For those of you who viewed the Steven Colbert show the other night...the one that took place in Iraq for our American soldiers...you might enjoy reading this post. (For those of you who didn't see it, check out ronp01's post. He's got the link to the show. http://open.salon.com/blog/ronp01/2009/06/09/obama_orders_colberts_haircut

 My friend, Lt. Col Robert Bennett, happened to be in that audience of military who were present for the show. As a matter of fact, Bob's office was to the right of the stage. Bob has been in Iraq since last June and will be coming home in about three weeks. He is a writer and posts every Sunday from Iraq for his friends and family. Below is his post for today.

"As if life around al Faw Palace were surreal enough, Steven Colbert's
four day run at the Palace provided yet another twist to life around
here. While the preparations for his activities disrupted the palace,
the actual production of the shows themselves rendered the place almost
inoperable for four one-hour blocks over the course of four days. He
and his staff brought a world view so different from the mainstream Army
types we have around here, and we benefited from that difference. We
caught a glimpse of how the real world views some of the activities we
undertake as strange, and that helped us laugh at ourselves. We heard
jokes and quips about what everyday life is like back in the world, and
that gave us a chance to catch up a bit with our own culture back home.
We saw the professionalism and skill of a well honed team that wasn't
practicing room clearing techniques produce the show, and that helped us
realize that there are lots of hard working Americans back home who are
not involved in the War on Terror.

For most of us, our only linkages to the world are through our family
and friends. When we do communicate with them, we often share the
important personal factoids that need to be shared at the expense of
understanding the elements that really defined a day like meals,
weather, the economy, and et cetera.

The staff at the Colbert Report believed that the defining moment of the
four-day shoot would be Shrek shaving Stephen's head on national cable
TV; they were wrong. The MNC-I Command Sergeant Major thought the
defining moment would be when he led the crowd in a rendition of The
Army Song; wrong again, though it was a nice rendition. The defining
moment took place 45 seconds into Colbert's first monologue, when he
said, "by the power vested in me by basic cable, I declare victory in
the Iraq war." The place went crazy.

Militarily, he was right. By almost every possible measure, the war is
won, but winning the peace remains a challenge. Hundreds of thousands
of Soldiers figured out how to get things to this successful, yet very
fragile, point by expending gallons of blood, sweat and tears. And now
we are more than happy to pass the baton to someone else, but we want
some assurances that whoever picks up the baton will follow through on
the job and secure the peace we have fought to achieve.

Colbert's bold declaration and his commitment of a week of programming
to the effort established a bond between the off-camera Steven Colbert
(pronounce the "t" in his real name) and Soldiers. Of all the pundits,
"military experts," think tank geeks, (bad) reporters and premature
historians, the guy who seems to best understand the situation here is a
comedian. War may be hell, but at least it has a laugh track.

Colbert departed Iraq hours after filming his last program, but the
evidence of his visit remains around the palace. Some of his larger
props remain in the rotunda, and recordings of his programs are
supposedly on our shared drives in multiple locations. Water cooler
talk continues to include references to where individuals were during
each of the four shows. This event will live on in re-runs for all the
folks who were here, and it will likely live on in the memories of those
folks who will arrive over the next couple months to the point that they
will feel like they were there. Sorta like M*A*S*H.
We celebrated the departure of several of our folks at a screening of
the movie M*A*S*H last evening. As the movie began, one of our colonels
noted how there were an eerie number of similarities between the 4077th
and the JIATF. One man's definition of eerie is another man's
definition of a tolerable working environment.

Like Hawkeye, Trapper, Hot Lips, Duke and the Soldiers assigned to the
4077th, we are an eclectic mix of cultures here that arrive as
individuals and become part of a team. The team itself has a culture:
irreverent, skilled, hard-working, unique and successful. As people
come and go, the JIATF team finds a way to integrate a newly arrived
individual's particular capabilities into team fabric. It is
absolutely, hands-down the very best place to work in a general
officer-level headquarters organization in Iraq. It made complete sense
- based on the skewed JIATF logic - to conduct our recent farewell
ceremonies in a M*A*S*H themed party.

The physical props for the party were simple. We needed the
multi-directional sign that indicated each JIATF member's
home-away-from-Baghdad. A seven foot tall speed limit sign looked a
great deal like the base of the sign from the 4077th Compound. Moving
it from its location into the palace posed some challenges; the sign's
function and the fact that we didn't exactly own it could be interpreted
as barriers. Having said that, we assessed that the sign was no longer
used because it had been overturned for three weeks without being moved
and a contrary sign was located less than 20 feet from it and sunk into
the ground on a metal pole. It made sense that the old sign was both
obsolete and available. We hoped the two sets of guards we would
encounter between its location and our office would agree.

The guards said nothing, in fact, two of them held a door for us as we
moved it into the office. After determining distances to each of our
folks' home towns and obtaining nails and a hammer, we had ourselves a
sign.

We had to have at least four cases of near beer (the German element of
our team) and fine cigars (I'll claim responsibility for that wrinkle).
There was an artful array of sausages, chips, gourmet salsas and
munchies with real plates and silverware (the Pam, Jenn, Missy, Rachael
influence). Jenn's parents are medical professionals, and they shipped
several sets of scrubs and other paraphernalia to us so we could be
properly attired. We borrowed a projector from a sister team within the
Operations Directorate, and I linked my little DVD player to the
projector and a large speaker. The third floor deck became, for one
night only, the 4077th Compound.

In the movie, the helicopter that took Hawkeye and Trapper for a weekend
in Japan disrupted a driving range session the boys were having one
afternoon in Korea. In our version of the event, we created a driving
range on one of Saddam's catwalks on which he could observe the western
views from the palace. It was dark outside, so we naturally decided to
illuminate the balls in order to best observe their flight from the 3rd
deck into the lake. Our first, and most successful, technique involved
bathing the balls with the substance from inside a chemlight. The
second technique, also successful, involved covering the balls with
lighter fluid and lighting them prior to striking them. The fluid
generally burned out mid-flight. Unfortunately, it had been a while
since we had a chance to golf, and a few of us failed to address the
ball correctly or pulled our heads up and topped the dag-gum thing.

Our poor golfing skills resulted in a few errant strikes that bounced
off a 1-inch tall retainer wall four feet in front of the striking pad
and bounced behind the range. Also behind the range was the MNF-I
broadcast center, and one of our generals was conducting an interview
when the ball smacked into the side of her building with a resounding
thump. Apparently, there was some angst in the room, and the sergeant
major sent a young Soldier to the deck to investigate what was
happening. When he arrived on the cat walk, he found three dudes in
scrubs laughing their heads off as chemlight covered balls soared into
the night. He asked us to please refrain from striking his building
again.

We farewelled four people this weekend. Presentations to the departing
individuals were made, and memories were shared. We laughed at
ourselves, and we all mentioned how lucky we felt to be part of such a
unique team. We all noted our failures as well; despite the efforts of
the 60 or so people who have passed through the JIATF over the course of
the last year, we did not manage to change the federal government's
focus on or execution of interagency operations from at the national
policy level. We were unable to impose timeliness or accuracy
discipline on our colleagues from the intelligence community. We were
not able to change the culture of the US Department of State, though we
did see a career foreign service officer go totally native after two
successive embedded duty stints with the military.

Like the characters in the movie, we leaned on each other, and we got
through. When the chance to go home came for each person, they departed
eagerly, but they left knowing that a part of them remained in theater
with the teammates they'd left behind. They also knew that if they
returned several months later, the basic organizational attitude would
remain but the personality would change based on the personnel makeup at
that future date. I'll have to come to grips with that reality soon.

It has been determined that the JIATF will continue to exist for the
foreseeable future. There have been more successes than failures, and
the team has developed a corporate culture that embraces hard work,
occasional folly and a cooperative attitude. This is not the first time
this has occurred. T.E. Lawrence, in recalling his World War I
experience, wrote, "as our revolt succeeded, onlookers have praised its
leadership: but behind the scenes lay all the vices of amateur control,
experimental councils, divisions, whimsicality."

Some things remain constant, because people don't evolve that much in
the grand scheme of things. While the al Faw fish may be developing
legs now, they are not going to pose a threat to the security of the
palace for at least another 10,000 years. This war, like all others,
features many insane periods of activity and other periods of relative
calm. At the MNF-I staff level, the insane periods are superimposed on
a battle rhythm that would make the labor department initiate an
investigation into abuse back home. Here, it's just daily business. To
deal with the drama, a sense of gallows humor dominates, just as it did
for our predecessors in Korea and our contemporaries at The Colbert
Report. A sense of humor and someone with whom to share a joke when
insanity abounds around you are force multipliers. J*I*A*T*F is a place
where that multiplication takes place every day."