Iraq, from the ground up
By Andrew Seguin
 The average American reads about the war in Iraq in newspapers or listens to reports about it on the radio or evening news. To hear about it first-hand from someone who has been there, boots dusted by the desert sand, is a rare thing for most people. Upper School students recently had the fortune of experiencing that rarity: Buck Sexton, a counter-insurgency analyst for the C.I.A. and the older brother of a Class 12 student, spoke to the girls about the time he spent in Iraq during fall 2006.
Mr. Sexton’s talk began with an overview of the current political situation in Iraq before segueing into some of the qualities of quotidian life there. He showed numerous slides of the place that he had visited.
“Violence in Iraq is way down,” Mr. Sexton said. He explained that an increase in security forces, the rise of civilian patrols that protect their own neighborhoods and the unwillingness of the Iraqi people to accept a state run by jihad had contributed to that decrease. “The political solution is what we need to get to now,” Mr. Sexton added, admitting that it would not be an easy process.
Because much of the political future in Iraq is uncertain, Mr. Sexton felt compelled to share with the students his answer to a question that nags and tugs on so many of our minds: What’s it like over there? By “it,” we mean life, or at least the portions of life in a war zone to which we can relate.
“Life is a bizarre mix of war-zone caution and synthetic Americana,” Mr. Sexton said. “In the coalition dining halls you’ll find Pizza Hut and 32 flavors of Baskin-Robbins. You don’t even feel like you’ve left the continental U.S.”
“At least until the mortar rounds start going off,” he added.
Mr. Sexton also mentioned that some soldiers write blogs regularly or update their MySpace pages every day; and that a soldier, fully equipped with protective gear and a rifle, might take a cell phone call from his mother just before raiding a house, a striking image that encapsulates both the connectivity of our world and its state of conflict.
Many of the girls had questions for Mr. Sexton, ranging from how he decided to join the C.I.A. to whether or not the media accurately portrays the situation in Iraq. “I think the media tends to focus on the negative,” Mr. Sexton said. “But if you want to know what’s really going on in Iraq, read soldiers’ blogs,” he added, emphasizing that their perspectives are available almost daily.
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