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Attacks Rock 'Foundation' That Marines Built in Anbar
Charlie Company kept on patrolling. On Sunday afternoon, the troops were accompanied by the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit's commander, Col. Frank McKenzie. He said he likes to walk the streets two or three times a week to get his own sense of how his strategy is working.
McKenzie, of Birmingham, sported long, dark hair before he joined the Marine Corps. He has vowed he won't shave again when he retires. Given to reading both the ancient historians and the New Yorker, McKenzie, 48, takes an old-fashioned approach to war, dismissing the more arcane theories debated by military strategists as "elegant irrelevance."
  Capt. David Handy, 31, is the commander of Charlie Company of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit's Battalion Landing Team. (By Nelson Hernandez -- The Washington Post)
VIDEO | Col. Frank McKenzie, commanding officer of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, leads a 3-mile foot patrol in the city of Hit. (Video by The Post's Nelson Hernandez, edited by washingtonpost.com's Jonathan Forsythe.)
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"I think that sometimes the American military was seduced -- we were intellectually seduced -- by guys who promised a solution to everything," he said, as he walked the trash-strewn streets of Hit, where rusted-out cars and dilapidated stone buildings mix strangely with well-kept riverfront mansions with brilliant green courtyards and dusty Mesopotamian palms.
To McKenzie, the centerpiece of fighting the insurgency in Hit is the routine foot patrol, backed up by the kind of Southern charm he uses to set the example for his troops.
To that end, he said, he doesn't detain people without a good reason, and says he has let three-quarters of slightly more than 100 detainees go back to their homes quickly. On two recent patrols, his troops waved and gave Arabic greetings, high-fives and candy to residents they passed on the road. When they were searching houses, they didn't mark the walls with spray paint, as other units here have done.
As he walked along the three-mile route, he kept an eye out for what he and his officers call "atmospherics": how the residents look and react to the patrol. The Marines received a warm welcome from children calling out for chocolate. The grown men, dressed in the conservative gray dishdashas and turbans more common in this rustic part of Iraq, glared at the Marines from their store stalls, but would slowly nod or wave when McKenzie's troops greeted them.
The commander said his methods have deprived the insurgents of the popular support they need to win, adding that the Americans have received growing support from residents who are willing to tip off troops as well as a city council made up of local tribal leaders.
"Do they love us?" McKenzie said. "No. They don't, and they never will. But can you get a reasonable system of government here? Yeah, I think you can. I see nothing fundamentally ideological here that prevents us."
There's one catch. "I think this country can be fixed, but I think it'll take time to do it," he said. He doesn't worry about having to come back; in fact, he wishes he could stay a little longer, to see Hit develop a police force and a trash collection crew.
"To be honest, I'm more concerned about my son coming here," he said. His son, K.R., is a third-year midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy.
'The Bad Guys Got Lucky'
The second blow came that night, about 1:30 a.m. Monday. A roadside bomb had exploded beneath an armored Humvee from Charlie Company on a routine pickup mission from Hotel Hit to another base in the city.
The enormous bomb utterly destroyed the vehicle, McKenzie said. The explosion killed two Marines almost immediately. A third died later of his wounds, and two others were injured in the explosion. The names of the dead have been withheld by military authorities until their relatives can be notified.
"The advantage is always with the guy who plants the bomb," said McKenzie, who added that it was still unclear what type of explosive had hit the vehicle. "The bad guys got lucky. I don't know that a tank would have survived it."
McKenzie vowed that the attack wouldn't change his strategy.
"You've got a very small minority of people who are causing these problems. What they are trying to provoke is an overreaction from us," he said. "What we have to do is stay on the mission and not get caught up with the anger of the moment. And we go out and patrol, and that's what's going to happen today."
