To Whom It May Concern

When Driving Is Like A Bad Video Game

I'm back out on the road again, which has been better for a couple of reasons, time goes by a lot quicker, and there are more things to do than when you are working nights, but it tends to be a lot more frightening, expecially in Bagdhad.

Bagdhad is a city of more than 6 million people, which is something a lot of people don't realize. So when you go driving around there are these HUGE buildings, and you see people standing all over, walking along the streets, even though there is a curfew, I'm certain it's difficult to enforce given the size of the city and the vast number of people who are there.

They have barricades all over the place too, probably made for vehicles not much larger than full size pickups, and there we are flying around at 45 mph down these tiny streets, weaving our way in and out of the barricades, lucky to have even 2 feet of clearence on one or the other side just to sneak thru.

It's like some sort of really bad video game, and with all the armor you wear on the ballistic vest, even the air conditioning doesn't keep you from sweating up a storm. It's just plain scary being there. As we drove thru one area there was rubbish and trash piled several feet high on both sides of the street, a place where they obviously have markets at during the day. There is no way you would be able to see a roadside bomb, it would be just too easy to hide, so you just say a little prayer and ask the Lord to please watch over you and the rest of the guys in the convoy, that it not be your time to go, that you can get thru this particular trip unscathed.

As we got to the end of that street, a blue plastic bag suddenly got sucked up and right in front of our truck, probably about the size of a medium sized garbage bag, and scared the shit out of my co driver and I. As we turned the corner and got back out on a more open stretch of road, you could hear both of us breathing hard over the whine of the turbo, and I looked over at him and he just said 'wow' quietly, and I shook my head in agreement. Little shit like that, anything that is out of the ordinary or unexpected is so damn scary here.

Thankfully we never had to stop in Bagdhad, as we have had to do sometimes in the past, because that's always an eerie feeling, you are in this HUGE city in a column of trucks that stretches sometimes for a quarter to a half mile long, lights all turned off, watching the bomb disposal units and their armored support moving along, checking suspicious areas of road. You feel like sitting ducks, and all you want to do is get a little bit of the safety that comes with moving down the road at 40 mph or so. Nothing is worse than just sitting there out in the open. Maybe that's my old infantry mindset kicking in, who knows, but I hate being a sitting duck.

Is it better to be out on the road than working at our operations at night? There really isn't a comparison. Being out on the road is what I'm trained for, but I was willing to put the hours in working nights because they needed someone to do it. What pisses me off is when I have questions about something and someone laughs about it or makes a 'Fobbit' comment (a Fobbit is someone who never leaves the FOB *forward operating base*, or in my case Tallil). I'll have more than 5000 miles on the road after this particular trip, so I'm hardly a Fobbit, so that really fucking pisses me off when I hear that, and on more than one occasion now I have had to lock someone up and let them know if I hear a specific comment from them one more time that there are going to be consequences, which isn't like me to do that but I'm fucking tired of their bullshit. Add to that the other SSG's on this trip basically leave me out of the loop on everything, and fraNk is NOT a happy camper right now.

I just keep thinking to myself that I've got about a month left in this shit hole country and then we'll be home. Oh and when we do get home I'm going to talk to JAG immediately and report a few gross violations of Army policy by my unit, things they have done that have moved others who I outrank right past me, basically stifled my ability to gain rank, and have also underutilized me here in Iraq. But that's all stuff for the future. Right now I just look forward to seeing belly again, and giving her a huge hug, and getting some semblence of normal life when I get back home. Although, our life has rarely been normal by definition of what others might consider normal, I like the quirky existence she and I share together, and I always will.