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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Returned soldiers describe good U.S. doing in Iraq

Brian Davidson Post Register

REXBURG, Idaho — To Brian Gabrielson and Jason Hartley, there are numbers more reflective of life in Iraq than the number of American soldiers killed.

There are the estimated 14.5 million Iraqis who will benefit from cleaner water, thanks to water projects built by U.S. soldiers. There are the more than 2,300 schools rehabilitated with U.S. dollars, stocked with about 8.7 million in new textbooks. There are the 9 million children who have received their vaccinations from U.S. medics.

And Pat Burton was pleased to hear them tell all about it.

“I want to know the truth,” the Rexburg resident said. “I don’t want to know what they’ve copied from station to station, or through the newspaper.”

Burton, along with more than three dozen other residents, met in Rexburg on Thursday to hear Hartley, a sergeant with the 4th Infantry Division based in Fort Hood, Texas, and Gabrielson, a specialist with the Driggs-based 938th Engineering detachment, offer a soldier’s view of the Iraq war. The meeting was sponsored by the Madison County Republican Women’s Club.

Both agree the picture of life in Iraq as painted by the media offers too dark a picture.

Neither denies there’s trouble in Iraq.

North of Baghdad, where Hartley was stationed, his patrols regularly had rocks thrown and bullets fired at them. Gabrielson, transferred from U.S.-friendly northern Iraq to hostile Fallujah, felt the tension rise as he left an area where soldiers and civilians mixed without fear — and even played basketball and soccer together — to an area where the few Iraqis allowed on base were closely watched.

But the good news, they agree, isn’t getting out.

The media “only show the bad stuff,” Gabrielson said. “If they say they’re fair and balanced, they’d have nine good stories for every bad. There are millions of lives there being improved.”

“Before the war, the Iraqi people were really repressed,” Gabrielson said. “More than 400,000 were murdered under Saddam’s rule. He was a horrible dictator; that was one reason I felt best about going. I’ve seen the mass graves.”