 "Photo: Jordan Gomez")
Editor's note: This is the third part in a series on UT students who have served or are serving in Iraq.
Every day for 11 months and two weeks, Colin Burke's parents changed the number on a sign in their Long Island front yard counting the number of days he was in Iraq.
Burke, a McCombs Business School graduate student, was deployed to Iraq as part of the 4th Infantry Division 110 Cavalry of the U.S. Army.
After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy, Burke was stationed at Fort Hood with the 4th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army in January 2003.
He said the division did not expect to be deployed to Iraq, but on his second day of work at Fort Hood, training was stopped, and the deployment order was given.
He said his division crossed the Kuwait-Iraq border about two weeks after the initial invasion. Burke said they encountered little resistance, mostly light fire, as they traveled north through Baghdad to Tikrit. The 3rd Infantry Division had traveled the route and cleared the area during the initial invasion.
Though assigned the role of field artillery officer, Burke worked in civil affairs in Iraq, he said. He spent six months in the northeastern town of Balad Ruz on the Iraq-Iran border.
There was no coalition presence in the town prior to their arrival, he said. He also said the 95,000-person town had no working police force, government or schools when he arrived, and some civilians were looting from schools and hospitals.
"It was just basically chaos, almost like the wild west," Burke said.
As a civil affairs officer, Burke was in charge of allocating money to different programs that would provide structure for the town. The money created a police force, library, market, bank and schools, among other programs. The first Shiite mosque in the town was built during that time, he said.
Burke said he helped coordinate a new soccer program and started an Army school assistance program. He contacted friends and family who taught in the northeastern U.S., and they sent school supplies to Iraq.
Burke said the Army had an open-door policy four days of the week when townspeople could give input. Recognizing their importance in Iraqi society, the Army also had monthly meetings with sheiks, he said.
Burke said he had to learn to deal with a culture with which he was unfamiliar.
"We were given classes on the culture of Iraq, but learning the culture through my translator, through talking to the people, was probably the most important thing," Burke said. "We couldn't impose our culture on them."
With the town unable to hold an accurate vote, Burke was also in charge of picking an interim mayor and coordinating a town council. The town has a cross section of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and to ensure fair representation, Burke talked to townspeople, community leaders and sheiks.
"[The town council] was really a great opportunity for all these people to come together and talk, which it was evident that they didn't do," Burke said. "They didn't even kind of understand this whole concept of people coming together to talk about their issues, even though they come from different ways of life, but they live in the same town."
Burke then defended a military headquarters for three months in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown. The 4th Infantry Division, which had taken over Hussein's palace compound, received mortar attacks from across the Tigris River. Burke searched for enemies across from the compound and notified soldiers of their presence.
He noted the stark differences between the homes inside and outside of the wall surrounding Hussein's palace compound. He said the 50 or so palaces and mansions inside the wall were filled with indoor pools, movie theaters, crystal chandeliers, hand-painted ceilings and exotic animals, while the land outside looked like a ghetto filled with huts and shanties.
"It was amazing to see how a man could live like that in such excess," Burke said. "He had so many things, but then people living right next door to him, outside his gate, were suffering."
Burke said he was 10 kilometers away when Hussein was captured outside Tikrit in
December 2003.
He said he wishes to go back and talk to the people he met in Balad Ruz. He considers many of the citizens friends and has made attempts to contact Army personnel in the town to ask about the situation but was unsuccessful.
"While I was there, I felt like we made a good difference in these people's lives and made their quality of life better," he said.
Burke said he cannot say whether it was the right decision to invade Iraq.
"You can say that if it was the wrong decision, then you would never be able to prove that, because how do you know terrorist cells wouldn't form and come over and attack us?" Burke said. "If there is even a small possibility that America prevented an attack on America, I think it's worth it."
Be the first to comment on this article!