The acronym SNAFU was created for situations like this. Mr. Reppenhagen will probably get flak from some quarters for daring to speak on the record.
Mission deflated | Salon News :
[Garett] Reppenhagen, now 31, has certainly seen his share of crappy missions. During his 2004 duty in the Sunni Triangle, he was sent on countless raids. On nighttime patrols, when a muzzle flash appeared from a darkened building, he and his platoon would respond with the full force of .50-caliber machine guns mounted atop Humvees until the ammunition was spent -- even if that meant leveling a nearby building. If an insurgent was thought to be hiding in a house, they'd call in a tank to blow it up rather than do a risky search on foot.
As a member of a six-man sniper team, Reppenhagen was ordered to track down and kill insurgents in extremely dangerous areas. At other times, he and his battalion would cordon off streets, kick in doors on squat cement houses, and detain men 18 and over for minor offenses like being in a house other than their own or failing to show proper ID. “Half of the time, we got the wrong damn house,” Reppenhagen said. At least handing out soccer balls, he thought, was one thing the Army could do right....
At Forward Operating Base Warhorse, Reppenhagen and his fellow soldiers encountered a five-ton truck stacked with large cardboard boxes. They began to unload the truck and open the boxes. There were maybe 50 soccer balls in each box. But the balls had not been inflated. They were all flat. Reppenhagen scoured the boxes. No pumps. What was worse, nobody had bothered to pack the needles to inflate the balls.Resourceful soldiers that they were, the men carried some of the balls to mechanics in the motor pool. “They tried to pump them up with tire pumps,” Reppenhagen said. But the mechanics had the equipment to inflate Humvee tires, not soccer balls.
Frustrated, the soldiers asked their commanding officers what to do. None were sure. They kept calling their own superiors. Cassidy suggested that they order pumps and needles, which would arrive in about two weeks. The battalion colonel quickly tired of the whole discussion and said he wasn't about to requisition soccer ball pumps. “He decided this was a waste of time,” Cassidy said. “His thought was, 'Iraqis should be grateful.' Not, 'They will be grateful' -- 'They should be.'” Finally, the lieutenant commanded the troops to deliver the balls to the children. “He was pretty much like, 'Shut up and hand out these soccer balls,'” Reppenhagen said.
It seemed crazy. “We were so pissed,” said Reppenhagen. But orders are orders. When you are told to hand out flat soccer balls, you hand out flat soccer balls. So the soldiers who served in 2nd Battalion, 63rd Armored Regiment piled the flat soccer balls into their Humvees. Driving through the Sunni Triangle's war-torn towns, they tossed the deflated balls to children, who crowded the sides of the roads, running beside the canals and lush greenery that lined the banks of the Diyala River. “Kids were swarming us,” Reppenhagen said. “We went to a couple of schools and delivered stacks of them. Everybody we saw got a flat soccer ball.”
Which, of course, the kids quickly figured out. Pretty soon, Reppenhagen recalled, “They were like, 'What are you doing? What are we supposed to do with this?” When the Humvees began to retrace their route back to the base, the futility of the operation was becoming painfully clear. “Kids were wearing these soccer balls as hats,” Reppenhagen said. “They were kicking them around. They were in trees. They were floating in canals. They were everywhere. There were so many soccer balls.”
Today, Reppenhagen still cringes when he recalls the soccer ball operation, which to him says so much about the entire U.S. occupation in Iraq. He recently left his job at Veterans for America, a veterans' advocacy group, and currently serves on the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War. A spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division, Lt. Col. Christian T. Kubik, said Reppenhagen's battalion commander does not recall the soccer ball operation. In an e-mail, he took issue with the characterization of soldiers blindly following orders when they handed out the deflated balls.
...Reppenhagen said he certainly knows what he and his platoon got when they drove to the base: The Iraqi kids were expressing their hearts and minds with rocks and stones. “On the way back, kids were throwing rocks at us,” he said. “I assumed it was because we gave them deflated soccer balls. Maybe if we had given them inflated soccer balls, they would have been out playing soccer.”
