Buildings rise above the blast walls on three sides of the JSS, while palm trees grace the fourth side. Like in all of Iraq, things are much quieter in Tarmiya than they were just a few months ago, but it is almost a different country than it was a year ago. Last February, two American soldiers were killed and seventeen wounded when the base was attacked by a multiple car bomb assault, followed by a ground assault with small arms fire, which the Americans beat back. More grotesquely, in May 2007, al Qaeda actually rigged a newly-built girls school in the town with explosives—building artillery shells into the ceiling and floors—but American forces prevented tragedy when they discovered the plot before the school opened.

But that doesn’t mean that the danger has passed. The day before I arrived, someone threw two grenades over the blast wall, both of which fell well out of range of the vehicles and soldiers. Specialist Jay Mitten, a soldier from New Jersey who joined the Army in hopes of speeding up his career as a police officer back in the states, has a theory that since Iraqis grow up playing soccer, as opposed to football and baseball, “Iraqis have shitty arms, so the guy barely cleared the wall.” A few days before the grenade attack, someone fired at one of the Stryker vehicles, but only hit the bulletproof glass that shielded the Lieutenant riding up front. If not for the glass, the Lieutenant would have taken two perfectly placed rounds to the head.

The soldiers at Tarmiya are housed in a large, one-story building that used to be a youth sports complex, and have converted two of the larger rooms into barracks, which were only just being equipped with bunk beds on the day that I arrived. Hot food was also a relatively new thing for the men at the base—they had subsisted on Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) for all their meals for a good part of their two month-old deployment. And unlike the other combat outposts I had visited, which had trailers equipped with toilets, the men at Tarmiya use open, outdoor wooden outhouses poised over 55 gallon drums around the corner of the building.

It was by far the most austere of the combat outposts I visited, but unlike Courage and IBA, Tarmiya sits right next to an Iraqi Police headquarters, and is staffed by an American Civil Affairs officer who deals with the police and some local governance and reconstruction programs. The police station sits across a small, empty lot that the company commander, forty year-old Captain Christopher Loftis, told me they used to have to sprint though to avoid sniper fire.

While security is much better in Tarmiya, in the coming days I would grow to understand the political and tribal squabbles indigenous to the area, which proved to be the most complex I had yet experienced.

Part One, “The Rejected,” is here.

Part Two, “Men With Guns,” is here.

Part Three: “Night Patrol,” is here.

Part Four: “The Suicide Bomber” is here.

Part Five: “The End of the Weapons Cache” is here.

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