Active Unit News

4-18-03
Children Reaching Out to Wary U.S. Troops
By Dionne Searcey
Staff Correspondent
April 18, 2003, 7:00 AM EDT
Safwan, Iraq -- A young boy clutching a dark object along the roadside cocked his arm back and aimed for a U.S. Army truck cruising down Highway 1.
"What's he got there?" said Sgt. Curtis Hudson, the truck's driver. Fearing a grenade attack, he reached for his machine gun.
Suddenly, the maroon object was airborne, sailing past the soldier in the passenger seat of the truck's cab and plopping down on the console. Everyone in the truck gasped, then stared at it. Hudson picked it up. It was a paperback, inexplicably, Dorland's Pocket Medical Dictionary, 24th Edition.
"I've actually been wanting one of those," Hudson said, and tucked the book into a seat pocket before he drove on toward Baghdad.
With warnings of guerrilla attacks by civilians fresh in their minds, edgy soldiers are traversing the highways of Iraq this week in convoys of trucks loaded down with fighting machines that pack massive firepower. Children line the same roads, blowing kisses, holding peace signs and begging for food and water.
For many Iraqis in small villages in the south, these soldiers who slow or stop their vehicles along the road to Baghdad might offer the only contact they will ever have with Americans. And likewise, the children, many of them dirty and hungry, might end up the sole diplomats for their country for the group of soldiers shuttling fighters and their equipment north.
"Yes, Bush!" one boy said to a cluster of Army drivers stopped to fix a blown tire. The soldiers smiled. "That makes you feel good," said one of the men.
As soon as they hear the rumble of the slow-moving trucks, children stream from square brick houses at every town to walk alongside the giant heavy equipment transporters.
"Mister, mister! Water, water," they shout and hold up empty packets of Meals Ready to Eat.
The soldiers offer them cheese tortellini and meat loaf in gravy, yet rarely give up sunglasses and watches, both of which are popular requests. But they readily change dollars for dinars, which feature a picture of Saddam Hussein and are prized as souvenirs.
Some drivers ignore the children; Hudson waves at all of them. He was a little annoyed when he passed a group of young men toting flags who ignored him. "No warm and fuzzies from them," he said.
He leaned out the window of his truck on a recent trip and tossed a red bag of Skittles candy to a cluster of boys.
"I throw out a couple of MREs," said Hudson, 30. "I don't feed the ones who beg."
Other soldiers have developed strategies for feeding the children. One said he hands meals only to little girls. Another said he likes to pitch meal packets to groups of boys and watch them fight for it. Earlier this week, two boys could be seen kicking and punching a smaller boy who happened to catch one.
Some gifts from soldiers are less desired.
"What is this?" one boy asked, holding a mini-bottle of Tabasco sauce that comes in the MREs.
When told it was bad, he chucked it into the road. He figured out on his own the used moist towelette he'd been given also was worthless.
Hudson and other drivers said the children make them nervous. They swarm too close to the trucks, which are difficult to control while pulling large trailers. Having been ordered to be wary of civilians, soldiers are suspicious of every person, regardless of age. Most of the convoys lack an Arabic translator.
Sgt. Jason Crosby, who is part of the Army's 4th Infantry Division, said he practices the four S's in handling the children: Shout at them, show them his weapon, shove them out of the way and, as a last resort, shoot them.
"I don't want to shoot a kid," he said, adding that so far he hadn't.
The kids, on the other hand, seem fearless.
Many drivers had been warned about Safwan, a border town near Kuwait where the cease-fire agreement was signed after the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Officers told their soldiers that the children there have been lying in front of the trucks so they would stop, then daringly climb aboard the trailers, taking boxes of water bottles and food and anything else that wasn't bolted down. One driver said he was whacked in the face a week ago by a child wielding a lead pipe.
So when a convoy entered the city limits on a recent trip, soldiers clutched their machine guns and pointed them out the windows.
A boy dressed all in white jumped in front of Hudson's truck, planted himself and spread his arms to stop it. Slowly and deliberately, Hudson kept going. It seemed the boy disappeared under the hood of the truck, but he had stepped aside at the last minute.
"There weren't as many kids out there today," Hudson said. "Still enough to tick you off."
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