PEP, November 2007: From Ground Zero to Baghdad and Kabul

Park Supervisor Mariano Frazier — aka Sgt. Frazier — is off to Afghanistan early next year.

It will be the Local 1508 member’s second tour of duty in President Bush’s war on terror in the Middle East. Previously, Mariano served 16 months in Iraq, where he was stationed at Camp Victory near Sadr City in Baghdad.

“Personally, I feel I have to be willing to go wherever they want to send me,” said Frazier, 42, about his coming one-year deployment to Afghanistan. “My hope is to be able to continue serving my country, my state and my city.”

A member of a combat unit with the New York State National Guard, Mariano doesn’t yet have details about his deployment to Afghanistan other than that he will continue to do communications work, as he did in Iraq. He will be deployed with the 101st Calvary of the 42nd Infantry Division of the New York State Army National Guard.

Frazier has participated in the war on terrorism from the beginning. After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he spent two weeks working at Ground Zero with Battalion 258 of the National Guard’s 42nd Division.

“We patrolled and guarded Ground Zero, making sure only authorized people were down there,” he said. “We didn’t assist with the cleanup, but we saw what was going on, with the bodies being pulled out of the rubble.”

Frazier served in Iraq from January 2004 to April 2006.

“My feelings on the situation were not so much about finding weapons of mass destruction but that we were there to look for terrorists and to rebuild a country,” he said. Frazier recalled being put on alert for Iraq’s constitutional referendum on Oct. 15, 2005, and the parliamentary elections on Dec. 15 that year. He expressed relief that the fears of widespread violence on those days didn’t materialize.

But the conflict in Iraq is an unconventional war in which insurgents blend in with the general population, confronting the U.S. forces with a harrowing situation, said Frazier. The fear of random violence is constant.

“I was shot at on the base, and we had two convoys shot at on the road. There were causalities,” Frazier said. “We were shot at every day. If the base were under attack, you would have defensive positions to go to.” On one occasion, Frazier was preparing to go to a guard post. “One of the insurgents shot a rocket-propelled grenade at the base and I almost got blown up,” he said. He believes he would have been hit if he’d left his quarters a few minutes earlier.

Frazier spent most of his time at Camp Victory working on communications projects, such as setting up phone lines. For a period, he also was in charge of distributing board games, footballs and volleyballs at a base recreation facility. While living under an ongoing fear of violence, soldiers at the base were always searching for ways to deal with boredom, he said.

Every now and then, Frazier was assigned to convoys shuttling politicians, high-ranking officers and contractors to Camp Cuervo, another base in Baghdad. “I didn’t do the gunning, but I had to keep my eyes open in case I noticed anything unusual and had to notify the driver,” he said.
Because of good intelligence work, the convoys hardly ever came under fire, Frazier said. “They made sure we weren’t being set up for land mines and the roads were clean,” he said. “We were lucky that the intelligence was good. But as far as I am concerned, all of the highways in the country are highways of death. Anything can happen.”

Based on his interaction with Iraqis training at a police academy at the camp and others who worked there, Frazier said he felt a majority of the population supported the U.S. presence in Iraq.

“I still feel we are fighting the terrorists over there to prevent them from coming here to our own shores,” said Frazier, expressing his view of the United States’ strategic objective in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are trying to help the Iraqis build a country,” he said. “I feel nation-building is taking hold, but it’s going to take time.”

—Gregory N. Heires