The men sat against the high block wall which separated the filthy street from the dooryard of the residence in Big Barwanah.  They sat on plastic chairs and wooden crates and the trunk of a date palm felled many years ago.  This was their daily ritual in the absence of gainful employment; to sit and watch the activities that transpired in the small village that was little more than a cay in an ocean of palm trees. 

            They smoked cigarettes and spit on the ground and ignored the women as they walked by carrying the 20-liter jugs of water from the canal that skirted the edge of town.  That was their daily ritual, their beastly burden; to bring water from the canal twice a day as their homes had no other source.

            They gave up long ago trying to keep the mud off of their black abayas and they only avoided the small, open sewer trench that ran through the middle of the street by accident.  They spoke in hushed whispers and it was only when they passed the group of men that they fell silent and covered their faces with the loose ends of their black hajabs.

            This was a scene that had probably played out daily for centuries and it would probably play out for centuries to come.  The only difference today was that the village crawled with soldiers and Strykers and the sky thundered with aircraft.

            This was just one of many operations stemming from Wolf Pack Harvest; it was a 48-hour clearing operation that focused on two small villages on the western edge of the Bread Basket.  In many ways the villages of Big Barwanah and its neighbor to the south, Little Barwanah, represent the past, the present and the future of this troubled country.  The two villages are a microcosm of sectarian violence, a controlled experiment in the natural selection of religious intolerance.

            Separated by a mere 200 meters and a swampy palm grove, the two villages have withdrawn into citadels of hatred, violence and distrust, leaving scores dead or wounded and the infrastructure badly crippled.  In the absence of security from the Iraqi government or US forces for more than 18 months, the Sunnis of Big Barwanah fell under the influence of Al Qaeda and the Shia of Little Barwanah under that of the Mahdi Army.

            The villagers shot each other, mortared one another and engaged in kidnap and murder in the name of their respective religious sects.  The swampy, no-man’s land in between the villages was laced with anti-personnel mines and the water and electrical facilities that serviced both, were sabotaged.  The roads leading to the villages were seeded with dozens of deep-buried IEDs and illegal checkpoints deterred travel across the religious fault line.

            In the village of Big Barwanah, the violence wasn’t just reserved for the other side; AQI imposed Sharia Law and enforced it with methodical cruelty.  Women were forced to keep their faces covered at all times.  People were not allowed to smoke or play music or watch television.  One young man said he owned a store nearby that sold game stations and electronics and AQI forced him to close his business.  Another young man said he was kidnapped and beaten for having a picture of his girl friend, on the back of which she had written some endearing statement. 

            Many of the high, mud walls that lined the streets were almost completely riddled with bullets except for several eerie voids in the shapes of human torsos.  The few residents that eventually warmed-up to our presence that first day, spoke of public executions and beatings carried out under the banner of Sharia Law.

            Our mission was to clear every home in both villages of all weapons and establish order.  I moved with Recon Platoon from Hammer Company and the recent loss of their fellow comrades still weighed heavily upon the unit.  Our tried and true routine of good cop/tough cop continued to be our modus operandi throughout the mission.

            On the morning of the second day as we surveyed the mine field between the two villages, an eerie wailing began to emerge from nearby Little Barwanah.  The wailing preceded a screeching sermon from the Imam broadcasting through the loud speakers mounted to the minarets of the village mosque.  The screeching and wailing built to a perpetual crescendo; an intensity that seemed impossible to top but somehow it grew.

            As we stood there in the cold, morning air, we could just make out the procession through the fog that rose from the swampy palm grove.  Hundreds of mourners marched through the streets and screamed and wailed ever louder as the Imam built the frenzy the way a conductor builds a symphony.

            Women knelt in the mud, beat their chests with their fists and cried as if they had just lost a child.  Men walked as if possessed, slapping their faces and clawing their chests with their fingernails.  Some had small, beaded, leather whips with which they drew the blood from their own backs as they screamed and wailed to the cacophony that pierced the morning air.

            At several times during the hour-long ceremony, the generator that powered the loud speakers died and had to be restarted; the power was interrupted but the spectacle went undisturbed.  It was the Shia observance of Ashura, a festival mourning the death of Husain, the grandson and heir apparent to the prophet Muhammad.  It was a scene that played out in hundreds of Shia villages across Iraq that day but I could not imagine a more surreal vantage point from to which to observe it.

            Aside from the proximity to its Shia nemesis to the south, the village of Big Barwanah was unremarkable from every other community in the Bread Basket except in one unfortunate way – an unusually high concentration of mental retardation.  In a 50-meter radius we encountered at least nine young adults with severe cases of retardation. 

            What struck me as odd was the closeness in age of all the cases; they were all between 20 and 25.  I didn’t see any one with the affliction who was older than that and only a handful who were younger.  That fact that nine of the village’s 140 families dealt with this congenital disorder seemed to be a high ratio and that they were all of the same age, seemed to be more than just a random mutation of genes.

            What were the odds; between 20 and 25, both male and female?  I could only hypothesize that since many men in these small, isolated villages seem to have numerous children with multiple wives, perhaps the gene pool here had become a little clouded over time.  To put it bluntly, did the family trees resemble that of a date palm? 

            Or perhaps it was some kind of acute chemical or environmental pollution.  In spite of such a strong reliance on the plentiful bounty provided by nature, there seems to be little regard for the environment in Iraq.  There are no trash cans in the villages for the village itself is the dump.  Hand a child a piece of candy and he will promptly throw the wrapper on the ground as if it were nothing.  Household garbage is simply tossed in to the streets and alleys.  Broken-down automobiles are cannibalized and left to rust where they sit having drained their vital fluids directly on to the ground.

            The source of water for the villages here are the canals; the same canals which are the receptacle for human waste.  The same canals which are clogged by the flotsam and jetsam of a dozen villages along their course.  This, in addition to whatever chemical pollutants are dumped further upstream.

            But those conditions have always existed.  Why didn’t I see as many cases of retardation in children or in older adults?  Maybe the child mortality rate was higher now with the war than it was 20 or 30 years ago and perhaps it was higher still in generations past.  Or maybe whatever pollutants that caused the defects were purged from the system soon after being introduced.

            Days later we returned to the two villages with Iraqi and American physicians to perform a Combined Medical Engagement (CME).  The doctors examined patients, diagnosed illness and dispensed medication to over 500 people.  A CME is like a roving sick-call to treat minor injuries and illness with bandages and cough syrup.

            With the majority of the village’s population concentrated at the respective CMEs, I was able to see that my previous observation was partly incorrect.  At these two events, I could see numerous children, of all ages, afflicted with congenital physical and mental developmental problems.  It wasn’t just the nine young adults I had seen that first day in Big Barwanah; it was a score or more of children of all ages from both villages. 

            There was little care we could provide with a one-day CME from the back of a truck except refer them to long-term care at an inadequate hospital 25 kilometers away; and 25 kilometers can be a world away when you travel roads laced with IEDs. 

            The sad fact is that even long-term medical care is helpless to make any real difference to those afflicted or their families.  Long-term medical care can not go back in time and change the circumstances that created the disorder to begin with.

            Maybe in that sense the CME is symbolic of our efforts in Iraq from the beginning; trying first-aid cures on a country and a culture we perceive as being congenitally ill.  To wear-out a well-worn cliché even further, perhaps we’re trying to put a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.

            Is a temporary, increased presence in a village really going to change a thousand years of religious intolerance and hatred?  Can an American soldier really be expected to reason with a man who beats himself to the point of bleeding over the death of someone 1300 years ago?

            In spite of our good intentions and best efforts, a hundred years from now men will still be sitting on that fallen palm trunk as women carry water from the sewage and garbage filled canals of Little and Big Barwanah.

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