About 2 weeks ago I was very honored to learn that the one and only Buck Sargent actually read my blog. I of course sent him an email right away and he agreed to be interviewed and become April’s first Blog of the Month.

Buck is a sergeant in the US Army serving in the general area of Mosul Iraq. He has also been deployed to Afghanistan during the greater war against Islamofascism. As you will read; like so many of our men and women serving in this war Buck is far more than some 18 year old kid that couldn’t find any other line of work (as Richard Belzer recently claimed).

Quite the contrary they are the best and brightest among us. Buck exemplifies the dedication, patriotism and self sacrifice that defines the tens of thousands of heroes serving in our armed forces. Tom Brokaw may well have been right about our world war two era veterans contribution to the greatest generation. There is no doubt men like Buck are worthy of walking beside them, and it gives this civilian great hope for the future of our country.

On top of all that he is a damn good writer. One look at his blog, (AMERICAN CITIZEN SOLDIER), his recent email to Hugh Hewitt, or his comments here on my blog will tell you that.

With all that said, it’s time to let the man speak for himself. Here is my interview with AMERICAN CITIZEN SOLDIER’s Buck Sargent:

UA: Where do you live back in the states?

BS: My unit is stationed at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. I’ve lived up there since April 2003, although in the previous 36 months I’ve spent only 13 of them at home. The rest have been on deployment rotations of one kind or another, mainly Afghanistan and now Iraq. Alaska is a great place to live and I hope to see more of it in the near future. Last summer was the first year that I actually got to spend a single day in July there. But our nation is at war, and that is the nature of the beast. There’s always next year.

UA: Where are you from originally?

BS: I grew up in the Bay Area (was actually born in Berkeley, if you can believe that) and moved to Austin, Texas with my family when I was 15. I lived there off and on until I joined the Army directly after graduating college.

UA: Do you have family back home? Wife and Kids?

BS: I don’t have any children as of yet, but I do have a wonderful wife waiting for me back home in Anchorage. She is an actress currently performing in a variety show at a local comedy theatre called the Fly By Night Club, and she also does television and radio spots for a local furniture store. But that just scratches the surface — she’s easily the most talented woman I’ve ever known. We met in Anchorage soon after I returned from Afghanistan in late 2004 and asked her to marry me exactly three months after our first blind date. Oddly enough, it was truly love at first site for the both of us. We got married a few months later under the looming uncertainty surrounding my next Army assignment, which ended up sending me across the street to another unit on Ft. Rich that was scheduled to deploy to Iraq within 6 months. So our first year of marriage has been primarily spent apart. But we are incredibly committed to each other and she absolutely supports what I do. But I know that when I get home I have a lot of time apart to make up for.

UA:What is your job in the army?

BS: I am an infantry noncommissioned officer and one of two team leaders in a squad, which means that I am responsible typically for three junior enlisted soldiers. I’m sure many likely think the infantry is all just killing people and breaking stuff, and that IS part of our job description, but really we’re where the rubber meets the road in this conflict. Our responsibilities run the gamut, from patrolling and security, to directly engaging hostile forces, to performing nighttime raids on high value targets, to training the Iraqi army and police, to settling disputes between locals, to going door to door checking the pulse of a neighborhood. We are basically the “sheriff” that Iraqis come to for all their concerns. We’re currently trying to wean them off of that dependency, and have them seek out their own mayors and local officials for their grievances, which is usually a long and neverending litany.

The infantry guys on the ground are the face and voice of the U.S. Army around the world. We are the only ambassadors that individual Iraqis are likely to meet, and we try and treat them all with respect until forced otherwise. We don’t judge the whole by the actions of a few, and we hope they’ll allow us the same courtesy.

UA: I read on your blog that you were also deployed to Afghanistan, how long have you been in the Army?

BS: I’ve been in the Army just over three and a half years. I was promoted to E5 “buck” sergeant just prior to us leaving for Iraq.

UA: Do you plan to make it a career?

BS: Five years will be plenty enough for me. I never planned on being a lifer. I joined pretty late in life (26) and there’s still too many other things I want to do. And I’m anxious to get started.

UA: I noticed you were a University of Texas Graduate, if you are staying in the Army any plans to become an officer?

BS: No, I never wanted to become an officer, although the option has always been there. But I enjoy being a noncom and I like working closely with the soldiers on the ground. My biggest fear was always being trapped as a desk jockey in the Army. That’s the biggest reason I went the route I did. I certainly wouldn’t mind earning an officer’s salary, but there’s a lot more to life and job satisfaction than money.

On the morning of 9/11, I was planning on registering for the Law School Admissions Test. My goal after college had always been to become a prosecutor. But by 11am central standard time I found myself tossing my LSAT study guide into the wastebasket and sitting in a recruiter’s office within the week. As I told an Anchorage Daily News reporter last fall, I figured the justice I would help mete out in the Army would be a lot swifter.

Basically, the entire direction and purpose of my life did a complete one-eighty because of what happened that day. But I know I’m not the only one.

UA: So are you a longhorns football fan?

BS: I don’t really follow sports much anymore, with the big exception of Texas Longhorn football. I’d been a huge Horns fan since moving to Austin in 1990 and suffered through all the ups and downs along the years. I attended every single home game during my three years at UT and no one was more excited than me when they finally won it all last year. It had been a long time coming for such a great football program.

UA: Did you get to hear or see “The Game“?

BS: By chance, my midtour R&R leave just happened to coincide with New Year’s and the Rose Bowl title game. So I watched it live in my living room in my lovely wife’s lap. If that’s not the definition of Heaven on Earth, then I don’t know what is.

UA: How long have you been blogging now? Was your post in July 2005 your first one?

BS: I have a long history of commenting on message boards and the like under my real name, but yes, that was indeed my first foray into the blogosphere and the debut appearance of “Buck Sargent.” My identity is not a huge secret or anything. It’s been publicized a few times here and there. But I use it just to keep the focus from being totally on me. None of this is about just me, and I never intended it to be. I want the focus to be about the war, and how best to win it. Winning the war is my only agenda right now. It pains me to say it, but if Ralph Nader had the best ideas on how to take this fight to the enemy and kick the everliving shiite out of them, then that is who I’d support. And then I‘d throw up.

UA: Why did you start your blog?

BS: I had kept a long and tedious handwritten journal throughout my tour in Afghanistan. This was back before blogging really took off. (I wouldn’t have had the quality of internet access to pull it off, anyway.) So, I’d scribble in my journal and then tear the pages out every week or so and mail them home to my parents who would then xerox them for friends and family. I think of it now as a kind of a “poor-man’s blog.” I’ve since been reposting those entries sporadically on my site under “Operation Enduring Boredom”. It’s easy to forget about the war in Afghanistan, and with all the focus on Iraq we sure felt pretty ignored while we were over there. The conditions aren’t nearly as comfortable there, so I would say if you’re going to support anybody with care packages and food snacks and whatnot, send it over to those guys. They certainly deserve it more than we do.

UA: Do you read any other blogs and if so who are some of your favorites?

BS: My time for web surfing is obviously very limited, so I usually just download the latest from several sites I enjoy and then read it later when I get the opportunity. I usually check the Mudville Gazette, Blackfive, T.F. Boggs, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Yon, Victor Davis Hanson, Opinion Journal, Stryker Brigade News, and whatever else those sites send across my radar. Oh, and of course, The Real Ugly American!,

UA: Your writing is very compelling. Did you do any writing before starting your blog?

BS: I’ve always enjoyed the act of writing. I was fairly prolific in college, yet never really impressed many of my professors due to the fact that I only seem to possess the ability to write what I want, when I want to. Give me a proposition or topic that I have to stick to and I’m an unmitigated disaster. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t try to pursue that law degree.

UA: Ok you have this trailer on your blog called “Give War A Chance” IT IS AMAZING. You say it’s going to be a feature film released in 2006. Is this a goof or is it for real?

BS: It started out as a goof, but I started to accumulate so much footage over the course of the year that now it’s actually something I plan on releasing in some form or another. The finished product is still very much in the idea stage.

UA: And you did this all on a digital video camera?

BS: Roger that. A tiny Fuji Finepix Z1 digital camera. I’ve worked with larger handicams and the like, but I always come back to my little workhorse. It takes awesome video for a digital camera, and I can whip it out at a moments notice and capture things that I may not have been able to otherwise. The final product is a lot sharper than the low-bandwidth quality I’m forced to put up for viewing, but I’ll work out all the technical issues when I get home.

UA: Can I invest in this movie? If this is real it is going to be HUGE.

BS: There’s nothing really to invest in, actually. I always planned on releasing it free of charge just to keep promoting my message. I go back and forth on how I’m going to do it in the end. Right now, my grand idea of the week is to release it in serial fashion over the internet one month at a time, thus simulating the truly marathon mental and physical stamina needed to get through a year-long deployment like this. And plus, that would allow me to drag my feet on editing this gargantuan project. If I hole myself up in my office working on this for too long when I get home my wife will either kill me or divorce me or both. But who knows, I could change my mind again and just allow people to order a DVD of it for the cost of shipping and handling. But I’m not totally up on all the legal copyright issues, meaning I don’t know if I can put any music in it and still distribute it that way. I’m still expecting Green Day to send me a “cease and desist” letter for that first trailer.

I’ve actually been told by people with sources in high places that the Sergeant Major of the Army and possibly even General Casey himself have seen some of my videos. Though I can neither confirm nor deny that rumor.

UA: Obviously the other guys in your unit know about this film since they are in it. What do they think about it?

BS: It focuses mainly on my platoon because that is the reality of whom I’m outside the wire with on a day to day basis. There’s kind of an attitude of feigned indifference about the whole project, yet they all mug for the camera whenever possible hoping it’ll “make the movie.” It’s a struggle to film things without altering behavior simply because they know I’m filming them. So I try to be discreet. It’s the same way, only worse, with the Iraqis. They turn into dancing circus bears whenever they see someone pull out a camera.

UA: Do they know about your blog and what do they think about it?

BS: My entire chain of command knows about it by now. The Army is a lot more indifferent to blogs and the media aspect than most would think. As long as you’re not tipping the enemy’s hand, they really could care less. The same thing goes for embeds like Michael Ware. He seems to think the Army approves of him because they don’t muzzle him. It’s more likely they’re completely oblivious to him and what he does. I wish the Army would focus more on PR, because I think it’s a huge part of this war. But they don’t seem to, so here you have a bunch of grunts doing it for them. Maybe it’s better that way.

UA: In your Give War A Chance post some jackass says “i am very surprised at the standard of writing from a US soldier. one is left with the distinct impression that this lad could have done a lot better for himself than his current situation.”

and you reply:

“Yeah, I could have done something that pays a lot more, is 100% safer, and definitely more comfortable. But I believed this needed to be done, and how could I advocate a course of action that I was not willing to participate in myself? That is the whole point, and apparently it flew right over your head.”

Devastating. For the record what did you do before you joined the army?

BS: I had toyed with a few different career paths before I finally settled on (and then ultimately jettisoned again) the legal profession. Retail, the food industry, aviation… I actually moved back to the Bay Area for a year to attend a helicopter flight school. That was certainly a lot of fun and a challenge. But right about the time I ran out of money, I finally got the bug to return home to finish college in ’99 and that’s what led me to where I am today. I’ve always felt you can’t always plan out your life because you never know what direction it’s going to take you. But I wouldn’t have met my wife if everything had not happened the way it did, so I clearly have no regrets.

UA: You did an interview with an Iraqi blogger known as Dr. TT this guy is obviously anti American. Do you have any feel for what percentage of the population this guy represents?

BS: It’s hard to say. I get the impression that the majority of Iraqis understand why we’re here and are appreciative of a chance to start over. But I understand why many of them would be frustrated with the slow pace of progress when viewed in terms of the improvement of their individual lives. Iraq was a failed state long before we arrived, and it will take decades to get it back on its feet entirely. But Iraqis have got to learn to start doing things for themselves. We didn’t come here to take Saddam Hussein’s place, we came here to allow the Iraqi people to take his place. Three decades of Stalinist nanny-statism cannot be unlearned in a single election cycle.

UA: How do you think Iraqis feel about the American servicemen in their country? Can you break it down for us into groups?

BS: I’ll put it this way: The reason why the children almost universally love us no matter what their parents’ views are is because they bring no ingrained biases or prejudices to the table. They judge us purely on what they see us do and how we treat them, not on what they read about us in the Baghdad Times or whatever. Honest people will recognize when they are being respected and when they are not. But some of it is just inherent in the Muslim culture. Some will always hate us no matter what we do.

To be fair, I would probably feel the same way if I lived in a dangerous neighborhood that was constantly patrolled by big scary policemen. Mistakes are going to be made, tragedies are going to happen — it’s unavoidable. And that has been TT’s experience from what I understand. He’s been mistakenly shot at, and even had an uncle killed I believe. So I don’t begrudge him entirely his anger, and that’s why I gave him the forum that I did. But educated men like him need to start stepping up and reclaiming their country from those who are trying to destroy it. We are not the enemy — we want Iraq to succeed, not fail. But if we leave right away like some claim to want us to, things will get a lot worse before they get better. There are real-world examples to point to for this view. Look at Tall Afar before the U.S. and IA cleaned it out. Look at Fallujah. Look at Mosul just a year ago. These places were hell on earth when Zarqawi and co. called the shots. The atrocities committed upon the average citizen by them are almost too horrific to be believed.

UA: Do you think Democracy and freedom is going to succeed in Iraq?

BS: I do, but that’s not up to us. Our job is to prepare Iraqis to take our place as guardians of the peace. This can and will be done, but it will take time. It took three and a half years for the best military in the world to adequately train someone like me to be able to come over here and successfully do my job. Why do we expect the Iraqi security forces to be able to learn it in less time with less education, less institutional history, less equipment, and less manpower?

Right now we’ve given them their learner’s permit and they are pretty much driving the car. We’re just along for the ride and to help them when they get into trouble. It is my feeling that by the time President Bush leaves office they will be ready to receive their license and go it alone for good. I think this is a workable timetable, and I think it has to be because whoever the next administration turns out to be will not have nearly the political backbone of George W. Bush. I do not support everything he does, but I cannot for the life of me comprehend how someone could think he would go to war for political gain. The war has been a disaster for him politically, yet he has never wavered or backed away from it. Just like Lincoln, he has staked his entire Presidency on it. I’m a big student of presidential history, and believe me, that is not the mark of a leader who wants to be liked in his own time. Talk tough and do nothing, and you will be hailed as a great statesman by the chattering classes and media elites. Or make tough choices and take bold risks, and those same people will deride you as a hopeless fool or even a villain. But by the time of your funeral, the real history will finally have been written. Is there really any doubt left that Ronald Reagan had been right all along? You can read up on how they trashed him while he was in office. It’s deja-vu all over again.

UA: Dr. TT answered one of your questions by saying he was ok with a democracy or a dictator, Do you think most Iraqis want democracy or was Dr. TT’s answer representative of Iraqi opinion?

BS: The people who were relatively sheltered from the horrors of the Baathist regime seem to be the only ones who remember those days fondly. But you won’t get that view from a Kurd whose entire family tree was chopped down, or from generations of Shiite males who were drafted into ten years of bloody, pointless slaughter just to stroke a madman’s ego.

I always meant to ask TT how he would feel if we had never invaded, only for one day to have his own pride and joy catch the eye of Uday Hussein or some other Baathist apparatchik as she was walking to her university classes in Baghdad. I don’t think I have to go into what would become of her. TT would probably blow off the example as ridiculous, but things just like that happened to many, many Iraqis for a very long time. It just never happened to him, so he doesn’t care. Everyone views the world through the prism of their own experiences. Sometimes you just have to put your own aside for the moment and consider what others may have been going through while you were living it up in privileged ignorance.

So, to make a long answer short: Yes, I do think we will succeed, and Iraq will eventually succeed. But only if we don’t quit while we’re ahead.

UA: Are you familiar with Soldiers Angels? And do you know anyone who gets letters and packages from an Angel back home?

BS: Yes, I’ve heard of it through the blogosphere, and I think it’s a great thing. But like I said, we have it too good here on the big FOBs to need any extra support, although we‘re humbled that so many are willing to do so much for us. Still, I recommend focusing on the smaller, outlying provinces in Afghanistan and Iraq where guys are still sleeping in tents and surviving on MREs. Believe me when I say that is no fun at all.

UA: How would you describe the morale of the troops in Iraq?

BS: For a war, I’d say it’s pretty damn good. At times, it’s probably too good, because then it permits you to start focusing on and complaining about all the normal, everyday bull**** that you’d gripe about back home. It’s sort of a Catch 22 — if the Army makes life too comfortable here, soldiers will only begin to complain more than they would have otherwise. It’s a delicate balance. Sometimes things have to suck just enough to make you appreciate what you’ve got.

That’s why it’s foolish to rely on polls that say “3/4th of the troops say they want to come home.” My only response to that is, “what the hell is wrong with that other ¼ ?” If you view the question from a personal standpoint, of course you want to come home. I wouldn’t personally choose to be away from my wife if given the choice. But if you ask a selfish question, don’t be so surprised when you get a selfish answer. They should really ask it this way: “Do you think the United States military should abandon the Iraqi people and fully redeploy immediately?” Only the misanthropes are going to say yes to that. I would say most soldiers understand that this is a necessary job. They just don’t necessarily want to have to shoulder the entire burden themselves. After this last tour, I’m sorry, but I’m passing the torch off to the next generation. I have nothing but love for the careerists in the military; we couldn’t have one without them. Those are the real patriots. But I’ve always seen myself more in the “citizen soldier” mold. Hence, the name of my blog. When this is all over I will gladly hang up my arms and go back to my plow, so to speak.

UA: Do you see any progress in the reconstruction and if so can you give us some examples?

BS: Frankly, I don’t see as much as I’d like to, but then again, I‘m not privy to every single thing that goes on. But there are some big projects that have been undertaken in and around the city. (Sewage, electrical, water treatment, etc.) And there’s always new home construction going on by the locals. But there just isn’t the foreign investment and construction going on that you see in secure places like the Kurdish north. They’re building suburban tract homes up there and have shopping malls already. The difference is one of security. They do not allow any Arabs up there without an escort to vouch for them and they guard that place like hawks. That may sound exclusionary, but it works for them. They’re really leaving the rest of Iraq in the dust. When the Iraqi Arabs figure out that they have way more to lose than gain by continuing to support the violence and chaos, that is when you will see Iraq really turn the corner. The next generation of Iraqis need to form an entrepreneurial class, and they need to do it yesterday.

UA: How about the Iraqi military? Do you see them progressing and getting better?

BS: The Iraqi army units that we work with up here are all mainly Kurdish, and many of them are veteran Peshmerga fighters. A lot of their new recruits are still pretty green, but these guys are honest and they really have guts to ride around in pickup trucks when we won’t even leave the wire without our monstrously armored Strykers. If there’s any heroes over here, it’s those guys.

UA: Do you guys do any joint operations with them?

BS: Not so many when we first got here, but later almost every single day. And like I mentioned earlier, it’s now to the point where they’re doing many of the operations completely on their own.

UA: It sounded like in one of your posts that you guys had a journalist embedded with you. Have you had any journalists embedded with your unit? If so did you get to see the stories they were writing and were they accurate?

BS: I give the media in general a lot of hell in my blog, but the few journalists we’ve had up here have actually done a fantastic job in the time they were here. Margaret Friedenauer from the Alaska News-Miner in Fairbanks was here with us last fall; Kimberly Johnson of USA Today just left a month ago; and Robert Kaplan from the Atlantic Monthly paid us a visit as well. There’s probably been a few others, though the international media have all but abandoned Mosul since we’ve gotten it under control. As our Colonel told Robert Kaplan, that may have been a good thing since it gave the insurgents less incentive to pull off spectacular displays of violence. But the embeds I mentioned all rode out on numerous patrols and I think really captured in their writing the essence of what we do here. It doesn’t mean ignoring the bad — I don‘t expect anyone to paint only a rosy picture of endless rainbows and chocolate fountains — it just means including the good and the bad as part of the larger picture. If you rewrote a history of WWII only focusing on the setbacks, by the end of the story you’d have no idea who, if anyone, actually won the war.

Most soldiers obviously aren’t news junkies like me, and they don’t follow too closely what is being said about them and the war back home. But when I do read the impressions that are being given to the average American, it just makes me crazy. That was really the purpose of my blog from the beginning, to level a giant tank barrel squarely at the press and put pressure on them to start telling the whole truth or risk losing their audience. I can’t do that job alone, but I’ve done my best with what I have to work with. And the rest of the blogosphere has been magnificent in picking up and running with that message. It’s also why I’ve focused so much on the political aspects of the war often to the exclusion of the day to day events that most other milblogs cover. Part of it is to avoid crossing the line with OPSEC issues; I can’t really go into detail a lot of the things we do or the way we do them simply because it would aid the enemy in their intelligence gathering. This enemy is extremely internet savvy, and they will exploit every advantage they can. And right now they are playing the mass media like a fiddle. I’ll give the insurgents credit — it’s the only real tactical skill they possess. On the battlefield they are ridiculously incompetent.

UA: Is there anything you would like to tell the people back home?

BS: I don’t pretend to speak for the entire Army. I’m just one soldier who tells things the way that I see them. I ‘m sure you could find others who hold diametrically opposite views based on their own situation and experiences.

But I will say that I believe to my very core that we are doing the right thing over here, and have been from the beginning. I know that may be hard to stomach based on what you read and hear on the nightly news, but you have to be patient and have some perspective. This is not going to be a quick and tasty Happy Meal war — you’ve really got to step back and keep the big picture in view and not lose your nerve.

Iraq was headed for a meltdown whether we stepped in or not. The status quo could not have been maintained forever. If 9/11 proved anything, it is not that we were too involved in the world, it is that we were not involved enough. Osama bin Laden took a long, hard look at our country and saw weakness, not strength. The danger of allowing failed states to implode in this day and age is that there will always be consequences that reach far outside their own borders, and the applied fix only gets harder the longer we wait to address it.

But that is all water under the bridge now. There will be dire consequences if America walks away from this fight prematurely. They may not materialize overnight, but the enemies of our country will recognize it for exactly what it is: weakness. And they have shown that nothing emboldens them more.

In the immortal words of Winston Churchill:

“Never give up! Never give up! Never give up!”

Thanks for hearing me out. And thank you to everyone out there who supports the military men and women and the cause they’re working to see through to the end. This is a war of ideas, first and foremost. You are the ones the Islamists are really fighting, not just us. Don’t forget that.

Buck Sargent
4/23 Stryker Infantry
Mosul, Iraq
http://americancitizensoldier.blogspot.com/

****End of Interview*******

After reading that wouldn’t you like to see Buck have a little talk with Richard Belzer?