Good Day

A close up look at business as usual in Baghdad:

Lt. Kevin Irvin thought something was wrong Monday when he looked through a window in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad and saw what looked like a bookstore dedicated to rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Irvin of North Little Rock called the headquarters of Bravo Company, Arkansas' 39th Infantry Brigade, and reported he was going to search the compound. Company commander Lt. Keith Wilson of Sherwood was in the al-Shaab Iraqi police station at the time, listening to a policeman tell him the location of a nearby command center for al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

Irvin and Wilson didn't know they were focusing on the same building.

<...>

Inside, soldiers captured two Mahdi Army fighters, weapons, ammunition, grenades, mortars and piles of paperwork on Mahdi Army operations.

Among the paperwork were passes for Iraqi workers to enter Forward Operating Base Gunslinger, headquarters for 3rd Battalion and Bravo Company's home. "Here's one that allows a contractor to come and go without escort," Irvin said, holding up one of the plastic cards as he dug through piles of paper in the building's courtyard. "That's scary."

As is this simple method for planting mines under pavement:

By the end of the day, Bravo Company would unearth four roadside bombs. Two had been embedded in the asphalt, buried in a hole in the road created by a burning tire. Insurgents scraped away the melted asphalt, placed a 155 mm artillery round in the hole and refilled the hole with asphalt. The naked eye saw only a wire sticking up out of the road. In the north of al-Shaab, Delta Company detained a man stopped at a traffic checkpoint who was carrying $60 million Iraqi dinar - the equivalent of $60,000. A vapor tracer, which detects the residue of explosives, indicated that the hands that handled the money had handled explosives. The money was believed to be the profits from a weapons deal in al-Shaab.

<...>

When Irvin's platoon burst into the "Islam Center for Solitude," they didn't realize what they'd found. The center's name was neatly painted above the door in red and blue. A box in the courtyard near a scattering of prayer rugs held worn prayer stones.

Inside, however, soldiers found a badly beaten man chained in a room, a makeshift clinic, hand grenades, an RPK machine gun, AK-47 rifles, an SKS rifle, rocket propelled grenades, artillery shells, electronic switches, Mahdi Army uniforms and a Browning .30-caliber machine gun.

Within the clinic were vials of Valium and an anti-psychotic medicine. Third Battalion medical officials believe interrogators used the mixture to force information from a subject.

<...>

As the patrol drove off, two rocket-propelled grenades were launched from a house. Both missed.

"This was a pretty good day," Lawless said. "It was a good find and nobody got blown up."

Guess wherever you are, good days are relative.

But for those who read the story to the end, this gem was waiting, explaining the real bright side of the news:

Wilson said that was in part because of the people of al-Shaab. They told the soldiers about the command center and of other dangers.

"As we were finding all this, we had a lot of people come up to us, giving us information," Wilson said. "There's still a lot of good people here. They realize the Mahdi Army's impeding our progress in helping them out."

A bit of progress from the Thunder Run, at least.