What made Afghanistan memorable for North Bend’s Andrew Conway, serving there as an intelligence analyst for NATO, were the mountains and the friendly people.

What he most vividly remembers about Iraq, where he was stationed from last April to November, are the heat, dust and a breakdown one night in Baghdad.

It happened in the last mess hall on the closing U.S. Army base, packed with soldiers and foreign nationals. They were the last soldiers to be sent home as the U.S. withdrew, he recalled. The place was noisier than usual with all the extra people, but got very quiet when some started hearing a loud, shrill whistle, like the sound of an incoming rocket.

“It was dead silence. Everybody stared at each other, then in a split second, at the exact same time, everybody took cover underneath there tables,” Conway said. “It was pure bedlam … food was flying everywhere, tables were getting turned over, shelves were falling down, people were low-crawling.”

Then the sound stopped, and nothing happened. People got up off the floor, righted the tables, and sat down to continue eating. At the second sound of the whistle, about half the people reacted, but by this time, others had noticed the man in the corner waving his arms and yelling something about the sound coming from the broken ice cream machine.

That machine gave Conway one of his favorite memories, and serves as a metaphor for much of the time he spent in Iraq. As an officer and a “multi-functional team leader” of a group of 10 intelligence analysts attached to a larger infantry unit, he was frequently frustrated by the broken systems he encountered.

Tied hands

Justice in Iraq was especially difficult to navigate, politically.

“Our hands were so tied,” he said. As the country resumed its own governance and policing, officials focused more closely on local issues and local crimes, rather than, international criminals or even attacks on Americans, he said. Often, he or his men would arrest someone, only to see them back on the streets within 72 hours.

“It was really hard for us to keep a guy detained,” he said.

Military contractors, on the other hand, had more authority to arrest and detain prisoners, “so as a result, all the fun missions went to those guys,” he said, adding that “Getting those really nefarious characters off the street is always fun to me.”

Conway’s other main frustration was how hard he had to work just to get his soldiers involved in daily operations with the infantry group.

“They always look at the intelligence guys like they’re aliens,” he explained.  “They don’t know what my guys can do, they don’t know them, they haven’t worked with them, so why risk their lives?”

The intelligence guys, and girls, don’t go through the same training as infantry soldiers, but are equally physically fit and combat ready. The rest of their job description can vary dramatically, from day to day.

Instead of focusing solely on “what the enemy had, what the enemy was capable of, and that kind of stuff,” Conway said modern analysts gather information in hundreds of different ways.  “The whole mindset of military intelligence has changed. Since the last two of our wars have been predominantly nation-building, our focus has been on economics, international affairs,” he said.

As an analyst in Afghanistan, he specialized in Pakistan, and “anything that would happen with Pakistan, their influence predominantly, of course, on Afghanistan, world affairs, what their relationship is with India and other countries, and pretty much whatever the general (Stanley McChrystal, then commander of all U.S. and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force troops in Afghanistan) wanted.”

Helping people

In contrast, Conway’s sweetheart and fellow intelligence analyst, Lauran Walker spent her deployment doing humanitarian work. Walker went to Iraq on the same deployment from Joint Base Lewis McChord  as Conway, but she went to a very remote, rural area.

Her job, she said, was to talk with the local women. “Just talk to them, see how they were doing, see if they needed anything, if we could bring them anything,” she said. On that assignment, she’d been asked to fix a village well, help make bread, watch the children, and just generally build a relationship with the native residents.

“They were enthusiastic that we were there,” Walker said. “They always ran up to us when we went through on our missions. They always stopped, they talked to us, they gave us hugs. They were very appreciative that we were there and actually spending time with them.”

“We call that atmospherics,” Conway said. “ A lot of commanders nowadays like to know what the feeling is in the towns, the positives and negatives, … it’s a good way for us to gather information and provide it to the real decision makers.”

For Walker, a Florida native who volunteered for the Lewis-McChord group, it was simply a good experience.

“Before going into the deployment I said I wasn’t going to let it change me, so I focused on all of the positive things that were going on,” she said.

Consequently, their shortened deployment and early homecoming in November was a mixed blessing.

“My return was a lot different from his,” she said. “He was really happy to be home, and I just really wanted to be back in Iraq. I felt like I didn’t have enough time there, and what I was currently doing, I didn’t finish.”

Conway could have been happier to be home, but only if his plane had landed in Seattle instead of New Jersey.

His family was very welcoming, he said, and his re-integration into normal life was easy, “because I didn’t have much of a life to re-integrate into.” Meaning that since graduating from Mount Si High School, he’s focused on finishing school with an ROTC scholarship, then officer’s training, rather than settling down and having kids, who might not know him if he’d left on a long deployment.

Conway is sensitive to the demands and stresses of a soldier’s life, from the daily strain of life in enemy territory to the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a very real condition he says, but maybe not as common as its perceived to be.

“There isn’t a person in Iraq that didn’t lose sleep, that didn’t have problems sleeping …. It’s just one of those things, when you have rockets and things flying over your head, you just don’t know if tonight’s your night. You spend your entire deployment, strung up, listening for these things. It’s not something that’s turned off readily or easily.”

It’s also part of the job, and few people are cut out for it. Conway is one of them. So is Walker, at least for as long as they remain in the Army Reserves.

“We’re just doing our jobs,” Walker said. “We appreciate people’s support, but for us it’s what we do.”