{"id":16344,"date":"2009-12-21T11:41:13","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T16:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/home.bates.edu\/views\/2009\/12\/21\/16344\/"},"modified":"2018-06-04T09:23:21","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T13:23:21","slug":"16344","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2009\/12\/21\/16344\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"OLYMPUS<\/a><\/p>\n

Army Lt. Col. Mark Leahey \u201986 poses with a young boy who had been following Leahey and other Army soldiers one morning during a foot patrol in a Kurdish neighborhood of Kirkuk City.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe boy\u2019s name is Mahmood,\u201d Leahey writes in an e-mail to Bates Magazine<\/em>. \u201cHe and his mother live with his uncle because his father was killed in a vehicle-born IED attack.\u201d The Kurdish children are always eager to follow and talk to the soldiers \u2014 English is mandatory second language in Kurdish schools. \u201cNo matter how hard we try to ask them to leave, so they would not be the victims of any kinetic actions, whenever we stopped they usually engulfed us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leahey is deployed to forward operating base Warrior, an Army logistical hub that\u2019s part of Kirkuk Airbase. This is his third combat tour as a tactical observer for the Center for Army Lessons Learned, and he\u2019s assigned to the Black Jacks of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. He reports back to military analysts on new TTPs \u2014 tactics, techniques, and procedures \u2014 used by coalition and anti-Iraq forces.<\/p>\n

He keeps this piece of Army text taped to his daily planner: \u201cThe old saying \u2018live and learn\u2019 must be reversed in war, for there we \u2018learn and live,\u2019 otherwise we die. It is with this learning, in order to live, that the Army is so vitally concerned.\u201d The quote is from U.S. War Department Pamphlet No. 20-17, dated July 1945.<\/p>\n

Leahey writes: \u201cI am truly amazed at the \u2018Duty, Honor, Country\u2019 that these young soldiers display in their actions. As Army leaders, we must ensure that our soldiers have the best training and knowledge to help them stay alive. I know that I am making a difference as I reported back on an innovative crush wire IED defeat system developed by an engineer unit. The unit did not know how to disseminate their information without it becoming lost in the abyss that is the Army.<\/p>\n

“I wrote an article on the defeat system and sent it back to CALL, which was quickly cross-disseminated to the engineer training center and also to the rest of the Iraq and Afghanistan areas of operations. Thus \u2014 hopefully \u2014 other units will employ the novel design and thus \u2018learn and live.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Army Lt. Col. Mark Leahey \u201986 poses with a young boy who had been following Leahey and other Army soldiers one morning during a foot patrol in a Kurdish neighborhood of Kirkuk City. \u201cThe boy\u2019s name is Mahmood,\u201d Leahey writes in an e-mail to Bates Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[7,130,133,220],"tags":[9491],"class_list":["post-16344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-collaboration","category-creativity","category-service","tag-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88240,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16344\/revisions\/88240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}