Boca man recalls how his Army unit spread messages through music in Iraq on a makeshift radio station

By ANDREW MARRA, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sep. 23, 2009

It was just a big black box, really. With a sad-looking antennae to hang on the roof and some soldier's laptop plugged into the side.

On the barracks rooftop it seemed like poor weaponry, throwing out feeble FM frequencies in the hail and thud of Sadr City sniper fire, mortars and bombs.

But on the streets of that immense Baghdad slum, where Army Sgt. Alan Coffman often went door-to-door in the sand-strewn streets with a helmet, gun and translator, it sometimes seemed like one of the best things going.

It wasn't quite Radio Free Europe, but then again no one had instructed Coffman and the rest of his team on just how to start it up. It had been a serendipitous thing - a few pieces of equipment brought in, then someone's suggestion: We should make this a radio station.

And so what was born became, in Coffman's estimation, perhaps the only FM music station broadcasting in a sprawling Shiite slum in suburban Baghdad that is home to more than 1 million people.

The "radio in a box," as they called it, had an eight-mile range, a playlist of Iraqi pop garnered from local CDs and - inserted between songs - pro-American messages translated into Arabic.

It was all part of the job for Coffman and his team. He was a psychological operations guy.

Today, in the air-conditioned office of Boca Raton public relations firm TransMedia Group, where the 28-year-old sergeant is an intern, the memories of that hellish stretch in Sadr City are less than a year old but seem ages away.

Tall, broad-shouldered and soft-spoken, he's a Palm Beach Community College student now, recently married. He's exploring whether he wants a career in public relations or marketing.

Apart from the bombing and death, he says it wouldn't be such a long journey from where he's been.

"The assignment," he said of his stint in Iraq, "essentially turned out to be like public relations at many different levels."

Not that he knew that starting out. The Deerfield Beach native, who worked as a cop in Hillsboro Beach and moved to Virginia Beach to care for his sick mother, enlisted as an Army reservist five years ago in search of a next step forward.

He found a place in psychological ops, or "psy ops" for short, because it sounded unique - the sort of thing he thought he would never be able to do in the United States.

The Army uses psychological operations to "send truthful information to foreign audiences in order to convince them to take action favorable to the U.S. and its allies," an Army spokesman said.

Radio operations are a popular option but just one of many, said the spokesman, Lt. David Chace of the U.S. Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Airborne).

"They use everything from billboards to dropping pamphlets from helicopters," Chace said.

When he was deployed to Baghdad's Sadr City in late 2007, a world of pain awaited.

Coffman fought street battles, rode air guard in combat vehicles. He took on heavy enemy fire, and watched a good friend die atop a Stryker vehicle standing in on Coffman's own shift.

He survived so many roadside explosions and fired so many rounds that his left ear became nearly useless. He uses a hearing aid now.

One day, three hours after he left the old police barracks where he and his team lived, the building was bombed, leaving an enormous crater where his cot had been. They had to move their quarters - and the radio station.

Working in an imbedded psy ops company, he said his job was "basically convincing people to do what we wanted them to do at the time."

In the interest of getting out the U.S. government's message, he produced pamphlets and fliers. With the help of translators, he tried to encourage Iraqis to turn in roadside bombers and avoid certain roads. To boil their water after a cholera outbreak. To use the government's anonymous tips line.

He went door-to-door in the Iraqi slums. The idea was to garner intelligence from locals. But it was also to answer questions and represent his country. To try to put people at ease.

"You'd get to walk into a house, take your helmet off, put your weapon down," he said. "Speaking with someone is a little better than speaking at them."

In April, not long after his friend was killed, his team started the radio station. A captain had brought the gear in from a larger base along with vague orders to transmit pro-American messages to the populace.

The team decided that would not do. Who would listen? They said they would start a proper station. Or the closest thing.

Coffman was told most Baghdad stations ran talk radio all day. They didn't like the sound of that. They decided theirs would feature music.

Coffman sent an Iraqi translator to buy a stack of local CD's. He monitored MTV Arabia to get clued in on new sounds.

He had public service announcements translated and placed in between songs on their playlists. They organized their programming with iTunes.

At first, they hid the fact that it was a U.S.-operated station. Later they advertised it.

On the streets he quizzed Iraqis about the music. Old men didn't care for the modern-styled pop. Younger Iraqis often liked it. Many didn't listen at all.

"We wanted to make it as much like an Iraqi station as possible," he said.

He admits it probably never would have won awards. But for a good half-year at least (he doesn't know if it still operates) it was one of the team's best, and most creative, arms extended toward the skeptical Iraqis.

These days, Coffman wears collared shirts to work and says his time in psy ops gave him a taste, he thinks, for public relations.

Living in Boca Raton with his new wife, who teaches high school in Boynton Beach, he's become nearly a full-time student, with monthly reservist duties back in Virginia Beach.

He credits his year in Baghdad with a vast expansion of his mind and world view. Joy and pain and hell all together, some strange mix he hasn't quite untangled.

"It doesn't look like fun at the time," he said. "It's not until later that you realize what you've been through."












All original InformationLiberation articles CC 4.0



About - Privacy Policy