Captain Daniel Green is an bat­tle­field sur­geon, treat­ing sol­diers and Iraqi civil­ians around Baghdad’s Green Zone. He has seen more casu­al­ties — and inter­acted with more Iraqis — than the vast major­ity of GIs over there. And that has given the cap­tain a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on this war. He isn’t happy with how it’s being run. In an e-​​mail to friends and fam­ily back home, Green says that it’s time for U.S. forces to get out of Iraq.

I don’t rightly know what your US news is say­ing, but here are a few of my own obser­va­tions… The US Army is putting forth its main effort to train Iraqi sol­diers… It will real­is­ti­cally take years before their Army and police are suf­fi­cient to pro­tect the peo­ple and resist inter­nal cor­rup­tion. The reports that the com­mands are mak­ing to the higher-​​ups are biased and sugar-​​coated. The cor­rup­tion is under­played and the achievements/​milestones exag­ger­ated. The results how­ever, may con­vince Congress and that a suc­cess­ful pull-​​out is close.
At this point I’d appre­ci­ate [it]. I’ve done my part. I’ve per­son­ally come to the law-​​of-​​diminishing-​​returns. The remain­ing process will be slow and ardu­ous. Increasing finan­cial expen­di­tures and man-​​hours are going to be needed to sus­tain any sig­nif­i­cant growth.
It’s sim­i­lar to build­ing a house. From the ini­tial ground-​​breaking to foun­da­tion and fram­ing, things seem to go remark­ably fast, giv­ing the home own­ers an unre­al­is­tic sense of impend­ing move-​​in. Then the minor details like out­lets, appli­ances, trim work, and cab­i­netry begin and lit­tle progress is noted after long peri­ods. The tenants-​​to-​​be get anx­ious. The same is tak­ing place here. The American pub­lic will not be able to con­sciously mea­sure our pro­duc­tiv­ity even with the best of media report­ing.
Besides, I think the mil­i­tary is the wrong force at this point. We deal effec­tively with the com­bat train­ing, but this cor­rup­tion is a new species. We need Americans more attune to the nui­sances of inter­nal gov­ern­men­tal fraud…people more like our own law­mak­ers. Soldiers need to focus on com­bat, not mafia arbi­tra­tion.
I wit­nessed a com­pany com­man­der a few months ago try to expose and bring to jus­tice the per­pe­tra­tors of an intri­cately weaved plot of elec­tric­ity theft. The King-​​Pin of the scheme was none other than the chair­man of the city coun­cil. That went over well…
If it moves shoot it. If it doesn’t move, shoot it any­way, and leave the rest to the State Department. Bring us home.

THERE’S MORE: As Jon reminds us in the com­ments, Michael Yon has been doing great fron­line blog­ging from Mosul.

The Times has an inter­est­ing story on American rel­cu­tance to give Iraqi army units the machine guns and armored Humvees they want.

Simply put, Iraq remains too frag­ile for any plan­ner to know what shape the coun­try will be in six months or a year from now — whether it will reach com­pro­mises and hold together or split apart in a civil war.
And that presents a conun­drum for American mil­i­tary plan­ners. With those ques­tions up in the air, they have to fear that any heavy arms dis­trib­uted now could end up aimed at American forces or feed­ing a grow­ing civil con­flict. And the longer Iraq’s army has to wait for sophis­ti­cated weapons, the longer American forces are likely to be needed in Iraq as a bul­wark against chaos.

Pick up the paper today, and you’ll read reports of “fierce gun bat­tles [that] erupted between about 40 insur­gents and the police… in west­ern Baghdad.“
Here’s what those bat­tles looked like, from a sol­dier who was there. He was kind enough to copy me on an e-​​mail he wrote home imme­di­ately after the fighting.

I just strolled back in to the safety net of my sur­round­ings and have been dragged through chaos the past cou­ple of hours. My brain is still spin­ning and I am not sure where to even start.
We received a request to con­duct a post-​​blast inves­ti­ga­tion of a VBIED (Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device) that det­o­nated near the base camp. The ini­tial report indi­cated that the tar­get was an Iraqi Police (IP) car. We responded to the inci­dent site and found the smol­der­ing remains of a cou­ple of vehi­cles in the mid­dle of the road. It appeared at first glance that the only fatal­i­ties resulted from the sui­cide bomber in the car and per­haps the occu­pants of the IP car. As we walked from our vehi­cles to the inci­dent site, we heard another car bomb det­o­nat­ing near an IP sta­tion approx­i­mately 2 kilo­me­ters away.
We soon received a request to respond. We quickly fin­ished up with the first inci­dent site, but not before we found addi­tional casu­al­ties per­sons in the near vicin­ity. While we pre­pared for move­ment to the sec­ond site, we heard on the radio that the sec­ond site was now get­ting hit peo­ple were dri­ving past the IP sta­tion, and fir­ing RPG’s [rocket pro­pelled grenades] at IP’s in their vehi­cles. We con­ducted move­ment to the IP sta­tion and when we arrived, the scene was full of chaos.
IP’s were fran­ti­cally run­ning down the streets help­ing injured per­sons. IP vehi­cles were speed­ing up and down the streets look­ing for the cul­prits. Vehicles were burn­ing. Gun fire erupted in the back­ground and we just pulled our vehi­cles into a for­ma­tion to pro­vide a good tac­ti­cal pos­ture and pre­pared to unleash a heavy vol­ley of steel. After every­thing set­tled down, we con­tin­ued to do our work. We found an IED nearby that was meant to add to the attack.
I don’t usu­ally write home and talk about the details of spe­cific inci­dents because I feel com­pelled to keep the chaos out of the homes of fam­ily and friends. But today felt dif­fer­ent. I don’t know why I had the need or desire to talk about today’s events — other than the fact that per­haps it was time to vent some fumes. All of my sol­diers deal with the real­ity of what we face every­day in dif­fer­ent ways. Some have made pacts to not write home and pos­si­bly worry fam­ily. Perhaps I am wrong in doing so, but I thought I would pro­vide some insight to what you might not see on the news tonight. You will not be able to smell the burnt remains of the sui­cide bombers or the IP’s. You prob­a­bly won’t see the charred remains of per­sons in the vehi­cles. And you won’t be able to see the full effects of a care­fully placed VBIED with a follow-​​up attack with RPG’s and small arms fire.
While writ­ing, I decided to comb through my pic­tures and add one. But I’ll adhere to my promise to not send any­thing too graphic. Perhaps, if you catch the news, you might just see that sui­cide bombers once again rocked Baghdad.