Word: cooking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Captain Nicholas M. Cook arrived in the Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad in May, the place was like a ghost town. Nearly 50% of the homes were abandoned and the residents that remained rarely ventured out. Only the crackle of gunfire pierced the streets. "Everyday it was like clockwork - 10 to 11:30 am gunfire would start. They would break for lunch and then start up again in the afternoon," says Cook, a West Point graduate from Lansing, Michigan who is on his second tour in Iraq...
...Cook's unit managed to turn the area around by patrolling 24-hours a day and putting up walls to choke off the flow of insurgents from the low-lying areas to the south. They went house to house, meeting every family they could find, asking about their problems, offering to help where they could and in the process building a network of reliable contacts and informants. They called these operations called 'close encounters...
Today the neighborhood's abandonment rate is closer to 5%; where there used to be just 11 shops, 160 shops are now open on the main street. There hasn't been a major incident against Cook and his men for almost three months. (He lost five men while routing out insurgents and turning the neighborhood around; about a third of his men have been awarded Purple Hearts). Between Cook's area and an adjoining one, the U.S. spent close to $3 million, jumpstarting the local economy by hiring and sourcing locally. Another $4.7 million is budgeted for future projects...
When he is out on patrol, primary schoolchildren dash across the street to greet Cook, running past armed neighborhood guards to proudly show him their report cards. "Hellow meestah Cook!" they shout. "Zien, zien!" Cook says, ("good, good") encouraging them in Arabic. Armed plainclothes gunmen - volunteers Cook helped organize - checked inside cars passing through the crosswalk...
Just at that moment the mosque behind the school blares out the noontime call to prayer. "You never would have seen this a year ago," says Cook. He knows the mosque leaders well and has met almost daily with them since arriving. "When you meet him you know he's a holy man," he says of the blind imam in the nearby mosque. "The government is not coming here," says Cook. "You can't help but understand their desperation. If we don't stay here to help and maintain the infrastructure there is going to be no sustained progress...