Troops Confront Waste In Iraq Reconstruction

"I didn't learn a whole lot, actually," Barnes said. "It would have been nice if they had taught us the paperwork portion of it. Instead they focused on stuff we're not even doing here."

Another former infantry soldier, Staff Sgt. Benjamin Johnson, 27, of Saginaw, Mich., described the civil affairs training course as "vague."

"We didn't go over any CERP projects, which is what we're dealing with here," said Johnson, referring to the Commander's Emergency Response Program, the main reconstruction fund used by U.S. generals in their areas of operations.

"I felt a little cheated," Barnes said.

Files in Disarray

By April, both Barnes and Johnson were attached to Forward Operating Base Iskan, run by the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment. It's a few miles south of Iskandariyah, an industrial town nestled at the southern tip of an area known as the Triangle of Death. In this area, where Sunni and Shiite groups compete for influence, the military had embarked on dozens of projects, including cleaning streets and canals, building soccer fields and blood banks, and renovating telephone lines.

Four-person civil affairs teams, whose varied duties include handling economic issues and training Iraqi soldiers, are attached to each battalion on one-year rotations, sometimes less. Incomplete projects are handed off to the next team.

When Barnes and Johnson arrived, they found disorganized files. They had no copies of payment receipts, which totaled $7 million under the previous team. To learn the status of many ongoing projects, they had to speak with contractors and locals. "It wasn't done the way it should have been done," Barnes said. "We had to learn as we went how to do a project."

Some completed projects, they found, were not operational -- such as the medical clinic in a nearby village that the Iraqi government has not yet staffed. Some have to be fixed. "I know there have been other projects from past teams that are not working now, and we have to go and fix them and assess them and redo them," Johnson said.

Meanwhile, their three-man team -- they've been short-staffed since they arrived -- has 25 to 30 projects of its own to complete. The soldiers' duties also include attending meetings of the city council, agricultural union and other local groups.

"We kind of have to make do with what we have," said Sgt. Walter Jackson, 31, of Houston. "It's on-the-job training."

They try their best to go out and visit projects, said Johnson, but sometimes they are forced to ask other soldiers out on patrol, with no civil affairs training, to stop by projects "to take a few pictures and let us know what they think of it."

On a recent day, Johnson was scrutinizing a $250,000 contract to renovate a secondary school in Musayyib, a Shiite city south of Iskandariyah.