Nesmith says daily gunfire normal during his year in Iraq: Warren County graduate served as civilian contractor
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Sleeping in a sleeping bag, drinking 125-degree water and not having access to a shower for nearly a year are things one doesn’t tend to forget quickly. But Nesmith said despite the hardships, he was proud to contribute.
An Army veteran, paratrooper, and intelligence instructor who has visited numerous countries throughout his military forays, Nesmith, a 1991 graduate of Warren County High School, said he wanted to continue to serve his country.
After his Army service, he began working with computers for different defense contractors and ended up with the information technology division of Northrop Grumman, which was one of the first American companies to send civilian contractors to Iraq.
His job was to set up digitized communication for the 1st Armored Division and other units, as well as set up computer communication between soldiers and their families, which he did for nearly one year beginning last April.
“I went to my boss and said if we get any work over there and the company needs my skills, I’d like to volunteer to go,” Nesmith said. “It was a couple weeks after that they asked me if I was serious.”
Nesmith became part of a 12-person team assigned to Baghdad as a network engineer.
“We basically built their infrastructure and tried to put everything together with the equipment they had bought, which ended up being pretty difficult,” he said.
As a civilian contractor, he was unarmed, which worried his family in McMinnville a little more than compared to when he went to Bosnia in 1995 and 1996 while in the Army. As a civilian contractor, he was basically embedded in a military unit in Iraq and said the unit was fired at on a daily basis. It was something that occurred so enough, he became accustomed to it.
The first six months were relatively quiet, as soldiers were careful to not look like they were creating a dictatorship after liberating the country, he said. Soldiers spent several months rebuilding schools and discovering how bad the infrastructure was before the war.
The last six months of his tour, that all changed. Everybody was a target, Nesmith said, adding he believes the rebels in Iraq responsible for kidnapping and murder of civilian contractors and others were organizing during that time period and studying how soldiers responded to different situations, including manipulating the media.
“I thought things would keep getting a little more intense and that’s kind of when I planned my escape out of there. It was about a week or two after I left that they kidnapped the first people,” he said. “It makes people think twice about going there to work. And they know how to use our media to keep in the headlines.”
Nesmith, who has entered a photography school in Montana to improve upon a hobby, said the experience transformed his life in many ways, as he now appreciates the small things many people take for granted. He also appreciates living life to its fullest potential and concentrating on things that really matter, as he saw some lives cut short.
Being in Iraq was much more difficult than previous military experiences like Bosnia or Africa.
“I had done all those things before but not for that length of time. And the randomness of violence, it’s not like a conventional war where you know where the enemy is going to attack,” he added.