My day... (as requested). This is a long one

As requested, this is pretty much a day for me. There is some description of what I do, along with a lot of descriptions about what I observe.

So… I am laying in bed thinking of my time here in Iraq. As much as I hate Iraq, I think that being here has definitely instilled some values and experiences that I am growing fond of. I am more grateful for family, friends, freedom of choice, and of course all the material things. Of course, if I was asked tomorrow if I would like to go home… of course, who wouldn’t (unless you volunteered and are just here for the money)? Anyway, I figured I would go ahead and explain, in a little more detail, what goes on here and the stuff that I see – some of which is quite funny, some… not so much. I know that nobody back home really knows what goes on here.

Normally, my squad does a lot of missions at random times during daylight. I don’t like that so much for a few reasons: (a) daylight means sun – sun means heat, and I don’t like the heat; (b) the enemy doesn’t have night vision (um.. hopefully) and I do; and, (3) the chance of us catching bad people doing bad things is higher, and the feeling of accomplishment greatly offsets monotony. Nights are nice. For real. It’s a nice and cool 90 degrees, there aren’t very many vehicles out, and occasionally you come across a few people that are abusing animals in ways that scares the living hell out of me (but it is great conversation and video ops for later). Anyhow, we do day missions with a few nights thrown in here and there.

My day goes a little something like this. I wake up about an hour to hour and a half before mission and say, “$%$#, I’m in Iraq!” I lay in bed before my conscience tells me that I’m running late. I jump down off my lofted bed (which by the way, I don’t have a ladder for), grab my shower shoes, towel, clean clothes and sun glasses. That’s right… sunglasses. For those of you who don’t know, if you walk outside in Iraq without sunglasses after sleeping all night, the wonderful rays of sunlight will pierce your retinas (okay, that’s kind of an exaggeration, but you get the point, right?). It is this point in time when I know if it will be a good day or bad day. If I walk out of my CHU (think redneck trailer, but much smaller), and I instantly feel a blast of heat comparative to the barbeque end of a jet engine… it’s a bad day. Anything less than that, eh… I’m okay. I walk a short distance to the shower and into a trailer that has shower stalls and sinks.

I start a new paragraph because this whole shower thing needs its own, and my old English teacher told me that very long paragraphs lose the attention of the reader. These showers are… um… not as nice as mine back home. The showers run on electric pumps. Electricity on the FOB in the middle of the summer is not so good. So, hypothetically, I am taking a shower and just got all lathered up and the power goes out. Then, that then overrules the original good/bad day moment. Once, and I couldn’t even make this junk up, the water was brown. Thank god I turn the water on before I get in, which brings me to another point. We are supposed to take Navy/combat/conservative showers. This means you get in, get wet, lather up, rinse off, and get out. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on how rebellious I’m feeling that day. The water isn’t potable, so I brush my teeth with the bottled water that we have here.

I just realized this sounds like complaining (which, I guess it kind of is) but I don’t mean for it to come across that way, but I have written way too much to revise it. I’m in Iraq. I am lucky to be able to take a shower 99% of the time. The people on this FOB before me built this FOB up to how it is. It could be much, much worse. Actually, take everything I say in this blog as an explanation. When I complain about something, I will let you know.

So, after my shower, I go back to my CHU and get dressed in my uniform, grab and clear my weapons, grab a water and head to my Humvee. While my driver and dismount, West and Harris respectively, is getting the vehicle ready and my gunner, Warner, is mounting his weapon in the turret, I turn on the navigation, communication and electronic warfare equipment, making sure the security settings and radio timing is correct. I then check my team to make sure they have all of their gear, which they are pretty good about, and brief them on what I’m looking for that day. We get a quick mission briefing and we load up, get ice, test fire weapons and depart the FOB (we call it SP for start point).

My squad is responsible for a few Iraqi Police Stations (IPS). They are pretty far from the post, between 45 minutes and two hour convoy time. We travel through Hawijah, or what we call the Wij or Weej, however you want to spell it. The Weej, at one point in time, was the most dangerous place in Iraq per capita and square mile (at least this is what we were told). The infantry has kicked ass out here, and now on a scale of one to ten on how dangerous it is, I’d say a three. That represents violence against Coalition Forces; violence against Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), which includes Iraqi Army, IPs, and SOI (I’ll tell you about them later) is slightly higher. Anyway, the Weej is a fairly large city for the area and is a very conservative city. There is very little money, and but a ton of markets. The houses are concrete or mud, roads are paved, and there is a canal system that provides water, a place to bathe and swim for the thousands of residents in the city. Dogs. That’s all I have to say. I believe that there is one dog for every person in the city, except that nobody really owns dogs here. If you have ever seen the movie Resident Evil, they are kind of like those dogs. Not really, but they are dangerous and like to attack our vehicles (or try). There are a couple streets in the city, that if we had to dismount our vehicle, a few dogs might end up having a bad day.

After the Weej, we travel through some farmland, and not farms like in Kansas, I’m talking about large fields of hard mud and uneven rows of whatever. The majority of the farms are hand farmed, without and tractors. I have a theory of the farmers that have combines or tractors, but they haven’t been blown up yet, so… I don’t know. Regardless, the farmers out here farm hay, melons and sunflowers. The cows outside the Weej appear emaciated; they eat what they can of the fields, food thrown on the side of the road or trash. Farmers walk their cows and sheep down the road to get water, and apparently cows don’t listen to air horns, or armor hitting their heads (it didn’t even phase it… calm down PETA, it’s alive and it hit us, not the other way around). You shouldn’t eat anything from the farms, because whatever would want to grow there is stupid. Actually, I have had some fresh vegetables, and they are pretty good.

So we finally get to the Iraqi Police Station. I can’t really go into how we provide security, but rest assured… it’s there. My squad leader or, in his absence, one of team leaders, walk in with an interpreter and meet with the Chief or Officer in Charge. I usually walk in with another interpreter, unless I’m the one conducting the initial meet with the officer, and go straight to the detention cell. I use the interpreter to talk to the detainees to get their names and why they are there. Which by the way, they never ever, ever, ever, ever tell me the truth. “I don’t know,” “I’m innocent,” “it was my brother” are all excuses I hear every single day. You should see the look on their faces when I leave an come back with the investigative officer and have him ask them why they are in there. They won’t dare lie when he’s in there because he will have a little “coming to God,” I mean... er… “Allah” meeting once we leave. Anyway, I check their names against our wanted list. If they are on the list – score! If not, I usually take pictures and collect biographical data and biometrical (fingerprints, iris photos, etc) information. We do that, because if we ever find their fingerprint on an IED or something, we will swiftly kick them in the ass with a Hellfire rocket.

During our meeting with whoever is in charge, we have Chai. Iraqi Chai is a shot glass full of tea with enough sugar to wind a 5 year old up for a year. It’s 130 degrees out, and they give me hot tea with copious amounts of sugar. Iraqis think it is extremely disrespectful to turn down Chai. They also don’t like ice tea for two reasons: (1) it’s dangerous to drink anything cold unless it was bottled or canned; and, (2) they think iced tea is for [wimps] (there was another word used by a certain Iraqi, but I won’t use it here).

After the meeting, if we so decide, we can do a joint patrol of the city, either mounted (in vehicles) which is nice because I like being inside armor, or dismounted (alongside our vehicles). We will move around the city, stopping vehicles and pedestrians, searching them and making sure they aren’t bad guys. We joke with the citizens a lot, talk with shop owners, and play with children, all while maintaining a high level of situational awareness. It instances where we mean business or something is popping off, we keep everyone away from us, and we pretty much do as we please to ensure that everything is kosher.

Children are everywhere. I mean… everywhere. Procreation here is big. I mean, I should have guessed, but it’s much bigger than I could have ever dreamed. The kids seem awfully similar to the ones in the movie Hostel. The surround our vehicles, they run up on us and ask for anything. If a soldier gives anything to a child, they cherish it. It could be a hot water bottle or handful of candy, they want it. They want our weapons (which we don’t give them or course), sunglasses, gloves, candy, and SOCCER BALLS. I mean every child, boy or girl, young or teen, they want “football, football, sir, football.” We tell them and we tell them every single time we see the same old kids, “we don’t have any damn footballs!” But, they are persistent little people. There could be one child on the street, if you give him something, 20 kids will appear and beat the living crap out of him for it, which brings me to a fun thing. Every once in a while we throw a handful of candy to a group of children. Can you guess the outcome? You can’t buy entertainment like that in the states. In all seriousness though, the children here are awesome. It’s nice to have supporters, even if it is children. I gave some of the soccer balls that were given to me but many of you to some of the children, because it gives me a feeling of accomplishment. We can’t really change the attitude of a lot of the adult population here, but we can influence the way children think of us, or at least make them happy while we are here. I’m seriously thinking about starting a clothing drive for children here. There is this IP’s little boy that is always hanging around one of the IP stations that is the coolest little boy I have ever met. For his safety, I won’t write his name. It somewhat saddens me when every week we are there, he has the same clothes on. He always runs to the market for us to get us stuff when we arrive at the station, and we always compensate him, very well, and his dad actually lets him keep what we give him.

The last time I spoke about children, I got a few emails and spoke to a few of you about how we need to protect ourselves, even against children. I know. We are constantly observing and analyzing every situation we place ourselves in. When we get that little Spidy sense that something is up, we get our standoff and take a better look at what’s going on.

So, after the patrol, we usually depart and head back to the FOB. When we get there, we clear all of our weapons, fuel trucks, complete any maintenance required and return to our CHUs. I am in my PT uniform in about… 2.3 seconds. I only wear ACUs when I have mission or am forced to. I like to stay cool. I usually get a bite to eat, fill out mission paperwork and take a nap or go work out.

That’s my day. Every day is fairly similar which is monotonous. I still get a little bit of an adrenaline rush while I’m outside the wire though… because you never know. I will tell you right now, and not one word of a lie, not much has happened since we have been here. I have no crazy war hero story. I haven’t called or written to people telling them about all of the stereotypical war stories, which if I did, would be completely fictitious. Of course a few things have happened; that is to be expected. Everyone in my squad is healthy and well, thank God.

I have seen things here that I can honestly say I wasn’t ready to see. Here are a few:

1. Pepsi can hoax IED – That’s right, Iraqi’s love Pepsi too!

2. A full out riot of all children – its like the LA riots with dwarfs.... Great!.

3. Donkeys Gone Wild – That’s all I’m saying. Don’t ask. I’m still in therapy.

4. I kid covered in sewage, who get this… is HAPPY – One question. Why?

5. Fields full of oil. Literally, full of oil – ever wonder what happens when a pipeline breaks?

6. And, a cow standing on the roof of a two story house – sounds like our senior prank idea made it to Iraq.

Nice list, huh? There’s more, but this has gone on long enough.

On days when missions don’t take place, I usually work out, eat, sleep, watch a movie or two, and… sleep. That is, of course, if I don’t have paper work, cleaning or maintenance to do (which is usually always)

Anyway, I figure this has probably taken you about a week to read and are pretty sick of me babbling on. I'm going to have to throw out there that this is make up for all of the blogs that I should have posted, but procrastinated (by the way, our Procrastinators Anonymous meeting was postponed.... again ;o) ).

I hope all is well at home. I miss you and can't wait to see you all.

Phil

If there is anything you want to know, let me know. As long as I'm allowed, Ill pretty much write about anything.

PS... I heard that "it was my brother" excuse again today from a detainee. Gotta love it.