go on leave. Essentially we were making a one-for-one jundi swap.
    Once we reached Camp Ali we offloaded everyone except for the jundi who were from 4th Iraqi Company, which was located on the Marine FOB (forward operating base, pronounced “faub”) in central Haditha. The convoy to Haditha was dangerous. By reforming a smaller convoy at Camp Ali that only consisted of the jundi that belonged to 4th Iraqi Company, our adviser team could minimize the number of vehicles and personnel in the convoy, thus lessening the exposure to the inevitable IED attacks on the route to Haditha.

    Map 2. Iraqi Army convoy operations during a leave period.
    Once the MiTT arrived at the Haditha FOB, we swapped the jundi and returned to Camp Ali. If the process already sounds complicated, stand by, it is not over. Once we returned to Camp Ali we had to do yet another convoy to Barwana, home to 2nd Iraqi Company. Barwana is on the eastern side of the Euphrates River about thirty miles from the dam. Because of the PPIED threat on the route to Barwana (which required a convoy to move slowly in order to spot pressure-plate switches), a convoy took two to three hours. Once we arrived at the Barwana FOB we again swapped jundi and brought them back to Camp Ali.
    In the end we dropped off all jundi coming off leave at their respective firm bases (dropped the kids off at their bus stops) and managed to collect all jundi going on leave at Camp Ali. Keeping track of the number of convoys thus far? We’re on eight, and we’re not done yet.
    The final stage in the leave process was to screen all the jundi going on leave for contraband and theft while at Camp Ali. Once they were screened we loaded them like cattle into the back of flatbed Leylands and conducted yet another convoy to Al Asad to drop them off at brigade headquarters so they could get on buses there and begin their fourteen-hour journey to Najaf. Once they were delivered to brigade headquarters, the MiTT returned to Camp Ali that same night (see photo 7 ).
    Leave runs were exhausting and exposed MiTT members to extreme danger. In the end, on a single leave run, an MiTT conducted ten combat convoys, drove 250 miles on some of the highest IED threat routes in Iraq, and traveled over twelve hours in a Humvee in less than a thirty-six hour period. I hoped the IA appreciated what we were doing for them.
    Leave Run Execution
    Route Bronze is the path we chose for our