Howdy from Mosul

Hello Folks. I hope everyone is well and enjoyed an excellent holiday season. For those who celebrated – happy whatever... I apologize in advance for sending one message only – the e-mail is very slow and this will take several hours to send. It's just too much of a time drag to send several. Please alert me if you would like to be removed from my list.

I am well here in Iraq – for the last two days I have been in and around Mosul (Northern Iraq, on the outskirts of Kurdistan) which is a welcome break from the smog and crowds of Baghdad. Of course Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, is crowded and smoggy too, but at least we're only 20 kilometers from some bonafide hills and open space. I think this country is as crowded as California, and very similar in some ways. There are large parts of California which are un-populated, just as here – but along the rivers and in the north Iraq is chock full of people. There is also a great diversity of land type here – from the border in Jordan it is very arid desert, sand and rock and this. But along the Tigris, it's sort of half tropical (still not very humid) with palm trees and plenty of agriculture. Up here, it's more mountainous and even to the east, on the border with Iran, there are some good size hills and more temperate, even cold, steppe-type lands. Enough geography, I guess everybody wants to hear about the towers and the people. For those of you who don't care about the business side of things – the tower stuff is first, followed by the people stuff.

In the last two days I have inspected two surviving towers for the IMN (state run broadcast media). IMN is now being "managed" or overseen by the CPA, through a contract with an American consulting company who does not specialize in broadcast, telecommunications or anything nearly so specific. They are possessed of some excellent, very experienced staff, though, and they seem to have recruited some excellent engineers. I finally made my way to the head broadcast engineer on this project (Lou Brown, a former VOA guy, for you radio engineers) and gave him the hard sell. He has a huge number of damaged and down sites, most of them victims of the looting following the fall of the regime. Anyhow, since I was planning to go to Mosul, I offered to inspect a few tower's of his choice so that I could show him what sort of experience and knowledge we have. Saturday I got onto a really over-engineered 328 meter tower just on the edge of Mosul, currently supporting Channel 7, a 20 kW VHF television station around here. The tower was fabricated in Iraq and has more steel per vertical foot than any tower I've ever been on, the 2000' kings down in Texas included. It's a four-legged guyed tower (with three guy alleys – do the math on that one) and has legs made of four 4"X4"X1/2" angles. Everything is bolted – everything. It probably took a crew a week to assemble one twenty foot section – I stopped counting bolts at 100 per vertical foot! So anyhow, this massive tower is home to a cantilevered, on-air VHF antenna and a 6-1/8" flexible transmission line. That's it. No lights, no lightning arrester, no grounding, nothing else. WARNING TO CASUAL READERS, TECHNICAL STUFF AHEAD: Of course the antenna matching unit (it's a 48 panel - 12X4 - C&S manufacture antenna) is all shot up and has four kinked feed lines, no weatherproofing, and a VSWR of around 1.4. Plus, Uncle Sam now overseas an 1100' lightning rod about two miles from a very active airfield and ten miles from a civilian airport – no lights. So I hope we can get involved in this work.

Sunday we went out to a site called Al Khayzer, which used to house an AM broadcast site on 607 kHz or so. What's left is the 150 meter tower, guyed, with 1" guy wires, sitting on the biggest base insulator I've ever seen – probably 4 feet high and three feet in diameter. The whole tower was looted, including some of the diagonals on the first 50' and the lighting system. These have been replaced, but it was kind of un-nerving to inspect this thing with so many incongruities. Monster guy wires, with monster Johnny-ball insulators, but little 1/2" stainless hardware at the guy takeoff points. And there were fox-holes dug all around the tower, which was right on the edge of Kurdish-controlled territory. Still, it was beautiful, a really superb piece of engineering nestled on a beautiful riverside. It was much more peaceful there and I would have taken a good long hike in the hills if I had not hopped a ride with the ultra gung ho contract security guys. Tomorrow (Monday) I'll inspect a site in Sinjar (west of Mosul, towards the Syrian frontier and as close as I'll ever come to Syria). Then I'm back to Baghdad to hire our local business manager and hopefully get on two 1000' towers outside of Baghdad at Abu Ghreb (the site of a notorious prison for Army and political prisoners). So I am reasonably confident we can score some work out of this. It's treacherous, though – there are so many parties involved in this work and they all sub-contract to people and none of them are specialists like us. It's unheard of for a company to actually have skilled specialists here – I think this gives us an advantage, but we have to get past the "I have a friend" stage. I'm hoping a good business manager will move this along.

END OF (MOST) OF THE TOWER STUFF

Otherwise, I came to Mosul to meet [a friend]. It was very easy to find his office (it took about one hour of broken Arabic and a few [...] sketches). Unfortunately, I had missed him Saturday morning while I was on business, and he doesn't keep afternoon hours. So today, after I got back from Al Khayzer, I went again and had missed him again. This time I had the afternoon to devote to it, and through the much appreciated assistance of one of his colleagues and many hours of questing, we finally arrived at his home off of Sharaa Soma in Mosul. Again, he wasn't home, although I did meet his son, [...] (about 20) and caught a glimpse of his wife (name unknown). [His] brother doesn't live at the same house. I still don't know where he is. Back to the Ninaveh Palace (where I'm staying tonight) I went, and I see a man gesturing at the desk with one of my cards. Ever the opportunist, I put on my best Arabic and introduced myself as "Bodgne Berg" (tower guy). Of

course that was [him] and got along splendidly. We spent a few hours and I helped him establish an e-mail account. The bank account is still waiting as he claims none of the Mosul banks will do international wires – I'll probably have to open in Baghdad. It was a very interesting time and I noticed again that there is a huge disconnect with relationships here. My presence near [my friend] made him more concerned (about his own safety and probably mine too) than I've been the entire time I've been here. Mosul is very calm – except for the Army convoys and check-points, you can't really tell there is an occupation. Baghdad every night you here IEDs and such, but here I've yet to here or see anything except a few aged craters. Still, there is obviously quite a difference to someone who lives here and will face the same people and situations day in and day out. The funny thing about this experience is that it's very hard not to have opinions about the Arabs I meet. Most of the Saharan and nomadic people I've met or worked with (like the Maasai) have some very culture-peculiar characteristics that can be un-seemly to Westerners. Like the Arabs, they are very rude when waiting in lines, driving, buying things, etc...Same goes here – one thousand times. There really is no line waiting, even when you are half-way into a transaction and have dinars waving and such. Same with driving, although in their defense, a lot of the roads are strangely laid out or have been detoured due to checkpoints and such. Another thing that's off-setting to the westerner is it's very hard to get details. This is another characteristic for which I was somewhat prepared, but not to the extent I've found. The Maasai will give directions like this – " Go down

the road (there is only one road so no need to name it), pass the tree (same) and you'll find such and such near the wadi – creek." At least in a

dry, almost desert-like place there are very few landmarks so when you find one it's obvious. Here, the directions are something like: "Pass to Sharaa

Soma, the shop is near the University." Of course there are thousands of shops along the Ejammual (University) street, all of them near the University. So anywhere I'm looking, the guy did OK. But to find the place? Anyhow, I find myself walking the usual fine line between the other Americans I meet who have next to know contact with the "average" Arab, and still have very advanced opinions, and the local contacts I have, who are mostly Arab, a few Kurds, and exhibit these and more characteristics that can be frustrating to a Westerner. Another thing that's tough for me is the language – in Bantu languages the accents are easier to pick up and there are more vowels. Arab is a very intricate language with very fine accents and tons of consonants. So as much as I know the right words and can understand some of them being spoken, I can't say them worth a damn to the fellow who doesn't understand English (about 95% of the people I meet). It's actually quite a bit like Maa (the language of the Maasai) which is big on inflection and short on syllables).

So that's it for now. One more day to play in the hills, then back to Baghdad and hopefully some contract signing. I will not be returning on 8 Jan, as originally scheduled. The way I see it, we're this far in (time and money) – I've got to stay the course to see some of these opportunities to fruition.

Best Wishes to all!

Nick Berg Prometheus Towers

Berg’s Email from Iraq