The only hope for an alien world to remain free lies in the hands of Prisoner Seven!
Scroll down to read more…
PRISONER SEVEN
Prisoner Seven volunteered long ago to travel to an alien world to teach the local population how to build better roads, bridges, and dams. In time, the nature of the mission changed. Instead of teaching engineering, his leadership wants him to concentrate on rigging elections. Asking to be sent home, instead he is tried for treason and sentenced to death. He awakes seventeen years later, finding his consciousness trapped in an alien body and a slave that is under sentence of death. He must now navigate the alien world as a conjoined consciousness, thwart the plans of his leaders, and find out who, and what, he truly is.
Letters from Iraq
“Mud, Dust and Engineers”
The deeds of the past are recorded, written in history. However, only for those who are leaders, they are true. For those who toiled and traversed under the hot sun, through mud and cold, under constant threat of death, their stories were not shared, not heard.
Now, we change this. Letters from Iraq is their story.
Letters from Iraq is a poignant publication inspired and written around letters sent home and documents penned at the time that show the people and the day-to-day operations of a United States Army Corps of Engineer unit from September 11, 2001, until March 2006.
This is a story of all the local Iraqis, foreign nationals, military personnel, and civilian volunteers who struggled in the heat and sun, mud and cold, to support the army and rebuild Iraq. History records the deeds, both good and bad, of the leaders, but for those who toiled in the hot sun, under constant threat of death, often only because they had to feed their families—there is no record.
About the Author
Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Victor Zillmer (retired) serve for thirty years in both active and reserve duty, serving among other places, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Starting out in college as a forestry major, he received a Bachelor of Science and a Master’s Degree in Forestry at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. After following his father’s footsteps in the academic world for three years at the University of Arkansas at Monticello as a research scientist in forest hydrology, he decided that academic life was not for him and joined the army at age twenty-five. Most of his family members thought that he had lost his mind, and after a few weeks of basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, he was inclined to agree. He did note that his paycheck as a private first class in the army was $40 a month more compared to when he was a research scientist. Considering the five years of study and thousands of dollars spent acquiring his education, he wondered if he had made the right decision. Pure chance had him working as a surveyor of the Air Florida Flight 90 crash in Washington D.C. in January 1982, the first of many views of carnage and waste that would be part of his military career. In January 1983 he was at the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he graduated as part of the top 10 percent of his class. He was assigned to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers where he would serve both in active and reserve duty and as a civilian for the next twenty-eight years.
The enemy was also trying its best to stop them, and ambushing personnel in convoys became a constant problem. Although none of his U.S. personnel were lost or injured during the first year in Iraq, many local workers were either killed or went missing, and several family members of the local contractors were kidnapped. Other than many incoming mortar rounds, he did get a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) round fired at his vehicle as it entered the Green Zone in Baghdad. He was quick to point out to the local state department personnel however that their front gate was arranged incorrectly which resulted in friendly vehicles being sitting ducks while they awaited permission to enter.
Toward the end of his first tour in Baghdad, he was assigned to build the prison cell for Saddam. That was one of the few “classified” projects he had. The second tour followed six months after the first, with continual upgrades to the defenses, life support systems, and maintenance of the five main bases in Baghdad. Nightly rocket and mortar attacks were common, but no casualties among his U.S. personnel. But losses, including several friends among the Iraqi personnel, continued to mount.
continued…
Arriving in Kuwait for a two-week annual training stint on September 11, 2001, he watched the towers fall from a Corps of Engineers office in Camp Doha. Two weeks turned into eighteen months when he became responsible for the construction of most of the facilities that the Army, Marines, Air Force, and allies would need for the invasion into Iraq. Although he never had a college course in engineering, he had years of construction experience, both in uniform and as a civilian, including building his own house in Lindale, Texas. The effort in Kuwait included water systems, sewer systems, power systems, fuel pipelines, barracks, headquarters buildings, motor pools, parking lots, guard towers, defensive systems, and everything else needed to take an empty chunk of desert and turn it into a base to support the troops and launch an invasion into Iraq. All of these had to be accomplished in less than one year.
After his tours of duty in Kuwait, he had a few months off, only to be mobilized again, this time headed off to what was to become the Iraq Area Office in Baghdad, Iraq. With a pitifully small force of about thirty-five people, he was expected to both rebuild the country and provide all the same facilities as before in Kuwait for a U.S. force of over one hundred thirty thousand personnel. After six months of spreading themselves thinner than a desert mist, the army came to the conclusion it would take a major general and nine hundred personnel to perform this mission, not a lieutenant colonel and thirty-five personnel.
His career did not get interesting until he became a major in the reserves and made the life choice of volunteering for one tour of duty. But it would be only one of the nineteen tours he would eventually be mobilized for, including eight tours of duty that are commonly referred to as combat tours. Notably, New Orleans was not officially a combat tour. But in many ways the initial hostility of the local population to the Army Corps of Engineers, and fighting two hurricanes and one tropical storm during his tenure, might qualify under the “all enemies foreign and domestic” clause of the oath of office.
Several of his tours were in Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo, where he initially served as an engineering liaison officer but was eventually assigned to build the border crossing between Macedonia and Kosovo. While the border crossing was officially built to control border traffic, it actually became a choke point so the local police could more effectively extract bribes from the truck drivers for a place in line to cross the border. He then moved to Kosovo where he served as the base camp construction chief where he was responsible for the construction and maintenance of the base camps inside Kosovo. It would be a good training for what was to come.
continued…
His third tour in Iraq was in Mosul, where most of the missions were in support of the rebuilding of Iraq for the local population. What he was not told was that there was a report of a million-dollar price tag payable for the death of the Mosul Area Engineer. There were four ambushes on his convoys, one of which resulted in two wounded security team personnel. His team was a common site in the Mosul area, with an armored Ford 350 pickup truck and a gun turret mounted at the back as a lead vehicle. Their convoys went roaring through town at up to eighty miles per hour, ignoring traffic lights and often going kamikaze, on the wrong side of a four-lane highway to avoid the roadside bombs. They were not always successful as one vehicle was a complete loss and most of the rest had shrapnel damage from numerous attempts on the team. But the insurgents were not successful, as not one of our projects was ever stopped because of enemy action. They did cancel one project on their own, a medical clinic, when the government real estate buyer forgot to check to see if the site was at the bottom of a lake.
After his tours of duty in Kuwait, he had a few months off, only to be mobilized again, this time headed off to what was to become the Iraq Area Office in Baghdad, Iraq. With a pitifully small force of about thirty-five people, he was expected to both rebuild the country and provide all the same facilities as before in Kuwait for a U.S. force of over one hundred thirty thousand personnel. After six months of spreading themselves thinner than a desert mist, the army came to the conclusion it would take a major general and nine hundred personnel to perform this mission, not a lieutenant colonel and thirty-five personnel.
After three tours in Iraq, the Corps of Engineers then decided that the best place for Lieutenant Colonel Zillmer was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Time off after Iraq was cut short. Orders arrived sending him off to New Orleans about one year after Katrina. After getting work started on some levee repairs, he was then assigned, without any actual job title, to “just get the damned things working” at the three temporary gates and pump stations on the ill-fated canals of Seventeenth Street, London, and Orleans. There were some outstanding personnel who had already accomplished most of the initial work, but because of the seven-day-a-week conditions of the past year and conflicting mission creep orders, the work just needed an additional push to get across the finish line. That was the theory anyway. It was in fact a highly politically charged atmosphere where facts on the ground had been often ignored by local politicians and special interest groups. One investigation after another preoccupied most of the original team’s time, so he flew below the radar, so to speak, and finished up both the original pumps on time and an entire additional battery of pumps with enhanced capability that no one figured could be manufactured and installed in the time allotted. But they were operational on time, and a year later hurricanes Gustov and Ike tested the pumps, and they performed brilliantly.
continued…
Lieutenant Colonel Zillmer’s reward for this achievement was then to be assigned to the Inner Harbor surge barrier, more often called the New Orleans Surge Barrier, or unofficially the Great Wall of Louisiana. Upon hearing that he had been assigned to lead this project, a friend asked him, “Does God hate you?” Supposedly, several others had been offered the job but had turned it down. Still in uniform, he was assigned the mission to which his only answer could be “Yes, sir,” but then he added, “And exactly what is this surge barrier?”
It was to be the barrier designed to stop the largest combined surge and wave condition ever attempted by man. It was to have three gates, two would be the largest of their kinds ever attempted by the Corps of Engineers, and a concrete barrier wall built across two miles of canals, bayous, and bottomless mud. It was to be operational in three years and one month after the contract was awarded. The plan was only a concept, or a 5percent complete plan. So the mission was to drill test holes; drive test piles; complete the design; move the equivalent of ninety-three football fields covered one-foot deep of concrete infill; construct and deliver enough piles to lay end to end from New Orleans to Lafayette, Louisiana; install two Eiffel Towers’ worth of steel; dredge a one hundred yard wide construction canal; and have all these operational in the time allotted any experienced engineer would consider and absolute impossibility. And oh yes, there would be no additional money.
Having many of the same people as on the pump stations, the impossible did happen. The surge barrier was operational before June 1, 2011 and was officially finished 2013. In 2012, Hurricane Isaac assaulted New Orleans, and the surge barrier easily repulsed the slow-moving and massive storm. In 2014, the surge barrier was awarded the highest award for a civil engineering project by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Competing for that honor were several bridges in China and other projects in the United States. It was the only project by the Army Corps of Engineers ever to receive such an award in over two hundred years of the corp’s existence. The surge barrier was on time, on budget, and constructed without loss of life or serious injury in one of the most challenging environments humans have ever tried to build anything.
Lieutenant Colonel Zillmer is now retired and lives in Lindale, Texas, and spends time with his family and operates a berry farm. His future plans include writing a sequel to Prisoner Seven, a book on his tours in Iraq and another on his time in New Orleans.
Scroll down to read an excerpt from “Letters From Iraq”
