U.S. Army engineers turn to neighborhood restoration, helping Iraqi's repair a community soccer stadium May 15. (Photo courtesy of USACE)

Baghdad -- People swarm over the field inside a sports stadium. One cluster with rakes and shovels smoothes the ground while a pair of workers pulls a roller over it. Another cluster throws armloads of clothing into a waiting truck. At the side of the field, a vehicle-mounted loudspeaker sputters to life with lively Iraqi music. Outside the stadium, a street vendor pushes a cart with drinks and food. It feels like a community fair.

But look closer. The rakes-and-shovels crew is backfilling holes dug by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, which used the stadium as a training ground. The cast-off clothes are uniforms, and some of the workers wear the military headgear as if it were a trophy. Elsewhere, workers squatting on their haunches sweep out dusty piles of trash from long-abused rooms of the stadium. Others patch walls, replace door frames and carry in cement sacks from trucks backed up to the door.

And outside the stadium walls, a teeming, poverty-ridden urban neighborhood is even more densely packed for the day with Humvees, soldiers mounting security and playing with the neighborhood kids and a throng awaiting treatment at a four-seater dental clinic under a tent canopy.

Backfilling Republican Guard fighting positions and collecting cast off uniforms.

Welcome to Task Force Neighborhood.

On Monday evening, May 12, Col. Gregg Martin, commander of the 130^th Engineer Brigade, had received an assignment. Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps, in charge of Army operations in Iraq, wanted to make an immediate difference in the lives of the people in Baghdad’s poorest neighborhoods. Long neglected or actively repressed by Saddam’s regime, they now were despairing because their trash was gathering uncollected in the streets, their police force had vanished, or was powerless to protect them from crime, drains were backing up, pure water was impossible to find and many other things were just going wrong while the governing occupation authorities promised much, but delivered little improvement. Wallace’s assignment was for Martin, as the corp's engineer, to apply the Army’s engineering capabilities to help solve some of the people's problems.

"I want this to be a neighborhood strike force," Wallace said. To counter the impression that the authorities favored talking over doing, "we need to get Americans working with the Iraqi people. This an offensive action. We have the maneuverability to go anywhere we want to go in Baghdad. We want to exploit that." He wanted the project to start Thursday, May 15.

A meeting was quickly scheduled for Tuesday to plan the first task-force action. Wednesday was devoted to further refinement and rehearsal of the plan with V Corps staff members.

"Everyone wanted to say, ‘we’re moving too fast; we need more reconnaissance and planning,’ " says Martin. He answered that the operation would suffer paralysis by analysis, and offered what he calls the example of Legos.

"If you give a set of Lego blocks to a group of engineers and another to a group of kids, the engineers will draw up plans and designs and spend a lot of time preparing to do the job. The kids will just jump in and start building things. We need to be like those kids," he said. Armed with that logic and reinforced by the corps commanding general’s order for quick action, Martin carried the day.

At 7:00 a.m. Thursday, a platoon from the 94^th Engineer Battalion rolled out of its base at Baghdad International Airport to Hay al-Salam, a two-block "area of significance" selected by Wallace, to launch Task Force Neighborhood. It was the poorest, dirtiest, most neglected and disadvantaged Shi'i neighborhood he could find in a personal reconnaissance of the city.

To forestall possible security threats, the task force had not announced that it was coming. The platoon leader’s first task was to pay a visit to the area’s leaders to ask what problems in their neighborhood the engineers, equipped with bucket loaders, dump trucks, hand tools, work gloves and cash, could help to solve that day. While he did that, a loudspeaker mounted on a Humvee announced the task force’s presence and intentions to the neighborhood. A small crew of applicants emerged from the community and were hired for a day to clean the streets.

Locals hired on the spot help clean up their streets in Task Force Neighborhhood operation. (Photo courtesy of USACE)

Uncollected trash was the neighborhood’s most obvious problem. As it happened, the neighborhood also included the office of the sanitation director of one of Baghdad’s nine municipalities, analagous to boroughs of the City of New York. The director said he had been unable to pay his department’s workers, although he had the trucks and tools for them to do the work. "If you pay, they will work," he said. The next day, Lt. Col. Paul Grosskruger, 94^th Engineer Battalion commander, met with the director and made long-term arrangements for weekly payments so the trash pickup could continue until the civilian government could be reestablished.

An after-action review by task force participants that afternoon tallied the mission’s successes: 20 workers paid on the spot for work done that day, 200 tonnes of garbage and trash hauled away and 600 meters of street and two schools cleaned up. One of the most important achievements was completely off the balance sheet, says Martin: the Army had contradicted Iranian propaganda that the U.S. was in Iraq for its oil and cared nothing for its people. "Some kids told us they wanted to join the Army!" he exclaims.

Three days later, the 94^th conducted its second Task Force Neighborhood in Al Noor, a site selected by the 3^rd Infantry Division, which is occupying the city and has become intimately familiar with its neighborhoods through constant patrols. As in Hay al-Salam, the local people were friendly and the action managed to put more municipal employees back to work, Martin says. But added to this day’s effort were medical and dental clinics and a campaign to encourage people to notify the team of unexploded ordnance.

UXO, as it is known in the military trade, is a widespread postwar hazard. Searches have found huge weapons and munitions dumps stored in schools, hospitals and many other locations forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. Land mines, hand grenades, mortar and artillery ammunition, and innumerable other explosives, including bomblets from U.S. antipersonnel cluster bombs, can be found scattered throughout the country. The second Task Force Neighborhood distributed flyers warning children of the danger of UXO and encouraging people to tell task force members where the UXO is.

"That turned out to be a huge hit," says Martin. An explosive-ordnance-disposal (EOD) team removed UXO that could safely be moved. If it could not be safely moved, the team marked it and returned within 24 hours to blow it in place. "That was a big part of it–to show them direct, immediate results of action," Martin says.

Troops with Task Force Neighborhood collect unexploded ordnance… (Photo courtesy of USACE)

Results from the second day’s action included work payments to 50 people; removal of 360 tonnes of garbage, a bus and a car; joint patrols of military and local police and cleanup of a police station, a school, a playground, a sports complex and a public courtyard. In addition, the Engineers fabricated and installed two basketball hoops, volleyball nets and a court and repaired tables, benches and trash receptacles. As a bonus, the team was able to close an illegal weapons market. And more than 100 pieces of unexploded ordnance were removed and destroyed.

As Martin tells this story, he is still astonished at the reaction he heard from one Iraqi news reporter, who had begun his coverage of the story with professional detachment and a jaundiced eye. At the end of the day, Martin says, the reporter said to him, "This is incredible. No one has ever cared about this neighborhood before until you Americans came." It so impressed Martin that he wrote the comment verbatim in his day’s notes.

On Friday after the first Task Force Neighborhood, Martin, backed up by Wallace, briefed the corps’ division commanders on the project. Within two days, the 101^st Airborne Division in Mosul had launched its own Task Force Neighborhood, and other divisions, seeing its impact and encouraged by the corps commander, have since followed suit.

"This whole thing has come together better than we imagined," says Martin. "Each mission has had a life of its own, a personality of its own."

Since May 15, the 94^th Engineer Battalion has run a task force three times a week. The operation at the soccer stadium reopened that large sports complex to its surrounding neighborhood and inaugurated it with a pair of soccer matches between the locals and the Engineers, who lost, 3-0 and 2-0. Another project centered on assessing and meeting the needs of a hospital, while another cleaned up school buildings and furniture.

Most projects have aimed at mobilizing the energy, skills and talents of people to improve their own communities, with the Engineers providing heavy equipment, cash, security and extra hands as needed. "We’re just trying to jump-start them," says Martin. Under the previous regime, people were trained to wait for direction from above before acting, and taking initiative with others for local action was discouraged or even punished. Task Force Neighborhood works to reverse that training, and to encourage people to improve their own lives, within their means.

Martin says follow-on inspections of the streets cleaned in the first Task Force Neighborhood showed that some people had reverted to littering the street. But the trash pickup was continuing on schedule and, even more encouraging, people on the side streets were moving their trash onto the main street for pickup, thus cleaning streets untouched by the original project. An inspection of the school buildings found that the local people had kept the schools clean and on their own initiative were replacing light fixtures, ceiling fans and shelving.

The 3^rd ID recently selected one unusual target for Task Force Neighborhood–cleaning up the banking district. It’s not a residential neighborhood like the typical site, but was selected because it had been devastated in the looting and its restoration will have a wide effect on the city’s economic life.

As bucket loaders scooped trash and a crane lifted a car, a safe and the hulk of a truck onto lowboys for disposal, a crowd watched from a row of stores. Issam Al Bashir, owner of a women’s fashions shop, beamed, "It’s lovely, it’s great. We’re suffering from this rubbish."

Supply of liquefied petroleum gas is still tight, but the supply of gasoline has improved since the end of the war, he says. Electric service and security both have improved as well. "We can stay out till 9 p.m., no problem," he says. "We start to feel a bit relaxed." Lt. Col. Glenn Ayers, commander of the V Corps’ 9^th Psychological Operations Battalion, says his troops take advantage of such gatherings to measure the population’s attitudes. "Our soldiers are trained to wade into the crowds," he says.

The direct contact with local leaders is a huge benefit from Task Force Neighborhood. Maj. Bernie Lindstrom, 94^th Engineer Battalion’s chief of operations, says he was able to present a magnificently crafted Qur’an captured in the war to an imam, who reverently kissed it, then kissed the presenter and everyone in the presentation party. "If there is looting, the imam can stop it," says Lindstrom.

The Task Force Neighborhood idea has rapidly spread to the divisions in V Corps with Gen. Wallace’s strong encouragement, and it has taken forms appropriate to local needs. The 101^st Airborne Division, based in Mosul, has a Task Force Neighborhood program, but is augmenting it with Task Force Pothole and Task Force Graffiti. Lt. Col. Duke De Luca, division engineer and commander of the 326^th Engineer Battalion, says that the city was riven with political, ethnic and religious factions, which were marking territory like urban street gangs with graffiti. His battalion sends a task force around with hammers, chisels, sanders and spray paint to obliterate the marks in an effort to reduce political tensions in the still volatile area. Task Force Pothole has charted every pothole in the city and has contracted with an asphalt vendor for hot-mix, with which Engineer crews patch the roads at night. It doesn’t precisely follow the Task Force Neighborhood model of using local energy and skill, but it is providing a needed service.

…repair guard rails…

Ultimately, one of the aspects of Task Force Neighborhood most satisfying to Martin is that it is returning stolen Iraqi money to benefit the people of Iraq. Just before the war started, Saddam Hussein reportedly removed $1 billion from Iraq’s banks. More than $800 million of the money has been found in warehouses and squirrelled away in odd locations around the government palaces Saddam built over the years. The funds now are being funnelled back to the country from which they were stolen via a program of quick-action projects under the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the civilian administration of Iraq. And the projects are not very costly. Martin says he has just run through the first $10,000 he drew from the captured cash, which he used to fund seven Task Force Neighborhood actions.

Spec. Jessica Schmitz, a mechanic with 561^st Medical Co., 30^th Medical Brigade, says she came to provide security for her unit’s dental clinic at the soccer stadium project. "I just wanted to come down and see this," she says. "I think it gives purpose to what we’re doing."

…offer dentil services…

…and frisbee lessons.

(All other photos by Thomas F. Armistead for ENR)

ENR Associate Editor Thomas F. Armistead is in the Mideast region with elements of Army Corps of Engineers and private contractors.