By Toni Eugene Associate Editor

Transcription

1 52 ARMY March 2008

2 faces of the most- n intriguing deck of playing cards is one component of a broader project to instill cultural awareness in American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like the personality identification playing cards distributed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which carried the of president Sad- By Toni Eugene Associate Editor wanted members dam Hussein s government, each card in this new deck contains a different image. Each also contains a different tip on how soldiers can prevent inadvertent damage to archaeological sites and help check the illegal traffic in looted artifacts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each suit in the deck has a theme: Spades feature March 2008 ARMY 53

3 historic sites and archaeological digs; diamonds show artifacts and treasures; clubs focus on heritage preservation; and hearts indicate ways to win hearts and minds. Some tips appeal to the soldiers own backgrounds. The two of clubs, for example, contains a picture of a mosque in Mosul and says: Ancient Iraqi heritage is part of your heritage. It is believed that Jonah of the Bible is buried here. Other cards offer new knowledge. The 10 of clubs advises: A mound or small hill in an otherwise flat landscape could be a sign of ancient human occupation. The cards in each suit are also pieces of a puzzle. A graphic displayed in the background of a card can be fitted with the other 12 cards in the suit to form an image. The hearts suit, when properly fitted, portrays the Northwest Palace Throne Room at Nimrud, Iraq. A wild card in the deck, which shows the four completed puzzles, advises: When artifacts are looted and ruins are destroyed, valuable pieces of the cultural puzzle disappear forever. The back of each card features a photograph of a clay tablet more than 3,000 years old, excavated in Nippur, Iraq. It is covered with cuneiform script the first form of writing and reinforces the message that both Iraq and Afghanistan have rich and ancient histories. The message ROE first! at the top of each card reminds the soldier that the rules of engagement take precedence over all other considerations. According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, soldiers have used playing cards as far back as the Civil War, and collectors now pay hundreds of dollars for the decks. During World War II, Army Air Corps cards carried the silhouettes of Japanese and German fighter aircraft. Another deck of cards sent to prisoners in Germany during World War II was a secret collaboration between the manufacturer and the military. The cards were water-soluble. Prisoners could soak them, pull them apart and put the 52 pieces together to form a map with an escape route out of Germany. Some 50,000 decks of the cultural resources cards have been shipped to U.S. training installations and troops; thousands more are headed into circulation, continuing the tradition of cards contributing to the Army s efforts. The cards are available only to deployed and deploying troops. Dr. James A. Zeidler, senior research scientist at the Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands (CEMML) at Colorado State University, suggested ideas, confirmed the accuracy of the information and helped determine what data to include in the deck. CEMML graphic artist Tracy Wager created all the graphics; it was her suggestion that each suit also be a puzzle. Ziedler and Wager are part of a larger cultural awareness project headed by Dr. Laurie Rush, archaeologist and cultural resources manager for 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), Fort Drum, N.Y. The project also includes reference pocket cards for the troops. One side explains how to identify an archaeological site or artifact and how to proceed if one is found. The other side warns that enemies may intentionally use cemeteries, religious buildings or ruins as firing positions and advises that buying looted coins, carvings, jewelry or other 54 ARMY March 2008

4 stolen artifacts encourages more theft and funds the insurgency. With support from the DoD s Legacy Resource Management Program, the project received the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation s Chairman s Award for Federal Achievement in Historical Preservation in the fall of Fort Drum was awarded the Secretary of Defense Environmental Award for Installation Cultural Resources Management. In the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraq Museum in downtown Baghdad was looted, and the ancient site of Babylon was inadvertently damaged. That event inspired Rush s hands-on advocacy of teaching soldiers about cultural property. I was listening to the radio as I drove to work one morning and heard about the helicopters landing around Babylon, Rush told ARMY Magazine in a telephone interview. I thought, on U.S. installations, cultural properties are off-limits; soldiers can t get anywhere near them. What s wrong with this picture? How can soldiers appreciate cultural heritage overseas if they have no training? That was the inspiration for this project. A third component of Rush s program is stabilizing heritage properties to preserve them and make them accessible for low-impact military training. Fort Drum offers that opportunity. It was originally a small cavalry installation named Pine Camp. In Dr. Laurie Rush, archaeologist for 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) and head of a DoD project promoting cultural awareness, identifies a 4,000-year-old mud brick during a visit to Egypt. 1941, the Army annexed 75,000 acres to train armored cavalry units. The land included the village of Sterlingville, site of a 19th-century iron furnace, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Active training areas surrounded Sterlingville, limiting access to outside archaeologists, but no Army funds existed to study it and, like other cultural properties, it was off-limits to soldiers. In 2004, Rush, together with Ian Warden of the Integrated Training Area Management program at Fort Drum, began to change that. They protected each foundation in the old village with layers of cloth, gravel and sand; buttressed the walls with sandbags; and put mock town walls on top. Now, soldiers train in the woods around Sterlingville, and when they are using the sandbagged areas as fighting sites, it is as if they were training in a town. Another element of the cultural awareness program took shape at Fort Drum: the construction of mock Middle Eastern archaeological sites, two cemeteries and a mudbrick village. The cemeteries serve as training grounds for aerial gunners who learn how to use angled fire to avoid damaging the tombstones; they also help in training soldiers how to respond to attack from such a firing site. After seeing one cemetery, a commander turned to Rush to thank her and shake her hand, grateful that his troops would be better prepared because insurgents do hide and shoot from such firing sites. The replicas make possible many different training scenarios. In addition, the prototypes will be studied to see which best withstand the extreme weather conditions at Fort Drum; those will be set up at other installations. Provided by Laurie Rush 56 ARMY March 2008

5 Fort Drum is now working on another element in Rush s plan; it is developing training scenarios that will help deploying personnel anticipate situations that may be complicated by heritage issues in theater, such as insurgents using an archaeological or sacred site as a cache for weapons or explosives. In partnership with the organization Saving Antiquities for Everyone, Rush s program has established restricted reference web sites that describe in detail the cultures, histories and contributions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Most important, they provide detailed information on the most significant archaeological sites for each country that can be used by military planners to avoid and minimize damage to these places. (Rush s address, for those interested in accessing the web sites, is laurie.rush@us.army.mil.) Rush is now at work on an additional core tenet of the cultural awareness program, developing a formal global archaeological awareness training and planning program to be implemented DoD-wide. As a beginning, Rush conducted a learning module for the Joint Engineers Officer s Course and recently conducted a briefing about it for a Joint Staff workshop. Soldiers do care, Rush says, and don t want to damage historical relics, but they need training. Her background is in museum work, and she notes that most DoD cultural resource managers are strong in anthropology. I called a friend from high school, Dr. Roger Ulrich at Dartmouth College, who is a classical archaeologist and knows Old World sites. He and his colleagues got excited about the program and wanted to help. Through various U.S. embassies, Ulrich served as liaison between the DoD and American classical archaeologists, including those who work in the Middle East. Students at Dartmouth helped research the cards. Rush stresses that the program is the product of many people. She works in partnership with Dr. C. Brian Rose (president of the Archaeological Institute of America), CEMML at Colorado State University and Saving Antiquities for Everyone. Rush says the program is still in its beginning stages. Fort Carson, Colo., and other bases are also working on training techniques, and different thoughts and approaches will be pooled and compared. There are, Rush estimates, more than 200 archaeologists working for the DoD; every major installation has one. We are providing expertise to avoid damage to sites, she said, while we help support the mission. The program is already reaching that goal. Rush said that the Army Corps of Engineers, planning an Afghanistan defense building in Kabul, discovered it would interfere with the ruins of a fortress, Bala Hissar, a site important in Afghan history. The Corps contacted Rush and Rose and now uses the project web site as an aide for planning future projects. Rush has also begun receiving e- mails in response to the cultural cards. One soldier wrote her: I had no idea of the deep history here [we] were never presented with this type of information before mobilizing. The protection of ancient sites and relics could provide some common ground between U.S. forces and patriotic Iraqis. 58 ARMY March 2008