A Big Wet Happy Mess

It drizzled some Friday. The ground became slimy and sticky. Saturday it rained and everything turned to slick, sticky mud. Driving on it is about like driving on ice. I had some minor fish tails. When you hit pavement you hear it slinging rocks…until the pavement is covered in it as well. Everything gets covered in mud. It sticks to your boots, you pick gravel up in the mud and you feel it stuck to your boots as you walk. I wanted to take a shower Saturday night (It is bath night traditionally…) but, I decided not to venture through the mud that covered the pavement…I’d just be covered in it when I came back. People would try to get it off their boots on any edge they could find. The mud is glue here. Everyone took it in stride, since it has not rained since the first of November. It was one great big, wet, happy mess.

The last two nights have been clear…

Monday night I had the chance to hop a Chinook going down south and back. There was a delivery being made and someone had to take the paper work down and get a signature. So, one of our guys was going alone. Tuesday is my usual day off so, if it turned into a late night it wouldn’t be so bad. I gave my Major a holler and said I wanted to go…its not good practice for one of us to go alone, to buddy up is better if we can. He didn’t mind so, I informed the 1sgt, got my stuff together and hit the flight line.

It was a good flight down, non eventful. The last time they took some small arms fire, but we didn’t have any moon, so it may have made it harder to spot us. Then it could have been all of the bad guys were taking the night off, or no one felt like taking revenge out for their Uncle that died in 1974 working for the Oil Company that sold Oil to the Americans. I had a good seat, right behind and between the pilots in the passage way. So, I could see the pilots, the controls and the lights of Sadr City plus several other towns as we went. I had a head set and was able to listen to the conversation; it would have been cool to listen to some Weezer though. I door gunned over Ft. Chafe Arkansas once while listening to some old Dylan. It’s been years since I was on a Chinook…I think I was sitting on the extra fuel tank…No, I think it was over the Panama Canal…I could have gotten some good footage, but, my digital camera stopped all of a sudden. I thought the batteries were dead; most batteries I get in care packages are just about dead. So, much to my disappointment when I got back to the light last night, I saw the battery latch barely loose…The thing has taken a beating over here and the latch will come loose sometimes. Next time, I’ll tape it down.

Contrary to popular belief I never make it out of the FOB. It was great to go somewhere besides the edge of Taji. Doing security I get to move around a lot, but never have too many reasons to go anywhere. You can go stir crazy here.

More pictures of random shit…

The other night we were watching a slide show one of the guys family had put together of some of his pictures and another guy’s. They did it to some crummy Kenny G music, but it was pretty good. There were pictures of random stuff. It showed allot of the character of being here. People ask us what it’s like, but we can’t fully explain the oddities and small but crazy little things that make up the day to day here. It’s hard to take some pictures, the Iraqis love to pose and will remember that picture for months. You just can’t keep printing pictures for them. We all agreed, we need to take more pictures of random shit.

All the way to F!*#@ing Baghdad!

I’ve been going through some loops trying to get a Radio Base Station set up for the Guards. I obtained it from a conversation, funny as it may sound, arranged for the Iraqi Signal School to set it up as a class project, had to get it programmed as a favor because the students had made a mistake and wrote simplified instructions to be translated into Arabic for the Guards. Then I was told today that when the American OIC of the Signal School came to help with a radio check today it wasn’t working. So, tomorrow it’s to trouble shooting. The darn thing was working the day before. All they had to do was have their electrician hook it up to the back up battery (better him for something so simple than them, I insisted it be done with real electrical tape). We put the antenna on the top of a building; the American LTC in charge of the Signal School said we should reach Baghdad with it. We’re going to have to trouble shoot it first.

Our Favorite Christmas card…

Doesn’t have naked women in it. It’s from a little boy some where’s that was sent to one of our Officers. It reads as follows:

Dear Major (insert hypothetical name here), we hope you survive.

Thanks for defending our country. Here is a song: We hope you

A merry Christmas we hope you a merry Christmas and we hope

You don’t die.

That little boy will probably work for Halmark one day…

OK, heathens, smile like you mean it…

I’m in Iraq, I might as well have fun…

The Appalachianist