Springfield State Journal Register October 19, 2003 A1 Daily Operations   On Patrol with the 233rd in Baghdad BY MARCUS STERN Copley News Service BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the real world, Jeff Royer is a four-year veteran of the Springfield Police Department. John Gillette is with the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office. But this isn't the real world. It's Baghdad. It's hot. And it's night. From his vantage point near the banks of the Tigris River, Capt. Royer, 34, commands the 233rd Military Police Company, a unit of the Illinois Army National Guard. The MPs were deployed to Baghdad from Springfield to maintain order after Saddam Hussein's fall. Gillette is one of Royer's five platoon sergeants. Last Tuesday night, the two men sat on a veranda within their compound in central Baghdad. The next morning, part of Gillette's platoon had been ordered to patrol the city, and the two were worried. Wednesday would be a major anniversary of Saddam's outlawed Baath Party. On the same day, new Iraqi currency would begin replacing the old money bearing Saddam's face. The sometimes-volatile holy season of Ramadan was approaching. And there were "other issues," Royer said. It was enough to prompt Royer to give Gillette an order he hadn't given during the almost six months the 233rd has been patrolling Baghdad. "Issue bayonets," he said quietly in the dark. Most of the soldiers in the 233rd haven't seen their families since Feb. 6, the day they were activated. That's more than eight months ago. The unit flew into Kuwait City, Kuwait, on April 6 and drove into Baghdad April 21. Now, even though the Army has begun rotating out of Iraq, these "citizen soldiers" expect to remain deployed in Baghdad until April. That would mean 15 months away from home. The 233rd, which has an authorized strength of 180, draws its soldiers from across Illinois. But most are from Springfield, the city the 233rd calls home. They reflect a cross-section of central Illinois. A few faces are old and grizzled. Others are young and fresh. Some are male, some female. Some are from the city and others from the country. Some are college graduates, others aren't. They're law enforcement officers, nursing students, teachers, carpenters and electricians. One drove a forklift. Another ran his own garden nursery. But here in Baghdad, they're all MPs, with M-16 rifles and body armor. With major combat still under way last April, they set off from Kuwait on Easter morning, making a two-day dash to Baghdad. They traveled in a convoy of 30 Humvees and five stocky, 21/2-ton cargo trucks known forever by the Army as "deuce and a halfs." When a flat tire halted the convoy, they took fire from a small village. "That was the fastest I think I ever changed a tire," said 1st Sgt. Robert Elmore, a Winchester resident who works as a state corrections officer in Springfield. As the 233rd's highest-ranking enlisted man, Elmore carries the respectful title of "Top." When the 233rd arrived in Baghdad, the unit found that almost all of the government buildings were a smoldering ruin. Gunfire and looting were rampant. Iraqis just were beginning to emerge from their homes in shock, without electricity, water or any means of communication. Their government was gone, and their meager economy had collapsed. Almost six months later, the water and power situation has improved but is still a problem. Children are back in school. And the economy is sputtering toward a start. The Iraqi resistance's near-constant sniper attacks have slackened. But they have been replaced by a smaller number of more sophisticated assaults. With devastating effectiveness, the resistance has begun using car bombs and improvised explosives to target coalition forces, the United Nations, the fledgling Iraqi police force, embassies, the foreign press and a mosque. The goal of the attacks is chaos. It's up to the 233rd to help contain it. Wednesday morning, Gillette set out with a squad of the third platoon, nicknamed the Hogs, on a daylong patrol of their assigned section of Baghdad. Their orders were to visit two Iraqi police stations they had helped establish and to patrol two banks involved in the currency exchange. As usual, they were in full battle dress when they left the compound, a condition they call "battle rattle." But for the first time since arriving in Baghdad, they also were wearing bayonets, ready to fix them to their M-16s. Gillette, 37 and heavily muscled, rode in the lead Humvee. Throughout the day, he would radio situation reports back to the company's Tactical Operations Center and bark orders to the two Humvees following him. His gunner, Spc. Stephanie Stretch, 20, of Springfield, stood in the turret and pivoted a heavy machine gun. Her squad assault weapon, or SAW, can spray 7.62-caliber bullets in every direction with lightning speed. Her face was soft and tanned under the hot sun. Brown locks curled from beneath her helmet. But behind her dark glasses, her watchful eyes were all business. In the second Humvee, Staff Sgt. James Batterson, a corrections officer from Loami, kept up a steady barrage of good-natured banter. In July and August, temperatures had reached 150 degrees, he said. "The people stationed on top of buildings would pour water on the roof and it would sizzle and evaporate just like that," he said, his cheek bulging with tobacco. In October, temperatures sometimes still top 100 degrees. Batterson, 34 and a father of three, had quit chewing tobacco awhile back, he said, but five weeks after the 233rd was activated, "I fell off the wagon." Their first stop was one of the police stations where they had helped train and equip new Iraqi police. Sandbags were piled high in the window of an office where they reviewed time cards and dealt with other administrative matters. The new Iraqi force of 21 officers and 35 patrolmen was up and running, policing a community of close to 1 million. But they have no bulletproof vests, only five cars and an extreme shortage of ammunition for the motley assortment of side arms the MPs had scavenged for them. The shortage was underscored when several Iraqi officers pulled the clips out of their weapons to show they contained one, two or three rounds. What bullets the officers had, they said, they bought from their own meager, unreliable paychecks. The next stop was a bank involved in the currency exchange. The 1st Infantry Division had set up concertina wire in front of the bank and had two Abrams tanks stationed there. Americans had feared rioting crowds, but only a few dozen people waited patiently in line outside the bank to trade old Iraqi currency for new. Batterson approached one of the infantrymen and quipped, "We're here to make sure you feel safe, because those two Abrams probably don't do it." Spc. Jeoff Clarkson, the driver of the patrol's second Humvee, stood nearby, surrounded by a group of children reaching out to touch his body armor. "I feel like I'm in a zoo sometimes," said the 28-year-old special education teacher from Mattoon. "The kids come up and want to pet the animal." As the patrol drove on, Stretch yelled from her position in the turret that she had heard the sound of gunfire. The patrol immediately set off to find its source. When they came upon the scene, witnesses said the shots had come from a corner house. Gillette led his squad into the building's courtyard. They found a large amount of blood in the driveway and several AK-47 shell casings. He ordered a portion of his patrol into the house, where they searched room by room. Eventually, they seized an AK-47 that still was hot from being fired. Still uncertain about what had happened, they reported a downed power line in front of the house and moved on to their next stop. Before getting there, however, they got an emergency call. A group of men with weapons had entered a hospital. The unit sped toward the hospital, driving their wide Humvees the wrong way up one-way streets and the wrong way around traffic circles, trying to sneak through the congested streets. At one point, they started the wrong way up an especially narrow one-way street already clogged with on-coming traffic. When one car was slow pulling out of their way, Gillette ordered his driver to plow through the offending Volkswagen. His driver complied, ramming the rear end of the car until their Humvee could pass. The second Humvee also plowed into the Volkswagen, ripping off its trunk. But the jagged metal of the car punched a hole in one of the Humvee's tires. With the flat tire shredded, smoking and flapping, the convoy continued on to the hospital. Once there, they found it had been a wild goose chase. The intruders with weapons actually had been Iraqi police. "This is what drives us crazy," Gillette said. Despite the job's intense daily frustrations and daunting challenges, most members of the 233rd say, on balance, they feel pride in their accomplishments here. They see their role as a quickly evolving hybrid between military and police. It is a role the United States and other nations will rely upon heavily as the post-Cold War era and war on terrorism unfold, they believe. And it's a specialized role they're helping invent. "I think we're making history here," Gillette said.