Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois



Brent Harney



Eyewitness to Iraq
Brent Harney speaking
 at the 6/2/08 SCRA meeting
July 2008 GunNews





The first couple months I was in Iraq, I went over with a maintenance company from here in Springfield, the 3637th, and a lot of our guys didn't get to do what they were trained to do over there but they picked up other jobs.   People brought us things they had been trying to get fixed for six months but they had been told no one could fix.  One guy left his humvee with us and we told him we would take a look at it because we weren't doing anything that afternoon.  I ran into him later that day and told him he could come pick that humvee up.  He said, "Ah, don't worry about it, nobody's been able to fix it for almost six months."  I said, "No, it's done."  That was one of the seal teams from seal team 2.   The four foot bearing in their turret hadn't turned for six months on one of their vehicles they were taking out every day and we had it fixed already.

One of the instructors back in Texas had said to us one day, "If I tell the active duty people, I need a hole dug."  They get out their shovels and start digging."  The guard guys say, "Where's the backhoe?  But the guard guys get it done and the active duty guys are all laying in a ditch half dead from digging all day long and they still don't know what they were digging for."

Jim Butler/Brent Harney



Brent Harney, right, presents a flag to SCRA chairman, Jim Butler.  Harney carried that flag with him during his second tour in Iraq, from which he recently returned.






Sometimes that's true.  The first two months I was over there we were putting new armored kits on the humvees, taking off the old armored kits that were thinner, putting on heavier doors, the battery powered turret that now includes instead of having to pop your head out over the top and look to see, they included bullet proof glass, five windows on the vehicle and two mirrors so you can see behind you.  By the time you put all your body armor and everything on, and in a humvee, and you put a .50 caliber and a bunch of weapons up inside that turret, it's almost impossible to manually turn it.  The old ones had a little crank and that crank is not real quick in a hurry.  So what they've done is put electric servo motors and stuff in it.  The crank is still there and you can disconnect it if it fails.  It's got a little joystick and that thing will turn any way.  We put a kit on a Monday and Wednesday that vehicle came back in, all the glass blown off one side, transmission blown out of it.  One whole side that you couldn't see any of the glass.  It just blew the hell out of the side of it.  Not one scratch on the five guys that were inside that vehicle.

Immediately within the first week, our guys had already had an effect.  We had electronics repair people that worked on communication systems, tracking systems, and jamming systems.  Not one time while I was over there did any of the electronic fired IED'S go off anywhere near us.  Other units drove through the same area and stuff went off on them but they didn't have our guys working on their stuff.  These guys did a good job and they knew what they were doing.  We had a really good electronics crew.

They've pretty much phasing the humvees out.  The new MRAPS, the mine resistant vehicles, were coming in by the boatloads.

They came around looking for anybody who had been in a combat area before so I volunteered to go with an infantry company and I did convoy security the rest of my time in Iraq.  We went from Al Asad in the Western desert, over to the Syrian-Jordanian border, all the way through Baghdad and down to Kuwait.  I believe we did over 95,000 miles of convoys.  The vehicle that I was in was actually a forty some year old vehicle that they've changed.  The Air Force called it a Commando.  It's a 4-wheel drive four tired armored vehicle with a body like a boat so blasts go off of it, kind of like the MRAP.  Everything is at an angle on it.  It has a driver, a commander, a seat for a medic and a small turret with a gunner who sits up in the turret and you can pop out the top which is what I did.  It has a 40 .mm automatic grenade launcher on it and a .50 caliber machine gun.

We came out one morning and we were dropping off some seabees with bulldozers to move some berms around a village.  We had to go out in the morning and come back and pick up some more and take them back out.  On the trip back out we came over the ridge and there were two Abrams  upside down in the middle of the road.  Our first thought was, "Holy crap, what blew one of these things over?"  We were on this road twenty minutes ago in humvees and very lightly skinned ASB's.  It turned out that one of the Abrams was towing the other one and got loose in the road and one of them ran over the other one.  Nobody was hurt, only a few scrapes and bruises. You come over that and you think "Wow, if that was an IED it would have blown this thing into the next neighborhood."

You've never heard a sound in your life like 3AM when you're waking up in Baghdad and you hear this "phsst, phsst!" and you discover it's one of these, I believe the Navy calls it the Phalanx, I don't know what the Army calls it.  It's just on a little trailer.  It shoots rockets out of the air.  It's like a mini-gun.  This things shoots 90,000 rounds per minute and radar guides it so if anybody fires a rocket at the camp, this thing just picks it up and destroys it.  It fires for about two seconds and there's about a three foot high pile of brass.

Some places got hit on occasion, Ramadi, Fallujah, they would launch rockets at it.  We've seen it where they put mortars in ice, they'll put the tube up in some rocks and and they'll freeze the mortar in a block of ice so they can leave it.  When the ice melts it drops down and fires but there is nobody around when it actually fires.

I've got pictures of weapons caches the Marines picked up around our base.  Our base hadn't been hit in almost two years.  I'm know I was safer there then I would be in Washington, D.C. or Chicago.

There's a couple of highways they used to take to Saudi Arabia and they man these little bases just during that time of year to protect the buses and the pilgrims.  We went out there 28 hours and the only thing we saw along the road looked like little tennis balls.  They turned out to be watermelons, millions of them.  It took us 14 hours to figure out what they were.  None of them blew up so we didn't care.

Towards the end some of the guys in the infantry were actually kind of hoping somebody would shoot at us.  We were getting really bored.

There are actually 4,000 Iraqi army being trained right there at Al Asad.  Some of them speak English pretty well.  Everywhere we went people were smiling and were nice to us.  We did have a lieutenant who went with on a 15 day mission when we were bringing the fourth id back and forth with their equipment and taking their replacements out.  The lieutenant was sitting in the commanders seat.  He asked what we wanted him to do.  We said, "Just don't touch nothing and sit right there."  He said, "It's amazing, the Iraqi truck drivers are just so friendly, they're all waving."  And our driver started laughing.  The lieutenant said, "What did I say?"  The driver said, "Harney's up there with a .50 caliber.  Every truck we pass he's got a machine gun pointed at them!  It's amazing how friendly they can become."  He's got a machine gun and a grenade launcher pointed at his head from about 12 feet away.  I'd wave too!  He's going, "My hands are empty."  But the lieutenant thought they were just being really polite.

We came upon a suburban that had crates of oranges tied across the entire top, stacked up 20 feet high like they do everything over there.  Every little truck looks like a mattress sale exploded.  A little girl was sitting up there with her dad and two uncles because they blew a tire and tipped over all the oranges so there were oranges all over the highway.  They were out in the middle of the desert, with no more water or food, and no spare tire.  So we made a call to the Iraqi army post up ahead and they brought out a spare tire for the suburban and helped them change it.  We took a picture of the gunner handing the little girl a pop tart.  We took another of her trying to figure out what it was.  As we were driving away we took another picture of her standing there in front of the oranges with a pop tart in one hand and a bottle of water in the other grinning from ear to ear!

The policy for the convoys now is that they're allowed to drive with us.  When I was over there we were still keeping them back 100 meters.  Say if you came upon the rear of the convoy or from a side road and you got within 100 meters, I'd put a flare on your head.  It's a little pin flare and it shoots out about 150 meters.  Put one right across the grill or the hood and they get the idea usually.  If they got within 50 meters we would shoot their vehicle.  If they got within 25 meters we'd take out the driver.  We didn't have to do that on any of ours and we were glad of that.  I'd hate to shoot up a car full of kids because somebody driving the car is an idiot!  It happens.  Only a couple times that I know of in the group I was with, and I was attached to the 29th Infantry, did we even fire on vehicles and that was a divided highway and guy thought he would go out in the other lane and we'd be okay with that.  We didn't like that idea.  He got up about past about half the convoy before I shot his hood up.  Once you put a couple rounds in his hood and put the red dot on his forehead and he's looking at you from about 12 feet away, he decides to hit the brakes.

We went through a lot of little towns and took supplies to them.  We took supplies to the Iraqi army and to the Iraqi police.  There's also an Iraqi police training facility there at Al Asad so we got the chance to meet VIP's in the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army.  We got the chance to meet people from other countries, Lithuanians, Australians, English, Danish, Polish and Russians.  

We went out in the pretty heavily armed vehicles with good weapons but you see some of the Danes, they go out in a Toyota, no armor.  Those things could be taken out by two girl scouts with a brick.

We were there when President Bush came and had the meeting with the sheiks, and the sons of Iraq. Al Anbar Province has been turned back over to the Iraqis now, it's under their control.  We still run convoys but we don't go through the cities like we used to do.  There still hasn't been anything major happen.  The only thing that our unit had had was when we go up and block an intersection for the convoy to go through, we take over the intersection.  We pull up on the right or left and we point weapons at anybody who comes near and the convoy rolls through and you catch back up and roll on, no stopping at stop lights, stop signs, etc.

It's hard now to remember those little red things mean stop.  My wife catches me looking up at the overpasses a lot.  It's a habit, sorry.

We started seeing a lot more of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police.  They're starting to take over places and we're pulling out of them, especially down in the south around Basra.  The British pulled out and I guess now they're pulled out completely.

We're pulling out a lot a lot of people now.  We were planned before the so called surge.  We were already going.  The unit that I went with was an infantry company from Virginia and they were only there for seven months and pulled out.  We were replaced by a guard unit from Indiana.  The 82nd was replaced by a guard unit from Arkansas.  I worked with them for the last couple weeks.  I actually did my military specialty which was working on weapons for the 82nd Airborne and the 39th ID out of Arkansas.

They're pulling down to a certain amount and thats already been planned months ago.  There for a while with the surge, every CHU, container housing unit, it's a little mobile home park where we lived, three 10 x 10 rooms in one building, were full.  We also had people living in tents.  But now they're pretty much back down.  Theere are quite a few people and quite a few bases that they're pulling out of.  But everything over there has been really quiet except for right around Baghdad itself, and right around Ba Quba and that area.  The west has been really quiet. that includes Falujah, Ramadi and the Defidan areas.  Those were real hot spots.  Falujah was probably the most fighting in the country.  I had no problem driving through downtown Falujah, we didn't have anybody take a shot at us at all and we went through the market in broad daylight.  It's real quiet now.  Even from what I hear from the guys who actually got into firefights in different places, it's hardly ever an Iraqi who shooting at you.

Who are the insurgents, Chesnians, Syrians, Jordanians, Saudis, Iranians, a little bit of everywhere but not very many of them are Iraqis.

Iraq has the oil and Iran tried to take it over for 10 or 15 years and they couldn't take it.  The battlefield didn't go more than 15 or 20 miles in 10 years.  We hear these people say, "We'd never stand a chance against Iran since we're already in Iraq."  Come on, they couldn't move 15 miles in 10 years.  We moved 700 miles in 24 hours.  Tehran would be a ghost town in 24 hours.

Al Asad was a pretty good sized place.  It was a huge air base back when Saddam was in.  Al Asad was the biggest one in the west and further over was TQ, that was a bomber base.  Then BIAP itself, Baghdad International.  Those are the major airfields there.  Just going around Al Asad on a bike is 17 miles

Our internet was the big thing but it was really slow.  It made dialup look like dsl.  And you couldn't send, like I sent a couple of pictures, but I couldn't send a real good picture or any video out of the country.  If I sent more than 2 or 3 pictures, I would pretty much use up my bandwidth for the day.  I was done.  My wife would go get the GunNews magazine up the street from the Dollar Store and put it in the care packages because I tried downloading it from the internet and I would get about half and it would lock me out.  I couldn't read it electronically, it just didn't want to work.  You could try it once in a while from a different location on the base and it would work but it was still really slow.

A computer was still your best entertainment because they have the morale servers over there.  You get on the government computer and they would give us the movie ILegend which came out here in the states on Friday.  On Saturday there was a free copy given to us on internet there.  We could take a thumb drive, put it in and watch that movie on Saturday.  Last month they took what used to be the base theatre and are showing movies there again.  There was a Subway and a Green Bean, if there are two tents in Iraq, one of them is going to be a Green Bean Coffee, like a Starbucks,  the slushies, the tea and the coffee, everywhere.  You get a building this size (Diamonds Buffet), one of these closets is going to be a Green Bean with two guys from India in it making tea and coffee.  Those things are great and I guess they are actually opening them in the United States now.

The last couple weeks I was there I started  doing my own job and we were working on the weapons.  We were working on designated marksman rifles, a silenced full length M-16 using heavy ammo.

Asked if there was any chance of his going back, Harney said, "I'm sure there is, it won't be quickly I hope.  I still have until the year 2012."

Three-thousand members of the Illinois National Guard are getting ready to be deployed to Afghanistan right now.  They are leaving I believe in December and February.  Pretty much if you didn't go on this trip, you're going on that one and I'm sure when they call again, we'll go somewhere else.

Iraq looks a lot like the beach with no water.  We had five and six man teams out at a couple of outposts.  Some of the younger guys are like, "Aw, this sucks out here."  We went to places like Fab Dinang where the Marines hang out.  You jump off the truck and your shoes disappear in the dust.  The sand is not like the sand here, it's like talcum powder or baby powder.  We've got video, when you walk across it it's like the moon landing with the dust.  I've got picture where your books are eight inch tall book with your pants bloused in them and your pants are touching the dust and your boots are buried.

Those guys get a shower every four days or so when a truck comes in and there's no water heater.  They have what they call a wag bag, looks like a lawn chair with a plastic bag with a hole in the lawn chair.  You open up the plastic bag, poop in there and they burn it.  That's your outhouse.  These Marines are out there, once a month they would get one truck with an entire PX inside it.  These guys were out there with no internet access, and no phone access.  The Marines are on seven month tours but seven months in one of those places would suck.

That was where we woke up one morning covered in snow.  We took a bunch of snipers out there and we were going to watch along the river.  There was not enough room and they didn't have anyplace for us to sleep on this base.  Once you got into this base you had to check with the landowner and see when you could leave.  They didn't want you leaving at certain times because they couldn't provide aircraft, artillery or whatever.  We got out there and had to stay the night because of delays of vehicles on the way.  I slept on the roof and I woke up in the morning, "What is this white stuff?"  We took pictures of "Iraq" written in the snow on the vehicles.  It was the first time it had snowed in Baghdad in 100 years.

You could smell the towns in Iraq before you could see them.  They actually have what looks like a pond on the city square.  That's a sewage puddle and it's flowing across the road.  You could smell the place for probably 20 clicks before you could see it.   We have video of little kids, no shoes, running barefoot through garbage in the snow and rock, running alongside our vehicles, just to wave, little kids and it's cold out.

Asked whether there was any trading in cigarettes and candy bars.  Trading no, we just pretty much gave the stuff away.  After you've had 50 pounds of beef jerky, you'll give it to anybody who'll take it.  The kids are always looking for candy.  "Candy, mister, candy?"  We gave them bottles of water and candy, just don't throw it in front of the vehicle.  We'd give the IP's at the check points, a case of water or a case of Gater Aid, Pepsi, PopTarts, all kinds of stuff.    They were thrilled to get bottled water because our water doesn't make them sick like their own does.

Some of these bases like TQ. if you go on the berm, its about ten feet from the building we were staying in, you can look down on the towns.  They went to move a berm one day about 20 meters from some of our tents.  When they pulled a bulldozer up there and started moving the berm they hit something.  They found out that berm contained six Miegs, all wrapped in plastic and covered in sand.  We'd been there five years and we didn't know six Miegs were less the 20 meters away.  And they're looking for a couple of gas shells, I don't think so.  You can hide anything.  When I was in the service before, we were in Central America a lot.  You think you can hide a lot of stuff in the jungle?  You can hide stuff in the desert.  Five minutes with a bulldozer you can dig a hole and put anything in it, cover it up with sand and it looks exactly the same as the rest of the country.  Five minutes after a sand storm comes through you can't tell what's been through there.

If you look up Al asad on the internet in Iraq, anybody ever seen the Mummy where the wall of sand moves.  There's a video on there some guy took from the top of the power plant and you can see an entire wall of sand covering the entire base, 10AM in the morning it was completely pitch dark.  If you wake up on the morning and you look at the little slit under your door and its orange, you might as well put a mask or something on because its just sand.  You can't see anything, nothing moves, no convoys, no aircraft, no nothing.  That's why it took us an extra four days just to get out of there.

The chow halls, the facilities over there are fantastic in some places.  Al Asad had four or five chow halls.  This thing was huge,you could play football inside easily,  two lines, regular menu, fast grill, omelets, regular eggs, sandwich line, Baskin Robbins ice cream, home of free Baskin Robbins.  That was in the center, and a cheesecake factory for the first couple months we were there.  My daughter asked, "What'd you have for dinner dad?"  "Shrimp, lobster, steak, on Wednesday, seafood and steak night."  What'd you have for dessert?"  "Cheesecake with ice cream on it."  Call me late for anything but not for a meal.


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