"Our guys were very concerned about the Islamic prohibitions against hanging out with their women, or even looking at their women; and here they're going to ask a woman to lie down on this camp cot and hike up her skirts…. Invariably the guy that was with her always had a rifle."
In fact, the Kurds took the pregnant women to the medies — a sign of enormous trust.
The trust the SF troops created was everywhere; the rapport was extraordinary.
In one camp, Major Rick Helfer built a particularly strong working relationship with its Kurdish leaders. One day, the leaders decided to honor him. A thousand kids suddenly ringed the SF perimeter and began chanting, "Helfer! Helfer! Helfer! USA! USA! George Bush! George Bush!"
"My people! yelled Helfer, hamming it up to the other Americans' amusement. Later, he repaid their praise by dressing head-to-toe in the clothing of a Kurdish tribal elder.
Life in the refugee camps could turn hellish in seconds. A few days after the children's demonstration for Helfer, the same kids were throwing rocks at Turkish soldiers who had come to their camp to steal some of the refugees' supplies. The Turks locked and loaded, and lined up in firing positions. SF personnel, their own weapons at the ready, rushed between the Turks and the refugees and faced off the Turks — preventing a possible massacre.
Mines — a constant, deadly danger — had been laid along the roadways and in many flat, open areas, stepping off a well-trod path could bring death.
Some children saw them as toys.
"They would go out and collect mines," says Krueger, "then go to the top of a hill and roll the mines down to see how far they would go before they went off."
Mines caused many injuries, mostly to kids who wandered into a mined area without knowing it. "I remember an SF soldier running up to the LZ carrying a little boy with a leg that had just been severed," says Krueger, who gave up his helicopter so the kid would be evacuated to a hospital. "That big burly SF soldier with that little bitty body in his arms. His entire focus was to get him medical attention."
The danger wasn't only to Kurds; an SF soldier had to have his leg amputated below the knee after stepping on a mine.
Even relief operations could injure people. CH-47 Chinooks are powerful helicopters, capable of delivering large amounts of food and other supplies. Their massive rotors, powered by huge engines at either end of the aircraft, generate immense downdraft as they land. "It would blow little kids over. They would just go flying like tumbleweeds," Kershner recalls. "It was no fault of the helicopter. That's just physics."
The SF found safer "games" for the kids than collecting mines or watching helicopters land. One favorite involved policing the area. "The guys would give them candies from the MREs," Kershner continues, "for whoever picked up the most trash or something.
"I went to a camp and there was a medic walking through it, and a little four-year-old kid would follow this medic around everywhere. And if the medic had a free hand, the kid was holding it. I finally asked what the deal was. It turned out that the kid had choked and the medie had done the Heimlich maneuver on him. That had changed his life, and this kid was just attached to the medic."
It was hard to find a Kurd who was not grateful in some measure to the Americans. One Kurd leader offered Kershner a fourteen-year-old daughter as a wife. "It took me quite some time to convince him that it probably would not be a good idea for me to take a second wife home."
CULTURE
Americans and Kurds have vastly different cultures. The Kurds' attitudes to women, children, the elderly, and to male privilege make most Americans uncomfortable — and of course that goes the other way around.
To the Kurds, for example, children counted for very little. Adults certainly valued the youngest members of their society — if the kids needed help, they helped them when they could — but they clearly put a much higher priority on helping other adults, especially the very old. Children were often the last to get food, water, and medical attention. A dead child would generally be buried in a shallow, mass grave; an adult would receive a much more elaborate funeral and separate burial.
"They would abandon the children that were too young or too weak — they would just leave them out to die," Kershner remembers. "It was a cultural problem for the Americans to accept that they took care of the old people first. But you have to understand the old people were their corporate history — the institutional memory. They were the decision makers. So that was where their emphasis was."
Attitudes toward women also shocked Americans. It was not uncommon to see a woman carrying heavy loads while men carried nothing at all. Girls were expected to marry as soon as they were old enough to bear children. And when SF personnel tried to show the women how to make a substitute formula for children from rice water, they nearly came to blows with Kurdish men, who resented their dealing directly with the women. Such techniques had to be shown to the men first, who would then teach it to the women — if they decided the women should know it.
While some Kurdish attitudes bothered the Americans, their strong family structures provided a base for organizing relief efforts. The elders were the primary decision makers, and their decisions were normally accepted without dissent. They were therefore the first people with whom to deal.
"If you told an older Kurdish guy, 'Hey listen, why don't you get your family together, cause this is what we're going to do,' generally speaking he'd get his family together to do whatever you wanted him to do," Kershner recalls.
"In fact, the Kurds seemed to enjoy working with our guys. And we had real good relationships with them. Whenever you met with them, they enjoyed hearing about your family. They wanted to find out how many kids you had, what they did for a living…. They were very generous people. They would share their last bits with you."
Or even on occasion offer to make the ultimate sacrifice:
"One day," Dick Potter recalls, "I was involved with the tribal and camp elders in Cukurca Camp, the largest camp located entirely in northern Iraq [125,000 population]. The meeting was heated. The elders were ready to move south, but only if the town of Dahuk was under CTF PROVIDE COMFORT control. At that time, I could not make such a commitment, and so the debate went on for hours.
"As I was leaving, the elders took me out of the tent and introduced me to two young Kurdish men, in excellent health and in their mid-twenties. The elders had heard of President George Bush's heart problems, and with great solemnity told me that if President Bush, their dear brother in Washington, needed a new heart, these two men were ready to travel to the United States to be heart donors. I thanked the elders, told them that our President had healed, and passed the message back to General Shalikashvili, who I am told passed it to the Chairman, who in turn informed the President."
The loyalty and generosity went both ways. "Big loyalties were created," Kershner continues. "If you could have told the SF guys, 'Well, we are going to leave you in place and you are just going to carve out the country, and we're going to call it Kurdistan and let all the Kurds live there,' they would have done it in a heartbeat."
GOING HOME
As the situation was stabilizing in the camps, diplomatic and political progress was also being made elsewhere. The allied occupation of Kurdish cities attacked by the Iraqis helped stabilize the political situation, and a second round of negotiations began May 7 between Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan Front, led by Kurdish Democratic Party leader Barzani. By this time, roughly 16,000 allied troops were involved in the relief and security operations.