To Whom It May Concern

Journey To Iraq

Our journey to Iraq began as we flew out of a small airport on a 767 jet. Now, coach seating is rather tight, but just imagine adding to that a laptop bag, regular carry on bag, ballistic armor vest, and your weapon. Yes, that’s right, sitting on a commercial airliner, with regular stewardesses and flight crew, with your M-16 rifle right there beside you as you sit in your seat. Now, it was all our unit on board for the first part of the flight, so about 170 of us soldiers. Our first stop was New York City, and as we flew in the pilot banked the plane so we could see the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and New York in general. For me it was really cool, because I’ve never been to New York (not that I ever really want to go there, maybe to visit, but even that I’m reluctant to do.) I called my wife upon landing, not knowing how often I would be able to call over the next few weeks.

Upon landing, we were instructed to stay in the terminal for the entire duration of our stay. It was rather humorous, because they strung out those ribbon movie-style barricades as a boundary right at the entrance to our gate, so that no one unauthorized could come in, and so we wouldn’t leave. So basically, it was like being animals in a zoo, with people in the airport walking by, taking pictures, some stopping to tell us thank you, others completely ignorant asking really stupid questions “What happened, why are you here???” as though there would never be a group of soldiers waiting at one of the world’s largest airports for their next flight.

After about two hours we were back on the flight. We picked up about 15 or so other soldiers heading back to the middle east after being on leave. They played several movies while we were on board the flight. Batman Begins, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, some really bad Herbie movie with that moron Lindsey Lohan, and Fantastic Four were the ones I was actually awake for at least part of. One odd thing about this flight, was that they served us meals like every 2 hours. Of course, I freaking kept falling asleep thru just about all of them, that was rather irritating, I’d wake up just in time for ice cream though, oh yum!!!

Now, it was difficult to keep track of just exactly how long we were in the air, or how long each part of the flight took, because we were losing time as we traveled along over the ocean overnight. I kept my watch on central standard time, if for no other reason than to keep track of how long it had been. I laughed at the people who were changing their watch time with every stop, because that seemed completely pointless. We landed in Germany at roughly 0900 in the morning, in Frankfurt. I hadn’t thought much about it while I was there, but it was the first time I’d ever stepped foot in Europe, and there I was in the land of my ancestors. There wasn’t much to see. They had security all over, and we were stuck in this place called a USO club, where we could eat crappy German cookies and buy phone cards to call home. Of course, I did call belly again, to let her know where I was at. After an hour or so, we were back on the plane and heading south over Africa.

On this portion of the flight I did the majority of my sleeping. It was a very long and boring part of the trip. If you looked out the window, you could see the desert, even from 35,000 feet, the long curves of the sand dunes, the occasional cities packed in tight next to any water supply you could find. We headed east then and crossed over Egypt and the Nile River, then over the Red Sea, and finally we made it to Kuwait and Kuwait City, our destination. The total flight time was about 22 hours.

We landed in Kuwait City at about 2200 local time. I was amazed at the traffic on the streets as we came in for our landing, you could see people driving around just as if you were landing in Chicago or Dallas or any other American City. I guess I didn’t know what to exactly expect, so to me that was interesting. We all boarded buses, windows completely covered up, and headed off to the northern part of Kuwait. Once we were out on the roads, you began to realize that Kuwait has some of THE worst drivers you have ever seen. They swerve in and out of traffic at probably 90 miles an hour, and every single vehicle is an SUV. Someone told us at one of our briefings that, because Kuwait is such a rich country, that when a vehicle breaks down, they don’t even bother calling a tow truck for a repair, a truck brings them out a new vehicle and they just drive off in that, leaving the disabled vehicle by the side of the road. I figured this had to be just bull, but there were sure a lot of Land Rovers and Toyota SUV’s all over on the side of the road, some really nice ones too.

When we arrived at the camp, we had to get ‘logged into’ the country, meaning we swiped our ID cards so they could verify each soldier had arrived. It was there that we realized we had gotten very lucky. The way that military pay works, it was the 31st of October, and regardless of when you get to your deployment site overseas, you get paid the hazard duty pay and other extra pay for that entire month, so even though it was like 2300 at night on the 31st when we swiped our cards, we got all the extra money from October. That was a pretty nice unexpected bonus. Then we had about 2 hours of safety briefings before we headed off in our buses to find our tents.

The tents we moved into were giant white 40 person tents. We had to squeeze like 50 people or more into them though. We all set up the standard military green cots and, because it was about 3 in the morning by this time, and because we were all jet lagged, most everyone crashed pretty hard. The next day most of us weren’t up till about 2 or 3 p.m. The tents had no windows and were pitch black inside, so stepping outside into the bright 95 degree sun, with the sand reflecting it back at you, was not very pleasant. Even with sunglasses on, it was very uncomfortable on your eyes, to the point were tears would stream down your face. Without sunglasses you were basically blind.

Two things basically describe what you most notice about the camp in Kuwait: constant sand and the smell of diesel fumes from the generators. That is the most memorable thing about that place. That first day many of us went exploring, found the MWR tent with the phones and computers, there was a Pizza Inn (pizza exactly like Pizza Hut), a Taco Bell, Subway (not very good), a coffee shop (with great chai tea), a horrible, and I do mean HORRIBLE Chinese take out place (this place makes La Choy Chow Mein in a can seem gourmet by comparison). That first 5 days or so, we basically didn’t have a lot to do, so people either stayed in the tents and watched movies on their laptops, played cards, or tossed around horse shoes. Late at night was the best time to try and use the MWR phones or computers, but the camp was overloaded with like 5000 more troops than would normally be there, so you had to wait sometimes in excess of TWO hours to use the facilities.

After that initial period of resting and getting used to the time change, we had a 3 day training period out in the dessert. We received refresher training in advanced weapons marksmanship, and also the most up to date convoy training responding to the tactics employed by insurgents in Iraq right now. It was very good training, much better than anything we received in our more than 3 months worth of time we spent in states.

It was during this time that a lot of people started to get sick, myself included. That last couple days of training we had it was getting really bad, my sinuses and upper chest were totally stuffed up. I ended up having to get like 4 prescriptions to try and knock the infection out. A lot of other soldiers were dealing with colds and sore throats and the like. It was not very fun because we all lived in such close proximity to one another in those tents, that if one person got it, most everyone also got sick.

Finally, after 10 days or so that seemed to last forever, we got word that we were going to be flying to our next destination, a place in southern Iraq. I had never heard of it, but then, most of us didn’t know much of anything about the places in Iraq, so this was all new regardless. We loaded up on C-130 planes and flew out of Kuwait, on our way north. I have never been on a military aircraft before, so this was a new experience for me. I didn’t ever feel nauseated, but woah did my ears suffer greatly due to the wild combat style landing that pilots are required to make inside Iraq. Basically they fly in and suddenly just drop, to the point of zero gravity inside the plane, and your ears are freaking popping and stinging. Due to this, it made my sinus infection even worse, and my ears weren’t right for a long time, I still am not sure it’s all cleared up.

The first thing you notice upon arrival where we are staying in Iraq, are the numerous HUGE bunkers all over the place. They were built for a variety of reasons. The largest of course used to house the Iraqi fighter planes and small bombers, protecting them from the Iranians during the Iraq/Iran war that raged on from 1980 till 1990. Of course, the U.S. smart bombed the crap out of them to take out the planes during the first gulf war. Also, according to one Iraqi engineer named Ali (I’ll tell you more about him later) the American’s had such good intelligence just before the first gulf war, that when the U.S. Air Force dropped a smart bomb on a building known as Building 1, they killed every more than 50 fighter pilots who were all in a meeting, basically rendering Iraq’s fighters completely useless (not that the old MIG Soviet fighters would have been much of a match anyway, but oh well).

Smart bombs are precision guided weapons that are guided in thru the use of cameras and penetrate many levels of concrete and other materials to explode in the center of whatever building or object you are trying to hit. Oddly enough, they did very little damage to the structure of most of the buildings they hit. Some however, are absolutely decimated, even to this day. The smaller bunkers are those for command centers and storage areas. We have explored a few of them and they are really interesting, sometimes a little scary. It’s hard to describe the size of them, they are absolutely huge. I’ll have to send a few photos out sometime, or just email me and ask me for some.

The camp itself is really really flat. There are no hills. When we first arrived, we had to live in tents in a place appropriately called Tent City for almost a freaking month, which sucked. They are supposed to be 18 person tents and we had like 25 people in each one. Of course, it was hard to get over a nasty cold when you are living with that many people in such a small area.

We all started getting into our duties, mostly what they call ‘details’, which are daily duties that have to be done around the base. Some are security related, some are construction related, most really are not fun. We were responsible for escorting Iraqi workers to their job sites and keeping track of them all day. As the NCOIC (non commissioned officer in charge) of the detail, I got to have my own HUMVEE, it wasn’t too bad a gig at all.

While we were living in the tents, as other units were leaving for home, a lot of us were purchasing refrigerators, televisions, desks, microwaves, etc, for pretty decent prices. The problem was, where to store all the stuff we were buying. Our tents started to look like we were all freaking packrats, but there wasn’t much else we could do, they kept changing the date when we could move into our trailers. When we finally got into our trailers, it was pretty nice. The trailers are like miniature dorm rooms, there are three rooms per trailer, each with it’s own door to the outside. There is an air conditioner/heater dual unit for climate control, and cable television (but wow the armed forces network can suck sometimes, they do have two movie channels though where all they do is put DVDs in and play them).

I purchased a giant desk with shelves, a headboard with shelves, a television, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a few other items. Along with them, I found a nice set of dresser drawers, an iron, a new set of sheets (unopened) and other really great items, stuff I would have probably never thought of, but that I would have likely had to buy. Rugs, hand sanitizer, singles of Wet Wipes (wow are those ever useful), permanent markers, lamps, folding chairs, 100 MPH tape, so much stuff, can’t even list it all. Basically, it was nice not having to go to the Post Exchange to buy much of anything.

They have a place called the MWR, which I believe stands for Military Wellness and Recreation or something like that. They have phones and internet computers there (if you like to wait in line for oh an hour or so haha), two television rooms, one for movies the other for usually live sports from the united states, two pool tables, foozball, several televisions with game systems like Xbox, PSII, and Nintendo hooked up to them. And there is a library. They have volleyball, horseshoes, basketball, and other activities outside of the MWR building also. The chow hall here is amazing. They have all sorts of food here, good food. I was all stoked about being able to avoid eating all that much while I was here and being able to stay in really good shape. But alas, the food is VERY good, the best chow hall I’ve ever been in, even better than the one I visited with my wife in Pensacola. I am not getting fat but I’m not getting myself into the best of shape either, let’s just say I’m hovering at around 190 lbs haha.

It’s interesting here how out of 170 or so soldiers, I’d say about 130 of us have laptops. Add to that people like me who have all this other stuff they either bought here or brought with them, and it’s unreal how we are such an electronic military now. I have the playstation II here (I play Need For Speed Underground II all the time, I just beat it last night) and my boombox with MP3 inputs and outputs for playing music from my laptop. We just recently got the internet hooked up, which is really good for me because on top of my other jobs, I’m responsible for the company newsletter and I’m unit historian for keeping track of what happens here so it can all be archived into a yearbook of some sort when we get back.

The unit we replaced was from California, and they were really messed up, I can think of some other words I would use to describe them but I’ll keep it clean here. Being a transportation unit, we have a LOT of trucks, 100+ trucks to keep track of. When we ‘inherited’ them from this other unit, probably 90% of them were completely unusable, and their maintenance department pretty much admitted that all they did for the entire year was replace tires, that is IT. They didn’t change oil, they didn’t fix problems like leaks or any of the little things that go wrong. Because the little things went unchecked, most turned into BIG things, things our company has had to spend a TON of time on to repair, because without our trucks we are basically battle ineffective.

Our unit has been getting a really great reputation over here so far. We have always done that though, not to toot our own horn but we aren’t the typical Army National Guard unit, we have great leadership and sergeants in our unit. We are still escorting Iraqi workers even now, and we’ve gotten a lot of praise for that part of what we are doing. It’s not all that hard, we meet a lot of really great Iraqi people when we escort them. One is Ali, who used to work for the number 2 man in Iraq, Saddam’s son in law. We hear the most amazing stories about what Saddam used to do, and regardless of what the media says, it was way way way worse under Saddam than it is now, yet the media just loves to talk about how BAD it is here. Trust me, it’s not that bad.

Ali is an engineer and arguably the most intelligent person on this post, American or not. He does not live here, he is in charge of projects that are being done, like building renovations, street paving, and motor pool paving (the motor pool is what we call our maintenance yards). I am learning a lot of Arabic working with him, and a LOT of history about Iraq. It’s hard for a lot of Americans to fully appreciate just how amazing the Iraqi history is. The United States has been around for about 230 years, and has been recognized as a world power for about 50 years of that. Iraq has had several civilizations throughout history that were world powers, from Ur some 5000 years ago, to the Babylonians, to the Sumerians, and others. The Garden Of Eden is rumored to have been just to the north in an area called the fertile crescent, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Even many of those who do not believe the Garden of Eden existed believe that man first walked the earth in the fertile crescent area.

Ali filled me in on the Temple of Ur, which I’ve visited a couple of times. Ur is an ancient civilization, many say the oldest civilization known to man. Ur was a port at one time, but that changed over the years as silt from the two rivers built up and pushed the Persian Gulf further away, until the point when Ur was no longer a useable port and basically faded away. It went thru three separate phases of existence, from 5000+ years ago, to 3000 years or so ago. Today there is very little left, there is no modern Ur. All that is left are remnants of the city on the hill. The temple itself is the oldest building of such size in the world, called a ziggurat, the Arabic word for ‘temple’. At one time it was three stories high, but now has weathered away to just one story, because the clay bricks were never fired in a kiln. Even at one story though, the temple is very impressive.

But most impressive to me about Ur, is the House of Abraham. Abraham is a central figure in all monotheistic religions (those religions who believe in one God). Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions all recognize Abraham as at least a prophet of God. The House of Abraham is where Abraham lived his life, and is located to the south of the Temple of Ur. The walls of the house have been rebuilt, because much like the temple, the bricks weathered away over thousands of years. But the floor itself is still intact with the same stones that Abraham himself walked upon so long ago. Walking around on that floor, in the same space that Abraham lived, was really moving to me. I have taken a lot of photos of Ur.

The Iraqis also have these little marts around where they sell stuff. A lot of what they sell would be best termed as ‘boot leg’, such as the dvd’s for 4 dollars, Rolex watches for 25 bucks, etc. None of them are the real thing, but there is little infrastructure in place in the Iraqi government yet to stop it. The US military at first didn’t allow it, but the Iraqi’s would set up their shops outside of the main gate, and soldiers would stop even though they were told not to, so finally for our safety, they were allowed to move the shops into an area just outside the inner gate, where they make a good amount of money selling their wares. If a movie comes out in the theater in the United States, within about 5 days it appears on DVD in Iraq, honest to God filmed IN the theater with a camcorder. It sounds hilarious, but the fact is, we can’t ever see brand new movies here so many of us will buy that crappy DVD for 4 bucks just to watch it.

So far we are really doing well, as you can see. I feel bad because I haven’t had the opportunity to really tell you all how things have been, I hope this gets you all up to date. This is a relatively safe place, but we are still in Iraq, so you always have to remain vigilant to what is going on around you. It is never 100% safe here, but when we all do our jobs no one should get hurt.

Current Lyrical Ramblings

So You will know the truth, too!
I'm not a comfortable liar,
Because my heart is on fire,
So others will not burn in the lake of fire.

Comfortable Liar - Chevelle