by Derek Farwell
Columnist

I was recently asked if I’d like to start writing a weekly column for The Extra about my military experiences, both good and bad, and share some of my acquired knowledge of the VA.

Before I get into that, I would like to say thank you to a few people that have helped this unique opportunity fall into my lap. My uncle Randy Farwell, who works for 702 Communications in Moorhead, first contacted me about writing this column. I’d like to thank Tammy Finney, Editor of The Extra who has made this pretty easy for me as well as my girlfriend Gretchen for really encouraging me to go through with this.

That being said I’ll tell you a bit about myself, and why I was asked to write.

I spent four years in Army’s 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, one of the Army’s more active combat infantry units. I was stationed out of Fort Lewis, WA and did a 15 month tour in Iraq from June 2006 through September 2007 during which time I was awarded the Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, and a Presidential Unit Citation. My tour in Iraq was certainly a pretty unique experience. It was 15 months filled with unimaginably brutal violence and a lot of death and destruction on both the good guys and the bad guy’s side.

We were based in 3 different cities throughout our 15 month deployment. Right away we were sent to Mosul which is in northern Iraq, not far from the Turkish border and the part of Iraq referred to as Kurdistan. This was my first experience in combat and it was fairly similar to what we had been trained for. We were not fighting a very organized enemy but more a loosely affiliated number of individuals and small groups. One thing that stuck with from my time in Mosul happened on our 10th or 11th day there. One of my friends who I’d gone through boot camp and advanced infantry training with in Fort Benning, Georgia was shot in the hip during an ambush. It was pretty tough to see one of my first army friends get wounded and have to be medically evacuated so soon into our tour.

Anyone who followed the Iraq war will remember when former President George W. Bush initiated the troop surge in Baghdad. We were sent there a few months before the surge to basically irritate a few areas to help find out where the troops should go once they start arriving. I won’t give you a complete report about that, but one of the places we went to was Sadr City. Muqtada al-Sadr is a Muslim religious leader and the son of a much respected Muslim Cleric who was murdered by Saddam Hussein’s government. al-Sadr has essentially created his own small country within the city limits of Baghdad, complete with it’s own government and army. Our job was to see how far we could push his army before it would push back which we immediately found to be not very far at all.

The last city we spent time in was Baqubah, Iraq. Baqubah is northwest of Baghdad in the Dyala province and only about 30 miles from the Iranian border. Right before the troop surge began in 2007 all of the enemy fighters started to evacuate Baghdad and move into its suburbs, like Baqubah. Baqubah was also the self-proclaimed capital city for Al-Quaida in Iraq. They were dug in and very prepared for us to arrive there and were prepared to hunker down and fight to their deaths, which they did. Among our many jobs, we conducted patrols on foot, in our vehicles, and provided security for events around town or for high security individuals. We also trained and taught Iraqi Army and Police forces as well as conducting combat patrols alongside them. We also worked with armed militias made up of untrained Iraqi civilians, which is a topic I will dive deeper into at another time. In the months that I was in Baqubah it was the most violent city in all of Iraq. There was intense fighting every single day. We were locked in street to street, house to house, and block to block street fights with well trained and dedicated Al-Quaida fighters from numerous different countries, and a pure hatred of those they were fighting against. It was something to see.

These experiences have forever changed the person that I am. I would like to believe they changed me for the better though it took me a while to come to that conclusion. Now I’ve been asked to share some of my stories and experiences in this weekly column, which I have agreed to do. Many of my stories and experiences have never been shared before so I’m interested myself to see how they all come out, and I hope that in reading them you can take something away from them as well.

drfarwell@hotmail.com