Army Reserve Chief Warrant Officer Brian Cox, who is with the 411th Engineer Combat Battalion, talks about conditions in Baghdad at a family support group.
Isle reservist details life
back in BaghdadBrian Cox says that morale is good
but accommodations are strained
in his camp
Brian Cox wants to be back in Iraq.
The 16-year Army veteran is home in Hawaii for surgery to repair a ripped tendon in his right arm, suffered while he was loading a truck.
"I want to go back," said Cox, 38, who ran an Internet data center before he was mobilized in November for a year's duty with the Army Reserves. "It's tough leaving those guys behind. The morale was good.
"It's damn good to be home, but there's another family I left behind and it's real hard. There's also a kind of guilt in leaving them behind."
Cox, a chief warrant officer, is part of the 600-member 411th Engineer Combat Battalion (Heavy). More than 300 of the unit's reservists are from Hawaii. The rest are from the mainland, Alaska, Guam and American Samoa.
The battalion spent its first month in Iraq working to make Camp Victory North, northeast of Baghdad International Airport, the largest overseas post since the Vietnam War.
About a month after arriving in a truck convoy from Kuwait, Cox tore the tendon in his right arm.
He was sent to a hospital in Germany and returned home Thursday for surgery to reattach the tendons to the bone and ligament.
"They tell me that there's two to three months of surgery and rehabilitation facing me before I can go back," said Cox, who headed the maintenance operations as a member of Headquarters & Support Company.
Cox, a 1983 Kalaheo High School graduate, said the reservists spend all of their time in Iraq working and building the camp. Conditions there are extremely crowded since the Pentagon extended the tour of the 1st Armored Cavalry Division to maintain U.S. troop strength because of the increased insurgent activities.
"You have a camp the size of Schofield Barracks but with facilities for only one division, and now you have elements of two divisions there," Cox said. "We have done construction work nowhere else than Camp Victory North. This involves building and grading roads and constructing buildings on the base."
Camp Victory North is one of a dozen camps begun in late January as part an $800 million project to house the 1st Cavalry Division. The 411th is attached to the division.
Once completed, the camp will be twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, one of the largest overseas posts built since the Vietnam War. Work was begun last fall on what was once a former hunting reserve for Saddam Hussein when the U.S. decided to move its facilities out of the airport since it was being returned to the Iraqi government.
Cox told a gathering of the 411th's Family Support Group this past weekend that there are at least 15,000 soldiers in Camp Victory North competing for the use of 20 computers and a bank of 20 to 25 pay phones.
He met with a group of more than 50 spouses, all seeking information about what life is like in Baghdad.
All of the reservists live in a "pod" that consists of about 75 to 100 trailers, Cox said. Each trailer -- which is about 12 by 12 feet -- is air-conditioned and houses two soldiers. Every soldier was issued a mattress, comforters and pillows for their metal-framed beds.
"It's like living in a mobile home that looks like those construction site trailers," Cox said.
"Each pod has shower and toilet trailers which are in walking distance to where we live," Cox said.
However, the dining facilities are about a quarter-mile away.
"Ninety-eight percent of the time, we get hot meals," Cox said. "The food is good and we eat well. When there is a lot of hostilities and transportation assets get bottled up, that's the only time we have problems getting a hot meal."
"We usually get up at 5," Cox said. "Then there is PT (physical training), and by 8 we're at work. ... Depending on the mission, we're usually off work by 5 or 6."
Cox said "the camp is really raw," and there is not much to do off duty. "Some people have purchased satellite television dishes or watch DVDs on their televisions or play cards.
"There is only one Internet cafe with 20 computers to serve the entire base. ... It's frustrating since it takes at least 10 minutes to log onto your personal Army account, and you are only allotted 30 minutes."
Army Reserve officials said the Pentagon's decision to extend the tour of the 1st Armored Division came after it had terminated the contract with the Internet service provider supporting the departing soldiers, and negotiations with a new Internet service provider are not completed.
Because of the limited availability of phones, where the soldiers can use phone cards to call home, some of the reservists bought cell phones -- which cost about $150 -- but they need to pay another $50 for a chip to operate them and there are substantial phone charges. One spouse said her husband pays 93 cents a minute.
Until many of the communications problems have been resolved, the Pacific Army Reserve has set aside 438-1600, ext. 3444, as a special phone line for family members seeking information about their soldiers.
