Need-to-know basis

A KHS alum wanted to know what it was really like in Iraq; so at 51, he took an opportunity to serve as a contractor in Iraq for one year.

by Lynn Meredith
While former Maple Park resident and 1973 Kaneland High School graduate Jim Fay counted down the days he was serving during a 13-month stint in Iraq, he kept thinking about what his college-age son Ben said upon learning that Jim received an offer from an independent law enforcement contractor to go to Baghdad.
“You're going to do it, aren't you Dad? You'll never get another chance like that again,” Ben Fay had said.
Jim knew it was true. If he really wanted to see what the Iraq war was like and what Army life was like—something he had not experienced as a young man—he needed to take the chance now.
“I'm 51 years old, and I'm not going to get opportunities to actually wear an Army uniform, carry Army guns and go into a … hot spot,” Jim said. “I just love knowing what the real story is. I'd never seen a Third World country in the midst of fighting. I wanted to know what it would look like.”
Jim said that wanting to know the real story is probably why he became a cop. He began his career as an Illinois State Trooper following graduation from Judson College. He went on to work in a variety of posts at Illinois State Police (ISP) headquarters in Springfield. He became Lieutenant Colonel/Commander of the ISP Training Academy and later received a law degree from Loyola University School of Law. He retired from the State Police in 2006, right before leaving for Iraq.
In Iraq, his role as a Law Enforcement Professional was to try to reduce the incidence of terrorist threats by using the methods that a police department employs to defeat organized crimes or gangs. The police use intelligence, tracking the supplies and the money that buys them to defeat the organizations from within.
Jim's experience in law enforcement was uniquely suited to his jobs in Iraq. The Army trains soldiers to fight and destroy, but not to investigate at the scene of the violence, he said. Jim would train U.S. soldiers in the correct procedures for collecting crime-scene evidence that would then be used to track down members of the terrorist networks.
In addition to training U.S. soldiers, Jim took a look at the Iraqi police force to ascertain their effectiveness.
“I would assess how prepared the Iraqi police were to do their job on their own. The most significant was tracking the dead body investigations,” Jim said.
He said the police in Baghdad, who had been Sadaam Hussein's national guard, were reluctant even to verify reports of dead bodies. They had not been expected to do real police work under Hussein. They also feared for their lives.
Embedded with the U.S. Army, Jim was able to answer the question he is frequently asked: How accurate are the reports we get at home? His reply is that the news media is reporting the negative very well, but what we do not hear about are the little successes. He says if you reported on only the bad things in any particular area of the country, the people living outside would think it was a horrible place.
“Not to sound callous, but just to be statistical—and this is the way most of the soldiers are looking at it too—a five-year war with 4,000 casualities in an area where you can't tell the good guy from the bad guy is a pretty phenomenal record overall,” Jim said.
The numbers of Iraqi citizens willing to put themselves in danger to protect their neighborhoods by reporting insurgent activity is one of the real successes, he said. They risk retaliation to provide specific information investigators need to track down terrorists. As any good cop knows, that's the real battle.
“Crimes are solved because people report on other people,” Jim said. “If regular people, same as here in the U.S., become involved in reporting and stamping out the aspects they don't want in their cities and communities, that's the key.”
Having returned at the end of January, Jim is relishing the luxuries of living in the U.S. by being in his own home and taking daily bike rides. While he did his best to communicate almost daily with Ben and daughter Becky, he said that a year was too long to be gone. During the long months, he remembered his son's words.
“I came back to (them) time and time again, trying to keep his mindset. His enthusiasm carried me through,” Jim said. “I went over to see what it looked like. Now I know. I've scratched that itch.”

05/09/2008