If I'm not Here, I'm probably Somewhere Else.

Finally got a bit of Fishing In

2008-09-08T15:34:00.003-04:00

Short summary of the past few weeks:

July 25 - finished fishing up in Bristol Bay. Packed the boat up and took off down to Petersburg.

Had a job lined up for another skipper, but as he was still up in the Bay when I got to Petersburg, I crashed on his couch for a couple of days.

Then we were supposed to meet in Juneau to pick up a boat, so I hopped on the Alaska Ferry up there and waited for two days for him to get there - got an nteresting time to check out Juneau, and as a highlight I found their McDonalds - ummm yummmmyy yumm yumm so of course I had to order *FIVE* double cheeseburgers.... it was AWESOMMMME.

Then we picked up the oldest still fishing wooden boat in the state - the F/V Eleanora. It used to be my skipper's boat, but he sold it four years ago. It was disgustingly greasy and dirty and plenty of stuff was broken; so we turned on all the bilge pumps to keep it floating and ran to PSG as quickly as possible before sinking.

Spend a week there fixing everything, painting, cleaning, etc. Everything to get it in fishing shape. Once it was semi-ready, we drove down here to Port Armstrong Hatchery.

Unfortunately, the pink salmon must have been frightened by the mere sight of the Eleanora so they never showed up (AT ALL) and we sat around all August.

We did fish two days and caught 30,000 lbs. That sounds okay, until you hear that we were expecting 3 MILLION pounds. And at .07 cents a pound, we lost a bunch of money - after paying and repairs, food, fuel, etc etc, we were down quite a bit of cash. HaHa looks like the crew will be writing the skipper a check heheheh.

We drove back to Petersburg once for a week because we were bored, but got called back to harvest some pinks and coho salmon; ended up with 25K coho and 7K salmon, which barely even paid for our fuel on that trip.

So August kind of sucked really badly.

And the boat was super tiny and fairly uncomfortable, not to mention that I hate with a burning passion the other crew guys, so it was a sticky situation for a while. They are both idiots and have little or no sense of how to act in a decent fashion when cooped up on a tiny boat with three deckhands and a skipper and his daughter. Somehow I managed to avoid bashing any of their faces in, but it was a close call. Self-medication haha I guess.(Gin and tonics make me happy!)

At the end of August we took the Eleanora back to PSG and did some repairs to it:

Put it up on a wooden grid out of the water to fix some of the holes in the wood seams.

Then the owner came down from Juneau and drove it back up there for us, which worked out well, because the Island Girl just got to town (that's our other boat) and we had to switch out and get back to Armstrong because the coho are starting to run.

Got down here, and fished the next day. Had 51,000 lbs of coho and 11K of pinks - a very good ratio. Fish are 25% female which is a good indicator that the run is just starting. The longer the run goes on, the more females show up. If the female ratio is high, that means the run is slowing down or almost over.

Have been sitting for three days or so. Our skipper left to go fishing on another boat and another skipper came in to cover for him, but haven't fished yet.

Posbbily this afternoon we will be doing some fishing and taking the fish to Sitka AK, which would be nice because we get significantly more money when we load them on board and take them somewhere, as opposed to filling up a tender that shows up here.

That is about all that's fit to print. Have posted some pictures below this post of some things we've been doing.

Hope all out there in TV-land are well and enjoying the summer. I did some jumping into the 54-degree water the other day; climbed up the rigging about 40 or 50 feet and plunged in; it was quite refreshing and broke up the endless ennui of being tied to the dock...

So Long, Scott

Some Pictures

2008-09-05T15:34:00.000-04:00

The Eleanora on the repair grid; and the wood boat guy fixing a leaking seam

Two pictures from the wheelhouse as I am driving down Chatham Strait:

A Small Halibut (40lbs)

A Medium Halibut (80lbs)

Medium Halibut being filleted(40lbs of meat from 80lbs fish)

I have a new toy

2008-09-01T23:48:00.004-04:00

About to be fishing

2008-06-23T17:53:00.001-04:00

Well we left Naknek, where we were parked in the boatyard and then at the cannery, and ran across Bristol Bay and tied up here in Dillingham AK for a night, and we pull out on the afternoon tide.

Likely to start fishing on Weds, the fish are Al-MOOOOST here....

Once it starts, it will be hot and heavy fishing until late July. Lots of work, hopefully lots of fish, and maybe a couple of dollars at the end of it all.

I have posted a link in the right side of this page, to the Dillingham harbor webcam we are currently tied up at, and will try to upload a current picture, but as I said, we leave in a few hours. But you can still look at the webcam if you want haha.

Also, read an interesting article in Science News Weekly about something called "Virtual Water." It gives you a sense of how much water you ACTUALLY consume - not just what you drink or shower with, but for instance how much water it took across the globe to brew your morning coffee. Check it out.

Talk to y'all in a few weeks...

STOP THE PEBBLE MINE!!!

2008-06-22T19:35:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone!

Two things I have come across lately.

1: An article in a science mag i read about our Virtual Water Footprint.

Basically it shows you how much water you consume - to include how much water goes into producing the products you use, etc. Quite an eye opener.

Link is here and click on their "Water Footprint Calculator"
http://www.waterfootprint.org/
http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=cal/waterfootprintcalculator_indv_ext

I took their test and came up with....
....
....
3577 cubic meters of water!

Dang that is a lot...definitely opens your eyes to how good we Americans have it.

2: and possibly more important to me directly:

The Proposed Pebble Mine

A proposed open-pit mine that would decimate the Bristol Bay area and ruin our fishery. Not only would this take away a very good job I just acquired, it will destroy the premium sockeye salmon fishery in the world.

If you like seafood, I encourage you to read more about this on the Web, and make your voice heard - call/write/email your Senator or Rep and ask them to shut this down.

The Bristol Bay fishery currently brings in about $170million a year.

The proposed mine will bring in somewhere around $3 TRILLION.

So we are fighting some REALLY BIG MONEY PEOPLE HERE. Economically, it would seem better to put in the mine. But after that money is extracted, the fishery and area would be ruined FOREVER.

Kinda messed up, me thinks.

Ok, LOL, all done preaching. But Like i said, the fishermen up here are fighting some HUGE money and could use all the help they can get.

We are OUTTtAAAAAa here

2008-06-21T01:15:00.004-04:00

Time to go fishing, with i had time to put up some pictures but dont really

ok i was just kdiding here are like two pictures - after all you cant leave port without a little Celebration:

and to make things more interesting, as I was driving downt he road today, the brakes in the old Ford truck went out, near as i can tell the master cylinder took the day off and is deciding not to stop the truck today ***SIGH*** good thing we are taking off.

Anyways, we leave on the morning tide to run 100 miles over to Dillingham AK to pick up the last crew member we need and then

BRING ON THE SOCKEYE

AND SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!!!

hopefully all goes well, i hope all you'all out there are doing well, i will be back online whenever time permits which will be less and less as the season picks up;

dont worry, if i havent been by to see you in a while, this fall is designated travel around and see everyone time, so I will be along in a few months with fresh fish to spread, but you gotta bring the bread!

Later Later alls

Well the boat floats, that is always a plus

2008-06-19T00:02:00.002-04:00

Well of course the tide could only come in high enough for us here to launch at 430 am, so we got up at 4 and loaded the boat onto a big trailer and splashed down into the cold fringes of the Bering Sea...

We drove down to our cannery and parked there and waited for the mechanic, who came down after lunch and we drove around for two hours and broke in the engine - it got rebuilt over the winter because it blew up at the end of last season.

My bag of raingear and clothes is STILL on the tender, on its way up here from Petersburg. He was supposed to be here around the same time I got here, but is taking his sweet time so he will get here on Friday. **SIGH** It will be nice to have some clean socks...

Gonna hit the water tomorrow

2008-06-17T23:59:00.000-04:00

Continuing on today with more boat projects, getting ready to launch on Weds at four am, yeah, thats right, four o the clock in the MORNING while all y'all are nice and warm and cozy in bed hehe sorry not me...

Anyway, today and yesterday we have been tying up loose ends like
Laying New Carpet in the cabin:

and giving the Ole Ford Truck

a tune-up and getting it running good

and getting plenty of beverages

to include caffeinated types and also some tasty frostycold malt beverages

but, alas and boo-hoo, with THESE PRICES

we won't have any Real Booze on board

sigh...

Other notes: gas up here just edged over $5.50 a gallon, so enough with your Lower 48 crying about it; diesel will likely be another $1 or so higher yet.

Tired today, sorry for lack of coherent and compelling narrative structure, I will post some more in the next couple of days and then we will be actually fishing.

Hope all y'all out there are doing well, I am eating fresh crab legs and smoked black-cod, yes I know its a rough life up here !

the First Shower of the Month

2008-06-14T01:10:00.002-04:00

haha LOL ok so we shut down work early today (730pm) and since there are still like five hours of daylight decided to wash my dirty armpits because we got drunk last night.

so the interesting thing about being up here is the prices -
last night at the beer store i walked in, asked what the cheap beer was, and was told
"MGD, its only $20 a 12pack."
So I got one of those for the other guy on board and picked up a medium size bottle of Captain Morgans Rum (well ya know siince we boys are playing pirates ya gotta drink Rum and walk around drunk and say stuff like Arggghhh Matey and YoHoHO)
and upon arriving at the register with the rum and a late decision to switch to Coors Light (Go Colorado!)

the total was
FIFTY SEVEN DOLLARS
and i said

ummmm Excuse Me are you Retarded or am I just deaf or did you really say $57?

She looked at me and actually doubted the total haha so rang it up again to my dismay, as her earlier attempt was right on the money.....

***SIGH***

I will take a few pictures of the prices up here for the viewing pleasure of you folks out there in the multi-Web-Verse.

I feel clean for the first time in June - actually got a hot shower tonight!

I am not sure what kind of statement that makes about my life that a hot shower and clean toes is that inspiring to me....hmmmmm........

Out of the Shower and into the Fire...talk to ya lata playas,
stay safe and if you do anything I wouldn't, take pictures and send me some.

Please send me a new toothbrush

2008-06-13T00:35:00.007-04:00

Okay so we've only been up here two days and already i am scrubbing stuff with my toothbrush (i thought i was OUT of the army LOL!)

So I am now up here in Bristol Bay ( sorry no links this post, the WorldWide-Inter_Web-Net doesnt quite make it all the way up here but we do get a strand or so)
and here is the new boat I am working on - the F/V Catcher. We are getting everything cleaned up and ready to go. Tomorrow we will be loading gear and doing final tasks and then late this weekend we will go out with the mechanic - our engine just got rebuilt so he has to come along for the first ride hahaha in case he did something wrong.

Then fishing starts next week! Yay.

So here is the boat. We are about to paint some non-skid stuff on the back deck; sorry for the hideous blue tarp.

This is the view when you stick your head in the door. Notice the tight quarters compared to my last boat.

here is our cooking/dishes area.

and our table; with a bench that doubles as the skippers bunk because.....this is the quarters for other three of us LOL. (nice aint it?)

Anyway, i gotta run and do something before the skipper notices me gone and blows a gasket. Hope everyone out there in TV-land is doing well; dont forget to eat your vegetables now!

Ax-Men aint got nothin' on the B.O.B.

2008-06-09T16:55:00.006-04:00

Ok so I had a break from fishing, and got really tired of everyone asking me if Alaska fishing is like The Deadliest Catch. So I heard about the other new show "Ax-Men" about all the loggers in Oregon (Which is where i am now, on my way up to Bristol Bay to fish salmon on a gillnet boat ) and I figured there wasnt anything they could do that I couldn't haha.

Anyway, I am en route back up to Alaska for the first half of salmon season. I will be up on the edge of the Bering Sea and so will obviously try to find a job on a real crab boat but if i cant then in mid-july it will be back off down to southeast AK for more salmon seining.

Anyway, its a tough life being as pimp as I am, but somehow I manage to do it and even look good in the process:

Hmmmm lemme see, anything else going on in the life...? Naw, thats about all for now. I gotta go catch a train to Seattle and hop a couple of planes to go make some money this summer.

Will post again when I have internet which prolly won't be for a while; hope that all y'all are having fun and being safe and living the good life cuz I'll be snuggling with nasty stinky fishermen for the next three months...

Over and Out, but not falling out of the trees yet...

Brief Update on Scott's Fishing Adventures

2008-04-09T16:55:00.003-04:00

Hey all...

Okay so since the last post, things have been pretty hectic and I have not had too much time to be posting, but as always, am hopeful that soon I can continue working on this miserable lack of content hahah.

Here is the brief info:
Finished Tanner Crab season early March. Was way lots of work and there were very few crab so we didnt make very much money, but it was a good learning experience and a chance to get my foot in the door and get some crabbing experience before heading up to Dutch Harbor and chasing down the dream of getting my 15 minutes of fame on "Deadliest Catch" tv show on Discovery Channel. Hopefully after the summer salmon seine season I will start networking with skippers to get on one of those boats, but in the meantime I am just taking things one fishery at a time...

Which leads to now - Herring Roe-On-Kelp fishery we are currently doing. I am just hired muscle for this one - no chance at big bucks, but it is work anyway. The short version is:
- catch lots of herring that are ready to spawn
- put them in floating cages filled with kelp
- herring spawn on the kelp leaves
- we harvest and sell the kelp leaves

It is actually quite tasty. In sushi terms, imagine fish eggs (roe) thickly layered on seaweed. If you like sushi, you would probably like this. We have tasted a few samples, and I find it quite yummy, although getting it fresh from the ocean probably makes it even better. We just finished putting the fish in the ponds and ran here into Craig, Alaska

http://www.craigalaska.com

http://www.craigak.com

Search Google for Craig, AK

Okay, thats all I have time for; I am going to post a handful of pictures just below this.

Hoping all y'all are doing well and staying warmer and drier than silly ole me... *sigh*

2008-04-09T13:19:00.000-04:00

Okay; here are some pictures from recent weeks up here in the great white North; listed from top to bottom. I am horribly mangling this layout thing but dont have time to make it pretty.
If the captions are int he wrong order; figure it out, I have faith you can play the matching game to the pictures.

Our fish hold semi-full of tanner crab (AKA snow crab down south)

Me taking a dip in Saginaw Bay, AK on Feb 19 during crab season

In a place called El Capitan Cave

This is the view from our boat at 6.30 am, after we woke at midnight and started fishing - ended up being a 21 hour day, but that is not so bad because prior to that four hour nap, we had been fishing for 50-something hours straight...

Here are a bunch of bald eagles on the fish pens - I have never seen this many in one spot, and apparently this fishery has one of the highest concentrations of bald eagles on the planet during herring season, as the eagles LOVE the easy picking of fish in the pens. If you zoom in closely (sorry for the low web resolution; I have hi res copies, email me if ya want'em) you can see a couple swooping down to pick fish off the top of the water.

a picture of us hauling the net - I am the one all in green in the middle with the big metal pole.

Bob is in Alaska

2008-02-07T00:50:00.000-05:00

ummm OK so I am now in Alaska, out of the Army, and trying to make money in the commercial fishing arena! its fun but super hard work.

I will be fixing this ugly blog; check back hopefully within a week or two i will have it done and some pics posted.

finally back online

2006-03-07T03:03:00.000-05:00

AAAAAHHHHHH.....

finally a spaare moment to sit down and update my little corner of cyberspace, which I have neglected far too long (Since Jan. 26 to be precise, I think! Man, has it really been that long?!?)

(Caaveaat Emptor - three months ago my Dell Laptop - Jan 2002 vintage, aging gracefully like me! - began seriously acting up, so I did the natural guy thing to do when something is broke:
1: Consider paying someone to fix it. NO WAY!
2: Consider looking on web for advice. Did that. No one else has a flickering screen apparently. (Only Googled briefly though...)
3: Consider paying someone to fix it (AGAIN). NOPE!!!
4: Dive right in, grab all the various screwdrivers I can find, clean off the desk, and start removing screws until something interesting haappens.
5: Find whaat I think is the problem, and reassemble.
6: Turn it on, now find that screen is horribly finicky, requiring constant fiddling to maintain ANY kind of a picture, and now the "AA" key sticks most times, spitting out two "A"'s when I only waant one. So be waarned - spellcheck on this post not applied! Bewaare of the AAAs!!!)

Okay the last few weeks have been ridiculously stuffed full of stuff, yet I really caant come up with aanything significant we have accomplished or done or learned, outside of the Ukraine visit (see below for that). Its funny how often the Army is like that - we will be on one "Training Cycle" and suppposed to be reaady to deploy on two hours notice - two duffel bags aand two rucksacks reaady and packed to go! - yet on that cycle we train more in the field thaan aany other time - requiring us to unpack one rucksack to taake with us to the field, aand one duffel for the geaar we need for the field!

AAnyway, its late and I'm tired, but just waanted to put up aa quick post.

Further juicy details about the lasat month coming this week, I promise....

Back from the Jump

2006-01-26T14:43:00.000-05:00

We are back from our jump / mission on Thursday night. The jump went well. I jumped from a C-17 - a huge military cargo aircraft that is about as big as a 747. Its got way more space inside than a C-130 (which is what we normally jump from) so its a much nicer ride. In addition, it is jet-powered as opposed to prop-powered, so there is much less turbulence when you exit the aircraft and less chance of getting tangled up when your chute opens, or twisted suspension lines or any of that stuff that makes a jump complicated.

We jumped from 800 ft. AGL (above ground level) which is lower than in Airborne School (1250 feet) which is better from a tactical perspective because you spend less time in the air getting shot, but also means less time in the air to slow down so you hit the ground a bit faster.

Anyway the jump went well, it was pretty windy at jump altitude so I was oscillating like a pendulum pretty hard. That sucks cuz if you slam into the ground on the wrong part of the swing you hit like twice as hard. So I pulled my risers to the right for a few seconds to stop swinging, and slowly corrected. After that, I released my rucksack and it fell down the 5 meters to the end of its tether to swing below me - that way you dont hit the ground with a rucksack strapped to you, which can hurt. I rode in with my SAW, however, I never lower my weapon. Just in case the tether broke or something. So I rode in with my machine gun strapped to my side, but managed to land on my right side - not the side with the gun.

I was one of the first few outta the plane on the second pass of twelve, so I quickly placed my weapon into operation, and my night vision, then packed up my chute and grabbed everything and double timed to the chute turn-in point, which luckily was only about 20 meters away.

After I turned in my chute, I linked up with Morgan and we walked over to where our assembly point was. Since we were some of the first jumpers, there were only a few others assembled yet. We checked in, and they kicked us out to the perimeter to begin forming a security perimeter. After a few moments, we moved the company area in to the woodline, and stayed there for about 45mins. Once we had everyone, we moved out on the mission. Originally our company was supposed to take over a nearby airfield/refugee camp, but that got pushed to Charlie Company.

So we got kicked out onto security perimeters in various locations around the operations. My platoon got tasked with Contact Point 1, which happened to be where the higher-ups were all hanging around, kind of the Command Center for the operation.

And of course, it was super-freezing cold that night. It had been around the 50s/60s the whole week, but special for our mission in dropped into the low 20s! How Special for us! Of course we were all freezing cold, laying there in the cold mud and grass. We lay there for a couple of hours, perhaps three.

Naturally the 1st Sgt had to roam around our platoon hollering at everyone who dared to get cold... How dare We?!!!?

I tell ya, I was so glad to see the busses pull up at 0200 and the Platoon Sgt yelling for us to bring it in and load up to go home...back to the barracks, clean weapons, rack out for a few hours, and get released Friday by noon for an early start to the weekend!

Upcoming Airborne Operations

2006-01-24T18:41:00.000-05:00

We haven't really been too busy the last couple of weeks, which has been a nice breather. Plenty of kicking around the barracks, chilling out and not too too much stress. A nice change from the stressful schedule of last summer's Intensive Training Cycle and the training we were doing in November and December. Although I *DO* bitch and moan a lot about the BS we have to put up with, there are a lot of moments like the past two weeks when we really dont do all that much, and since I am getting to be one of the senior members of the platoon as people get orders for different duties, those of us who deployed do even less than the new guys. So some things get better I guess!

We have some training coming up the end of this week, and next couple of weeks some random stuff. This Thursday / Friday we have an Airborne Operation training exercise - which means we parachute, usually in the middle of the night, assemble on the drop zone, and conduct some form of follow-on missions. Maybe its some urban combat, city and building clearing, sometimes its patrolling practice, sometimes its simply to jump onto and seize an airfield (which is after all our specialty!). This time we are jumping, assembling, and moving out as a battalion (4 companies, plus headquaarters elements) to take over an airfield/refugee camp a couple of clicks down the road. (1 click = 1 KM = 0.62 mile)

Most of this week will be taken up with preparation for the operation. Today we got the Operations Order (OpOrder) which told us the goals of the mission and how we would execute the mission. The officers have nice little satellite maps and images drawn up with code names, and objectives and phase lines and landing zones and all kinds of wonderful army code talk, and they sit down and tell us exactly how the op will go down - which platoons will go here, this platoon goes there and takes over the bridge and secures it, then they call up and provide security while a different company moves over the bridge and assaults an urban center... etc etc etc.

Its pretty cool for the most part. We are finally doing something remotely resembling our real job. I sit quietly in the briefings and take copious notes about the names for the roads (Phase Line Gold, Phase Line Silver, etc) the buildings (# 1 #2 #3 etc) and the different objectives (Obj Washington, Obj Bush, and Obj Reagan hahaha) to make sure I know what each piece of this complex puzzle will be doing all at once (oh yeah dont forget that the scouts will be ahead of us in two-man teams, marking the route with InfraRed lightsticks that only WE can see with our NOD - Night Observation Device).

When the OpOrder is done the day is about over. I grill some of the newer guys in the squad and yell furiously when they don't remember something. I try to make sure they know their stuff because this is the really important knowledge that could get people killed if they do the wrong thing. Just Sunday I was sitting in the sauna with two guys who were talking about how one of their buddies got killed on a training exercise, because a team leader let his guys push too far into a house and they got shot through a wall from a SAW in the room next door. So this stuff is for real, and we try to pound this into their heads. The new guys try their best sometimes, but inevitably screw something up. Oh well, that is what training is for.

It's getting late and I've gotta move some more stuff out into my house, so I will continue with the description of our training tomorrow. Bye...

bring on the weekend!

2006-01-20T15:25:00.000-05:00

ahhh at last the week is over. it's really amazaing to see how much one can really NOT DO in five full work days. we haven't done much at all this week and still somehow were busy all the time. oh well. i DID do some more work and upload some photos, and am now working on putting captions on them all. also, the links to the left are now divided a bit better, and i added a picture and my Instant Messenger links.

i've finally found a place to live off-post. for the moment i am paying out of my pocket, but its worth it. its inexpensive - sharing an apartment with two other guys who already live there. it is worth paying the money for the "sanity, peace of mind, and personal space" benefits. also, I will have a full kitchen where i can cook decent food, so by cutting down on the eating out bills i really wont be spending much more. and it also helps immnsely to have a place where i can go to at the end of the day and be totally separate from work. Not still be in the same building where i work. so that is a nice thing.

we are now doing PT twice a day and they are attempting to get us in better shape for Ranger School. so now instead of merely wasting 1.5hrs in the AM, we are wasting another 1.5hrs in the afternoon. which also means that i can no longer do PT on my own, its just too much wear on the old body. bummer. so now i am definitely not getting any stronger. i am trying to get approval to do my own PT program, but highly doubt that will happen. its pretty frustrating and puts me in a pissy mood. so that kind of sucks.

but we will see what comes of all this. Ranger pre-test is Feb. 3rd. and i am taking the Foreign Language Proficiency Test on Feb 2nd, so if I score well enough they will give me extra pay each month for that skill. and i am working on getting approved for off-post housing allowance, which would be super nice to pay for the apt.

alltogether, some good, some bad, and mostly nothing really ever improves around here. its a shame, since this is supposed to be one of the super elite units and all that shit. not much one can do though...

Sometimes it's kind of nice to NOT have an actual job...

2006-01-17T12:57:00.000-05:00

... so I can sit here during lunch and play poker.

PT this AM - a 5.5 mile run, which I ended up calling cadence for about half of, so I was pretty smoked. I like calling cadence, but try running miles while yelling at the top of your lungs. It'll break you off. And I did sing a sufficiently dirty cadence to get the 1st-SGT to come back and tell me to stop singing that one, so that made me happy.

And our work-day today consists of a Lay-Out of all of our gear. We are assuming DRF 1 (Defense Ready Force Level-1) which means that *WE* are the battalion that will get called should the president decide that we need troops anywhere in the world, like RIGHT NOW!!! This happens sometimes but not all the time. Lately brigades from the 82nd have been getting called out to the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, but chances are super slim that they will call while *WE* are on DRF-1.

Reason 1: We are scheduled for a future 1yr+ deployment sometime, so they dont want to send us out back-to-back like that.

Reason 2: We just got re-designated as a different unit, with all the shuffling around the Army is doing to create a "Lighter, Faster, more Flexible Army" so for the next two to three months we will be doing all the associated paperwork of changing our command, our unit associations, which brigade we belong to, etc etc etc.

So chances are we won't go anywhere soon.

But anyways, we still need to pack up all our gear to be ready to deploy within two hours, should the call come. So beforehand, we lay all of our stuff out to make sure everyone has all the stuff we are supposed to have - clothes, gear, all that junk.

We take outside our two duffel bags, one rucksack, and patrol pack (a smaller backpack) and dump everything out and the team leader calls stuff off the list and we hold it up to make sure we have it. As we go we make a list of deficiencies that we need to correct.

Of course, this takes all morning. The Army can never do anything in a decently rapid fashion... sigh.

Extra Duty is OVER! and finally got some Photos OnLine

2006-01-16T21:58:00.000-05:00

Okay so tonight was hopefully my last night of Extra Duty and Restriction to Barracks for missing a recall back in November. It wasn't too bad since it was all done at my company and I am pretty good buddies with everyone on duty, plus the last four days were a four day weekend so everyone was gone and it was pretty chill.

Back to work tomorrow AM with a 5.5 mile run, building up to 10 miles, increasing -.5 mile a week. So some more Cadence-calling for Bob.

I also finally figured out how to resize and caption photos and uploaded them to my PhotoBucket album - http://photobucket.com/albums/e199/jumperbob. Feel free to check them out. More will be coming soon, as I have time to edit and upload. I've got a lot of recent pics from training here on Fort Bragg and will put up some of those.

Anyways, I've gotta go get some sleep for the run. Although another thing I am happy about, is since we switched over to the new ACU uniform, we wear the beige suede boots, so no more shining boots or pressing BDUs. I will find someone tomorrow to get some pics of us in the new uniforms and post those too.

Hope all is well with anyone reading, I haven't been off Fort Bragg-dad in a few weeks!

ya know, not even I need one of THESE...

2006-01-09T23:33:00.000-05:00

Google is the homepage in my browser. So I noticed a while ago they offer a service called Froogle that will search for low prices (in Google's quest to index EVERY PIECE OF INFORMATION EVER!!! MM-WWW-AAAA-HHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA cue evil cackle) on anything you want.

Also on Froogle's main page is a list of the last few things people have searched for, which is worth looking at periodically because people look for strange things, like
Explosion-Proof Refrigerators

No, I am NOT kidding.

Had a nice 5-mile run for PT this morning

2006-01-09T11:49:00.000-05:00

I am going to try to post at least several times a week about the different facets of army life - good, bad, and annoying.

For instance, the first work day of every week is designated for Company PT (Physical Training - i.e. exercise). This means we do PT as an entire company - four platoons, about 140 altogether. This always means a long "Standards Run" of at least 4 miles or more. Our Captain is going to work up to a 10 miler, increasing 1/2 mile every week. We did 5 today.

The "Standards Run" part means that we will run to the 82nd Airborne Division standards. One of those is that each paratrooper will maintain a fitness level and be able to complete a 5-mile run in 45 mins, at a 9:00/mile pace. (Today we ran an average of 8:53/mile for instance.)

So we stretch out and then the Captain tells us the Task, Conditions, and Standards for today's PT:
"Alright Men, we've got a Standards Run today.
Task will be a 5-mile run, out to Ardennes, 2.5mi down, and then turn around and return.
Conditions are approx. 48degrees out, a nice morning.
Standards will be a 9:00 per mile pace, plus or minus 15 seconds.
Lets Go!"

And we march out of the company area, hit the road, and start double-timing (running). Ardennes St. is where most of the Division does PT on Mon mornings, so there were many companies like ours out there running.

The Sgts start calling cadence - they sing and we echo. Some of them sing stupid running cfadences about PT or the old standard one about jumping out of a C-130, but some of them sing more gung-ho ones about going to war, or fighting, or dying or killing, or sometimes the really good ones incorporate all four of those. The beat of the cadence helps us all to stay in step, which makes keeping a good tight formation easier.

Unfortunately, most of the Sgts in my company suck, so they call weak cadences, and I normmally get out there about 1/3 of the way into the run and start calling some crazy cadences. I actually made some new ones up last week, and some variations of the old ones to make them interesting, which in turn helps this slow run pace pass by. Here are some of the ones I made up and sang today (if you feel like trying this at home, just walk along the sidewalk and say it once and then echo it back, and each phrase starts on the left foot. some go for two steps per phrase and some of the longer phrases go four or six steps per.)

The Old Standby that every paratrooper hates cuz we sing it like 5x per run:

C-130 Rolling down the strip.
Airborne daddy on a one-way trip.
Mission unspoken, destination unknown.
don't even know if we're ever coming home.
Stand up hook up, shuffle to the door.
Jump right out and count to four.
If my main don't open wide.
I've got a reserve my by side.
Pin my medals upon my chest,
and bury me in the leaning rest.

That is the standard one. I sing it a little bit differently:
C-130 Rolling out of division
we dont give a fuck about a weather condition (would prevent us from jumping)
Mission top secret, destination unknown.
nobody cares if we're ever coming home.
Stand up hook up, shuffle to the door.
my knees get weak and i hit the floor
jumpmaster picked me up with ease
and threw my candy ass into the breeze
one-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand, four, hey
If my main don't open wide.
I've got a reserve my by side.
if that one should fail me too
i'll hit the drop zone before you do.
slip to my left and slip to my right,
slip on down into a firefight
if i die on the ol' drop zone
box me up and ship me home
Pin my medals on my son's chest,
and tell my wife i did my best.
Bury speakers all around my head.
So I can rock with the Grateful Dead.
Bury speakers all around my toes.
So I can rock with Axl Rose.
When I get to heaven.
St. Peter's gonna say.
How'd you earn your livin boy?
How'd you earn your pay?
And I will reply with a whole lot of anger:
Earned my living an Airborne Ranger
and when i get to hell
the devil's gonna say
how'd you earn your living boy
how'd you earn your pay
i'll reply with a knife to his face
i earned my living laying souls to waste.

So that is the C-130 cadence that gets sung all the time. Here is another one I made up:
See the Hajii sniper up on the hill
locked and loaded, he's ready to kill
gonna shoot me with a 7-6-2 (a sniper bullet)
till in comes an airstrike outta tha blue
cuz i wanna be an airborne Ranger
live a life of sex and danger
blood, guts, sex, and danger,
that's the life of an Airborne Ranger.
(the second half is an old piece of cadence)

Here are some links to other pages on the web with more cadences:
Cadences 1 || Cadences 2
(we do almost all of the ones on page 2 frequently)

Some of the ones we sing a lot are:
MP-MP dont Arrest Me - C-130 - when my Granny was 91

Some of my favorites are:
Bodies Bodies Bodies - Napalm sticks to Hajii (replace Kids with Hajii)
my version of C-130 - I wanna be an Airborne Ranger
and of course the ones I make up as we are running, always involving the insulting of non-Infantry (i.e. POGs) or non-airborne (i.e. Legs), killing, jumping out of planes, or being in the middle of chaos.

So that is a normal Company Standards Run, which we do every Monday. When we get back, we have some time left in PT hours, so we work on upper body and Abs usually.Today we broke down into platoons and did upperbody and abs for a while.

Altogether, PT is from 1-1.5 hours in the AM. Sometimes its good, but a lot of the time it is kind of weak for us who are in decent shape. So i have to do PT on my own to get ready for Ranger School - I am trying to go there in February.

Hope you all have a good day, and thanks for reading! I've noticed a few comments on the blog lately, I really appreciate everyone who is interested. (If you didnt know about commenting, you just click on the "Comment" button at the end of the post.) Of course, some spam shows up, which I try to delete but cant get to all of it.

Later!

talk about a long work-day

2006-01-03T15:40:00.000-05:00

We are back here now, hard at work. Leave was great fun, I rambled around a few different states and did some visiting and had a very nice Christmas and New Years. I got to see a lot of people I hadn't seen in a little while which was very nice. Sometimes being in the Army means one's schedule is not quite as fluid as it could be, so ya gotta make the most of the free time you get.

And speaking of free time, I don't have any any more. Due to the fact that I missed a couple of recall-formations back in November I received an "Article 15" which is Army-talk for YOU ARE IN TROUBLE NOW, STUPID!

An Article 15 is roughly equivalent to like a traffic ticket - gets you in a bit of trouble, but not too much. Mine was sentenced at the company level, as opposed to the Battalion level. Company Grade is much less severe and does not go on your permanent Army record. So I am happy that it was only Company-Grade but it still sucks to be punished.

They assigned me to Extra Duty and Restriction to Barracks for a while. Extra Duty means that when everyone else gets released around 5pm, I continue to work - cleaning the barracks, sweeping the sidewalks, picking up trash outside, raking our gravel pit so its nice and pretty, etc etc etc. This includes weekends, but you dont start on weekends until 0800.

Its not all that bad, except that you work a lot of hours - from 5.00 AM until 11.00 PM. So there goes my free time. Oh well, whatever. It doesn't really bother me that much other than being a little bit annoying. I don't know yet how long my extra duty will be, that depends on how good I behave.

You are probably thinking, Okay How are you posting to the blog in the middle of the day? Well, sometimes one can sneak away for a few minutes, especially if one has already got a lot done and it also helps if one is pretty good buddies with the Sgt on duty! (Everyone wants to be friends with the Arms Room Guy - luckily that's me right now!)

So that's about all that's going on right now. We got some more info on our schedule for the next year or two, and got re-named and changed units - more on that to come later.

okay back from the field, prepping for leave

2005-12-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

okay we had a nine-day field problem over the end of last week, the weekend, and into the first portion of this week. naturally we got a freezing spell filled with plenty of steady rain.

what else could one expect? haha

actually it wasnt all that bad, our 1st SGT let us make a fire in each platoon's area so we kept our fire stoked with huge logs and stayed kind of warm anyways, altho waking up with a sleeping bag that crinkles from all the frost on it is kind of interesting!

i am on 24-hour duty right now until Sat 9 AM, on the CQ Barracks Guard.

We go on leave next Friday, Dec 16, until Jan 2. I am still pending my punishment for missing the recall formations a couple of weeks ago, so not 100% sure I can take leave yet, but it looks like a good possibility. It would be nice to know so I could make travel arrangements, but the Army really doesn't care about that. Anyways I will be glad to get leave if I do, and if not, we won't be working that much here in the rear anyhoo.

I will post more about the field problem later on today.

sigh well so much for my last promotion

2005-11-21T13:28:00.000-05:00

ok so weekend before last we had four days off for Veteran's Day (yay!) and I decided to go away for the weekend. bought my plane ticket for nice and early in the AM to maximize my time awa, arranged a ride to the airport, etc.

all good and read (ok now i am pissed off, the "whi" letter - a know, the one before "Z" - just stopped working. so fill it in wherever i put a "-"...ugghh)
read- to take a few da-s off from the arm- and relax for a bit.

needless to sa-, the- couldnt allow that - heavens forbid! so as i am at the airport at 6 AM waiting for m- 630 flight, i get a phone call. someone in the compan- got a DUI last night, so a formation at 630 to get -elled at. so i told them to go stuff it, i would see them on Tuesday. (ok now its working again...arrghhh)

needless to say, they were pretty pissed that i ignored them. the army has some weird complex about total control of your life and stuff. oh well, whatever.

so i am now facing my first major disciplinary infraction, called an Article 15, named after "article 15" of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). its pretty much equivelant to a misdemeanor. my Company Commander and 1st Sgt have a little respect for me so it wont turn out too too horribly, but i will probably end up with at least demotion of one rank or more (back to PFC sigh), and 30-45 days of restriction to our company area and extra duty which means workdays are now from 0600 untill 2300 (11pm) and on weekends from 0800 till 2300.

so there goes any chance of going anywhere for Thanksgiving, and perhaps Xmas leave as well. its okay, cuz we wont be doing all that much while everyone is on leave anyways, and if i am successful in my requests for a transfer out of this unit then i will be leaving soon thereafter and will be able to take leave while transferring.

its kind of a bummer in one way but also kinda worth it just for the chance to let them know that life is not that serious and that they really dont run my ENTIRE life - just 95% of it!

yaay I got to shoot my SAW again today!

2005-11-02T00:36:00.000-05:00

We went out to the shooting range today, I got to shoot my SAW machine gun again; I love shooting it cuz it's so much fun.

The downside was walking the 7 miles out to the range with my helmet, ammo vest, SAW, and full rucksack. It wasnt so bad though, because I had some Arms Room tasks to finish up this morning so got to walk out there by myself after everyone else had gone. So I took my time and wandered a bit in the woods and had a pleasant meandering little journey without having to walk super fast and in some stupid formation!

We worked all day on reflexive fire and CQB - close quarter battle. What that means is that we all line up in front of a man-shaped target, and start walking towards it from about 25 meters away. The SGT running the range will yell:
Walk!
Ready!
UP! at which point we raise our rifles/SAWs to our eye, acquire a good sight picture on the target (aim center mass, slow breathing, steady smooth trigger squeeze) and put a "controlled pair" of rounds in his chest/head. A controlled pair is two shots smoothly and quickly fired into the same place. We fire two controlled pairs each time they yell UP! With the SAW, since its a full-auto machine gun, I just put two bursts into his head of however many rounds I want to use. Most of the time I will use a 3-5 round burst to conserve ammo, but every so often I will rip off a 20-ish round burst just for fun - BRAAAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP-PPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!

At which point the SGT will glare at me and scream some obscenities to encourage me to conserve my ammo; which is really counter productive because we have to shoot all the ammo we have anyways so may as well have some fun doing it!

Then we will face to the left or right, and practice spinning to the side adn quickly acquiring the target and placing well-aimed bursts from the side; or spinning around to confront the target behind you, etc etc. They make up different variations so we are comfortable shooting at all sides and angles and at any time.

Last we practice walking toward it and squeezing off bursts/pairs every other step, which is really hard to do - your walking and breathing make it hard to keep a rifle centered well, let alone a SAW that is bucking like a donkey and spraying round everywhere.

But it was super fun and good training, not too strenuous or stupid, actually enjoyable and practical. The last rotation, my buddy CJ and I both shot at the same target until its wooden head fell right off. Mission Accomplished!

Of course then we had to walk back, with NOD night vision, in the woods. Fun. So I am super tired now and about to fall over.

Tomorrow is the grenade range - lets go blow stuff up!

we got the cool new "Digital Camo" uniforms

2005-10-31T04:15:00.000-05:00

not much has been going on here. mostly maintaining the status quo:

- truck is still broken down but I think i have finally found a place to get a new transmission for it.

- no plans for a deployment anytime soon. we will probably have Thanksgiving holiday for four days, and tentative plans are for two weeks of leave in the latter half of December. Of course, last year they told us the day before Thanksgiving "We are not deploying" and then the Monday afterwards, they told us "We are leaving in five days!" so ya never know around here.

- my dirtbike is still running - I haven't broke it too bad yet, or myself either! Kirk and I *DID* manage to get chased off by some fat redneck hunters at gunpoint last weekend tho. What can I say, we got a little bored.

- I will find out tomorrow (Nov 1) if I get my promotion - I think I will, but not 100% certain yet. It would be nice; a bit of a raise.

- As soon as that promotion shows up, I can put in my application packet for Special Forces Selection. I am still figuring out whether that is the right way for me to go.

- We got issued the new ACU (Army Combat Uniform) last week. Its that weird new *duigital* looking camo pattern - more little pixellated blocks than curves and swoops; it is also a bit lighter. I will take some pics after work today and post them up here hopefully tomorrow.

- NOt much training going on right now. We do have some Shooting Ranges this week and then a company exercise next week - three day mission. Should be fun. Might be able to get some good video with my HelmetCam.

- My new roommate went AWOL last week for two days. (No, I am not that much of a jerk, he just really hates the Army.) He is some dumb 17 year old kid whose mom put him in the Army on his 17th birthday. All he wants to do in life is ride his skateboard and slack and smoke weed. Unfortunately, he came back. Not smart. If you are gonna go AWOL, you shouldnt come back in two days.

I am in good health and decent spirits lately. The Army is (as always) a bit frustrating and annoying but I am beginning to have some perks and privileges that make it a bit nicer. I am training hard and working out a lot to prepare for SF Selection if I decide to go, so that keeps me motivated. Not much news from Iraq outside of what the media reports. It doesnt seem to be getting much worse or better from what we hear from our guys over there.

More news later about the ACUs and hopefully I can put up some pics.

got a Free Day Off! yay and maybe a Promotion too

2005-10-13T05:06:00.000-04:00

okay so i got today off of work due to the massive amounts of hours we put in in the Arms Room preparing for ORS Inspection two weeks ago. they said they would be getting us some comp days, but we didnt really believe it - the Army will usually screw you every chance they get! so yesterday afternoon my Platoon SGT told me "Dont come in to work tomorrow, ya got the day off!"

super cool. so i sleep in through PT hours, until they wake me up at 0720 and tell me i have to go issue out weapons...SIGN i knew it. after weapons draw however, i was done and came back upstairs, got some breakfast, dressed and shaved, and took the rest of the day off. mostly anyways. its kind of weird because my room is here in the barracks and that is where everyone hangs out anyways when we are not out at a range. so i was doing the same thing i do most days, just in civilian clothes. it was nice though, to be able to just sit in my room and catch up on stuff while everyone else was working - like sleep, watch a movie, surf the Web, send some emails, etc.

we get a three day weekend again - 18th Airborne Corps (our parent unit) has a traiuning holiday tomorrow (Friday) so no work! it will almost make up for the five day weekend last weekend that turned into 1 day.

i bought a used dirtbike from a guy in another company here so i will have a new toy to play with this weekend. its a smokin deal - a

2003 Yamaha TT-R 225 - i paid $500 and the Blue Book value is $1300-1800. not a bad deal. it also comes with a helmet and gloves, so thats about another $300 of stuff. the idiot i bought it from wrecked a few times so it needs new plastic wheel fenders, but those cost less than $100 so i am still coming out way ahead. i am super excited about it. its a mid-level bike - fast enough to have fun without being really dangerous to me. i am looking forward to playing with that this weekend; plus there is a Fun Jump on saturday i am trying to get onto and perhaps jump my helmet cam again now that i got it cleaned and recording more cleanly.

Promotions, Special Forces applications, and more gas-powered excitement

2005-10-10T17:48:00.000-04:00

got some good news today, for once.

I should be getting promoted to Specialist (E-4) the 1st November. thats exciting cause it is the soonest possible that they can promote me - 18 months of service. it is also the level at which you can be a team leader or substitute for a Sgt, so its a nice recognition that i am generally doing well and not screwing up (well not on work time anyhow) and keeping myself in line and moving along in life. plus its a $150 raise and eligibility for off post housing (which is hard to get but i am trying) so even more good stuff.

i am stoked about that good news. in addition to that, i can now submit an application to Special Forces Selection - ya gotta be at least an E-4. i started all that paperwork two weeks ago to have a jump on it whenever i DID get promoted, so now i am almost ready to drop off my packet. just one blood test and PT test and i will be in selection. the next available class is probably Jan 6, but as long as i have a confirmed class date i will be in much better spirits, due to knowing that the current bullsh*t is coming to an end! plus it gives me a few months to get in shape.

some mysterious whisperings of an upcoming deployment, perhaps next month. just some really vague hints, maybes and perhaps and ifs. i give it about 50% chance that we deploy before Xmas; if not by then, almost definitely in January. deployments are much nicer - more pay and tax-free; we actually get to DO our job and go get the bad guys instead of sitting here doing nothing, travel and all that excitement, plus i like being in Iraq. its kinda cool to be there.

so to celebrate i went out and bought a dirtbike! well actually i just kind of fell into it - friend of a friend called while we were at breakfast and was like, Do you wanna buy a dirtbike? its a good deal cuz he needs cash super fast. more details on that later. i pick it up Friday.

airborne assault on Arkansas!!! Let's Go!!!

2005-10-08T20:40:00.000-04:00

we jumped into Arkansas last weekend. there was some big airshow going on in Little Rock at some airbase. apparently there were about 80,000 people watching us, which was pretty cool. it made for some long days, as we suited up here at Bragg at 0500 both days and flew there and jumped and then flew back, arriving home around 8pm. this was supposed to be a four day weekend also, but that kind of got shot down. oh well, that's okay, it was a good time.

My Saturday jump went very well. I was about halfway down the stick (army-talk for a line of jumpers) so had about 9 guys in front of me and the same behind. we had 19 jumpers on each door (the c-130 has two jump doors, one per side, behind the wings) and we had 24 seconds of green light, which is more than normal. usually we have more jumpers than seconds of green light, so ya gotta truck out the door super quick. but that tends to lead to mid-air collisions and entanglements, so we try to keep at least 1 second between jumpers.

anyway this jump we had 19 jumpers for 24 sec. of green light, so a pretty leisurely exit. the flight was 3.5 hours, so not too pleasant. i slept the first hour or two, but then woke up and just relaxed as best as possible in my chute harness on the c-130. it was a decent smooth ride until our final 30 minutes, when the pilots put the 8 birds into approach formation - all in a row, super tight, nose to tail. that made it a bit bumpy due to the propeller blast turbulence from the plane in front of us. but we were only bird #2 so not too bad; the guys in the back, like 7 and 8, had it SUPER bumpy. but not too bad for us.

anyway we got all lined up for approach, and got the jump commands:
Ten Minutes!
Get Ready!
Hook up! (static lines to deploy our chutes automatically)
Check Static Lines!
Check Equipment! (helmet, chin strap, chest strap, left and right leg strap...)
Sound off for Equipment Check!
(and it gets passed from the last jumper up to the first - Okay! Okay! Okay!... All Okay Jumpmaster!)
...
then wait for 6 more minutes...
...
jumpmaster does his checks, opens the door, checks the door, then actually hangs out the airplane to check for outside obstructions
...
...
(all while the bird is wildly pitching up and down and back and forth, 800 feet off the ground)
...
1 minute!
...
30 seconds!!!
...
over the Drop Zone now...patience, patience...
...
Green Light! Go! Go! Go!

and out goes the first jumper
second jumper
so on
and we pile out the door, me following my buddy Carl, he hesitates in the door for a split second to make sure the Jumpmaster Safety takes his static line properly, then he goes...
...
then...

JUMP, tuck head down to avoid the chute lines, good tight body position
Tumble, see the bird retreating from view at 150 MPH
WHOOOOMMMPPPPP
the opening shock of my chute opening and catching air.

i look up and check my chute to make sure all is well (it is) and that i have no twists in my suspension lines (i dont) so settle into the harness and enjoy the ride.

its not too windy today, so i am not drifting off of the drop zone, so take a look around

and spot the 80,000 strong crowd just a hundred meters away, yelling as we are suddenly surrounded by the scream of A-10 fighter jets screaming by just over our heads

and the raspy whining roar of WWI stunt biplanes doing loops over our head for the airshow.

look down again (oh yeah dummy you are still falling at 22 feet/second, pay attention!) and see the ground approaching quickly.

determine which way i am drifting and pull the opposite way on my suspension risers, to slow my lateral momentum for an easier landing.

pop open my chest strap buckle, which spreads my chute just a little wider so i fall just a hair slower. not authorized really to start removing the harness while still airborne, but we all do it.

looks good, i am over the grass, not the tarmac runway, should be okay, not slipping sideways too fast, okay here we go, here it comes (the closer the ground comes the more you realize how fast you are falling!)

okay treetop height now, look at the horizon, not the ground, so you dont reach with your feet (that leads to a poor landing), keep my feet and knees together, good, i am slipping right, thats my best landing side-
WHHACCCKKKK
TUMBLE
flop sideways onto the side of my leg then my butt then twist to absorb the impact into a weird type of rolling fall...

WHEW safe on the ground. its still a rush whenever i jump.

sunday's jump was much the same. we loaded up, harnessed up and flew out. Sunday i was door jumper - the first guy to exit the aircraft. it's kind of hard to get this spot, but my squad leader is the Primary JumpMaster on my door, and i finally have my Helmet-Cam rigged up and good to go, so he wants me to get some good footage (plus he will be in the video a lot since i am right next to him the whole time, which i am sure didnt influence him at all ;)

so about twenty minutes out i turned on my helmet cam and strapped everything on - i hung the camera in a nice little bag from my harness, just below my reserve chute. i figured it wouldnt get messed up there and would be out of the way of everything. it was just as bumpy today as yesterday so while standing up we were all holding on to something to not fall over. i got some good close-up footage of the jumpmaster team doing their safety checks, shouting the warnings, hanging out of the aircraft to check the outside as we approached the DZ, etc.

as we got over the DZ, they finished their checks and I (the first jumper) got the command of
Stand By!

so i handed my static line to the safety, turned and stood in the door. it was super cool as we were going probably just a little bit faster than normal and were zooming over the drop zone at the airbase in Little Rock. i could see the runways directly below us, surrounded by some grass, and about a hundred meters directly out the side of the plane were acres and acres of parked cars, tents, parked planes, and tens of thousands of people wandering around the airshow.

GREEN LIGHT GO!!! GREEN LIGHT GO!!! screamed the jumpmaster in my ear over the roar of the airplane, wind, and the huge propellers about 5 meters away hanging from the wing.

take a small step forward to be right on the edge of the jump platform, and one huge JUMP out the door to get as big a space from the aircraft as possible. i had a good strong exit but it was super windy and turbulent out due to the aircraft in front of us so i got blown almost upside down.

ONE THOUSAND
TWO THOUSAND
THREE THOU--------
i count to myself when suddenly my chute opens with an abrupt JERK and a sudden deceleration from 160 MPH to zero as the chute catches air. i was swinging like a pendulum very badly due to the excessive airspeed but i looked up to check my chute was good and then corrected by pulling one riser for a few seconds and then let up slowly to prevent more oscillation. i started to drift towards the trees but didnt worry cause i would rather that then the concrete runway - the grass strip was only about 30 meters wide, so i continued to make minor corrections as i approached the ground.

i was drifting to my left side as i was almost down, and landed with a bit of a THUMP on my left - not such a bad landing; i have definitely had worse (IE Milwaukee!).

i released one of my harness buckles to free the chute so it wouldnt stay inflated and drag me around the Drop Zone - that's bad form in front of a crowd! then i sat up and watched for a few seconds as the rest of the 300+ jumpers floated down - several landing in the trees just 10 meters away.

i was super happy with my jump until i took off my harness and packed everything up and suddenly realized where i had stashed my leftover MRE packet of applesauce - in my LEFT cargo pocket, along with my beret. well lets just say there wasnt much applesauce left in the foil packet - it was all mashed into my leg and my nice clean maroon beret...oops. oh well, if thats the worst thing that happened on this jump i am doing well.

pack up the chute, turn it in and check in with the jumpmaster team for accountability, and load busses back to the planes for the flight back to Bragg. a fun weekend all in all. We have Monday off for Columbus Day, back to work on Tuesday.

2005-10-05T18:58:00.000-04:00

not much going on here lately. the computer keyboard has settled into a spasmodic-random spitting of extra digits and characters, but for the most part is fairly normal. my truck is still sitting in the parking lot, minus one transmission. so par for the course for my stuff!!!

my internet was down for about two weeks due to my own laziness mostly. seems that everyone around the barracks got tired of everyone leeching off their wireless and put a password on their networks so i was SOL for a week or so. finally i broke down and got myself a router the other day and am now splitting a DSL account with the guy next door. much faster and more reliable but costs money. oh well.

in army news, not much is going on. the previous two weeks we spent preparing for a major Arms Room inspection. worked for 13 days straight, including weekends, for at least 16 hours a day and often up to 20 or so. we have about 250 weapons and about 60 night vision's that needed to be totally overhauled and inspected and all kinds of maintenance and what have you, so that we would be ready to assume On=Call status for the US Army. that inspection was last Friday and went pretty well. overall we did okay, so that was nice. Those of us working in the Arms Room fofr that will be receiving an award, as well as a couple of days comp time soon, and they will probably hook us up with a slot in a school we want or something like that for all of our hard work the last two weeks. i havent even done PT, eat a hot meal besides pizza or Chinese, or seen most of my platoon in the past three weeks. but that's over now so back to the regular more or less.

we WILL be jumping into Little Rock this weekend. there is some big deal air show going on so they fly us in to justify the 8467 trillion $ raise in the defense budget this year, or something like that. anyhoo, we get two more cool jumps into an air show which should be pretty exciting. the Thunderbirds will be there flying around, and about 15000 people are expected to be watching. we jump in once on Sat and once on Sun. its neat but i dont look forward to landing on a tarmac runway at 22 feet per second two days in a row. on the plus side, I rigged up my helmet cam so i should get some good footage of the jump and inside of the c130 and the whole airborne operation. due to my strategic camera placement they are putting me as first jumper, which is super cool cause that never happens. its nice cuz i can see the jumpmaster give all his commands and do his inspections, hang out the door to check the aircraft and landing zone, etc. then i get to stand in the open door for about 45 seconds or so waiting for the green light, which is Really Really Fun. first jumper is the coolest way to go anyhow.

other than that not much exciting is happening here. i 've started my application for Special Forces, more to come on that tomorrow.

in my web surfing i am appreciating more and more the WikiPedia

*located at en.wikipedia.org

a wiki is basically a user-group-edited web page where you can add, remove, or edit content. super useful for an encyclopeda type thing, especially since it means the responsibility for keeping up with cultural and internet news is shared among the whole community of readers, any of whom can add to a posting. it has an entry for virtually everything you can think of, plus people, technologies, places, the latest happenings, etc. for instance, on Sep 26, several P2P clients got shut down (that is what most people use to download music) and WikiPedia is already tracking the whole story along with updates and fixes. so its basically a constantly-evolving and updating encyclopedia/reference/dictionary that is super useful. i highly recommend it for anything you need to know, like about Rob Zombie or blogging or the 82nd Airborne Division or whatever you want to learn more about.

Be careful tho, i got on the wiki today and looked up and missed three formations and two meals in my wanderings - it is EXTENSIVELY hyperlinked, often with irresistible tidbits of uselessness.

gotta run, its late, and i still havent figgerd out how to post photos here to my blog like i wanted to twelve hours ago...

the sheer excitemment of beingg the only piece of the 82nd that isn't deployed

2005-09-18T13:57:00.000-04:00

last friday we got somethhing that appears to be good news, altho i am sure the Army will find a way to make it horribly distasteful and remove all the fun.

apparently in october there is goingg to be an airshow down in Arkansas - Little Rock if i recall correctly. so we get to jump in as the demonstration part of it! that should be pretty fun.

(quick tanggent - please excuse the extraordinary amount of extra "G"s - the keyboard in my laptop has recently become possessed. a couple of weeks agog i totally disasembled my Dell to clean it as it was filthy with dust inside and to tigghten up the connector on the sound card. predictably, once reassembled, altho it is now cleaner, the sound card still makes random noises. in addition, the integrated touchpad ceased to function, and now the keyboard does random thinggs at random times, to include the letter G and the number 8, and my screen flickers and becomes static-y to the point of non-usability. so i will probaly take it apart agagin tomorrow to FIX it this time. yeah right.)

so anyway, we gget (there it ggoes aggain) to jump into Arkansas in October. i think it is on Columbus Day or whatever federal holiday is in october. that should be pretty fun. i am not sure if we will be able to stay for a day. i kind of doubt it, we will probably fly straigght down and back - which may mean rigggingg up in chutes here and then suffering for the whole flight there, unless we fly in C-17s. then we could rigg in-flight, which is much nicer and more comfortable.

in any case, that will be a welcome relief from the monotony of Fort Bragggg.

this above-mentioned monotony has left me with way too much internet surfingg time, which leads to me findingg thinggs like

Rotten.com's Dead Pool

(Warning - as you can gguess by the name, rotten.com is pretty nasty stuff. so don't say i didn't warn you when you see the most bizarre, disggustingg, and disturbingg things ever there.)

which is like an online gguessingg game of which famous people are ggoing to die in the next twelve months. you pick ten names from a ridiculously largge list of people in all walks of life, from actors to military to royalty to singers to weirdos. check it out - my Dead Pool List is located at:

Scott's Dead Pool Pagge

There isn't any seriously distrurbingg things on my DeadPool pagge, but the main rotten.com site is, well, rotten.

ok now what kind of ridiculous-ness is this???

2005-09-16T03:02:00.000-04:00

well i knew the Army really didnt care about soldiers, but last week I got a shot of SMALLPOX.

geez, i mean making us run and do push-ups is one thing, but infecting us with highly contagious and deadly virii??? that seems to be a bit over the line.

actually its kind of funny. we had to go prepare all our stuff last week so we would be ready to deploy on a moment's notice (NO WE ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE, YES IT PISSES ME OFF) so all that included much paperwork to make sure our personal affairs were in order and a handful of immunizations. seems like every other week we are getting stuck with some needle or other. oh well.

so they gave me this smallpox vaccination, becuz i didnt get it before we went to Iraq last fall - i managed to talk my way out of it that time, but no dice this time. i even told them i had a bad reaction to a smallpox shot as a child and that i was allergic.

the P.A.'s response: "Dont worry, you'll be good."

such a reassuring bedside manner.
i guess free healthcare is worth what you pay for it heheh.

not going anywhere soon it looks like

2005-09-15T16:25:00.000-04:00

yeah so we have been just sitting around here on Fort Bragg for the past few weeks. the higher-ups have been wildly indecisive about whether or not we would be deploying - whether to Iraq, Afghanistan, or with the latest storm crisis in Louisiana there were rumours that somebody from the 82nd would be going down there to help.

so anyway they sent
- a battalion from the 504th Regiment to Afhganistan
- two battalions to Iraq: 2/325 from our brigade and 1/504 from the 504th Regiment
- and the entire 505th Brigade (3 or 4 battalions) down to Louisiana to help there.

which leaves us as the only infantry battalion here on Fort Bragg...**SIGH**

because that means that we are not going to deploy anywhere in the foreseeable future, because they will not deploy us with less than two battalions.

that is kind of a bummmer. i like deploying and actually doing our job. when we sit here on post, we really have nothing to do and sit around doing stupid stuff and getting yelled at by the people in charge because we have nothing to do and they hate to see us not being Highly Productive! (never mind all the extra days and late nights we put in over the summmer training in the field; we need to be busy All the Time dammmmit!!!!)

so that is super frustrating for me. i amm getting ready to go to Ranger School and that will perhaps be better. well at least it wont be mmuch worse, and i will get my Ranger Tab out of it all.

gotta run, its late already, i dont know where the time has gone these last few weeks but we've been super busy doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! and that kind of thing takes a long time to finish i guess...

later later alligater

oh yeah i forgot

2005-08-23T13:59:00.000-04:00

yeah we jumped into Milwaukee for the 82nd Airborne Association's Annual Convention last week. it was super fun. four hour plane ride up there, Air Force screwed up the Drop Zone (no surprise there, that is what they are best at!) but anyway in front of a crowd of several hundred we all jumped out onto an actual airport. was cool to do that but super dangerous due to all the obstacles - quarries, Lake Michigan right there, radio towers, chain link fences and FIVE CONCRETE RUNWAYS. luckily the wind was about 20 knots (good thing the safe limit for jumping is 13 knots ) and i was able to slip all the way to the treeline and managed to avoid the tarmac and land on my hip on a big rock! !@#@!#@!$%$@#$$

but that's better than landing on the tarmac, or in Lake Michigan, or... you get the picture. hey its okay, i am only limping a little bit still. the convention was super fun, i mostly screwed off and bumped around Milwaukee to check it out. went to a dress dinner and realized how much i hate all these stuck up Army brass and left quickly. then we jumped back into Bragg last Sunday. so getting a lot of jump this month.

and yesterday the transmission in my truck exploded while i was at... yeah you guessed it.... the Auto Parts Store!!! hahaha isnt that funny!
@#!$#@#!@$-ing truck.....

jeesh it never lets up around here...

2005-08-23T11:39:00.000-04:00

okay so i know i said i was gonna update more frequently... i would like to, but we have been going 125% since like... umm FOREVER!!! we were supposed to be done with our Intensive Training Cycle in early August and then go into a rest/recover period but as usual we get screwed out of anything remotely resembling a life outside of the Army.

over the last two weeks we have have a couple of multi-day field exercises as well as a ton of stuff to do back here in garrison. my duties as platoon armorer keep me busier than most other guys my rank and position - which is good for advancement and in the eyes of my *betters* but bad cuz i am super busy all the time and rarely have time for anything in my own life, let alone finding time to keep the blog up and going! but i will manage, in between training, and maintaining all my platoons weapons, getting the broke ones fixed, and signing them in and out of the arms room.

in addition to all that, we have a new First Sergeant, who is the guy in charge of day to day operations as well as all the discipline for the company. so he is super gung-ho, he came from a Ranger Battalion as well as just returning from 14 months in Iraq. plus he has got to flex his muscles and show us who is in charge, ya know? so everything is getting real stupid. in between our field problems and garrison tasks, he is inspecting us daily for Highly Starched Uniforms and Spit Shined boots. quite ridiculous actually. oh yeah, plus he wants the barracks and rooms to be 100% gleaming white and spiffy all the time (no small feat for a 60 year old building that has seen thousands of residents....arrgghh). so this takes up all of our time to do all this. most days lately we work from 0600 until at least 1900 (7pm.) which leaves ZERO time to run errands or personal stuff like that. but that is the way life goes i guess.

in regards to our possible deployment:
we aren't, to be blunt. at least not right now. maybe tomorrow. who knows.
last week they told us there was a "90% chance we will get called up" to go sometime in September. today we find out that two other battalions are going and we are staying. then at lunch we hear that maybe we are going and they are staying. then at afternoon we hear that maybe they are going and we are following in a few weeks.

anyways, who knows. we certainly know very little right now. basically they will probably do what they did last year: "Oh by the way, we are deploying next weekend." it would be nice to know a bit ahead of time to put our affairs in order, ya know? but NOOOOOO, they cant do that. i hate them (whoever the THEM is who makes these decisions...)

so Ranger School has been indefinitely postponed due to all the general chaos and business preventing any kind of decent preparation. bummer.

RE my Iraq Movie:
it's been done for a while, but i haven't had the chance to do much with it. but i've got a bunch of CDs and made up some spiffy labels and am about to start sending it out to the random people who have wanted a copy. so if that is you, its on the way ( i promise!). and if you want one, just email me and i will send you a copy. its still only in MPEG format so will need to be watched on a computer, but real soon i will finish up the actual DVD version (complete with Directors Commentary and Alternate Ending! ooohh aahhh!)
and that will be ready to go out.

a ton of guys here have seen it and are all super stoked on it, so that makes me happy.

not much else going on. its late now and we have some ridiculous PT coming up tomorrow AM so i am gonna go to bed.

we also have ANOTHER field problem this week. Weds night we conduct a tactical airfield seizure practice exercise. should be fun, a three hour flight, then jump in around midnight with out entire BRIGADE (about 2,000 guys all told) and take over an airfield. then we hold it for a day and then Air Assault (in Blackhawk helicopters) to a pretend urban objectivve and take that over. should be fast and furious and then back here by Friday morning and hopefully off by early that afternoon! then a Fun Jump on saturday will complete my busy week here.

- scott

Two SuperCool announcements from Bob!!! (includes NEW EMAIL ADDRESS)

2005-08-02T12:50:00.000-04:00

Okay so I have two more things that make me super happy.

1:
I finally finished my Iraq movie/documentary/whatever you wanna call it. It's called "Diplomatic Immunity 1:lowRes" and I am very pleased with it. So far I have shown it to about a dozen people and most of them thought it was pretty neat and well done. So I am happy about that. Now that the initial cut is done, in the next week I am working on getting an actual DVD made with varying soundtracks and some commentary, just like an actual DVD.

If you want a copy, let me know, itsw about 600 MB so only if you have super fast internet can you download it, otherwise I can mail you a copy.

2:
I am going to Milwaukee Aug 9-14 for the 82nd Airborne Association Convention, should be a super good time, basically a get together for paratroopers past and present. Better yet, we are jumping into Milwaukee (well only some of us are and I am one of the lucky ones) at a air-show / public show type of thing, so that should be super neat and a great time is sure to be had by all.

3:
Okay I lied, i got three new things.
My email has changed again, my former company (ziplip.com) stopped providing email services.
NEW EMAIL IS:
jumper_bob@fastmail.fm

later later, all

hey hey hey back to the real world for a little while

2005-08-02T00:35:00.000-04:00

okay so i know its been a while since i last posted... sorry.

anyway since we got back from Iraq in April its been pretty busy and this kind of got pushed to the back burner for a little while, but now i am going to try to keep it more regular, with at least one update per week as time permits, and more often when we are doing cool training.

quick back-brief of the last couple months:
returned in early April.
went on leave for two weeks in end of April - went out West, saw some friends in Colorado, went snowboarding in Whistler, British Columbia. also stopped in Vancouver and Seattle for a few days before flying back east.
month of May was clean-up, recovery from deployment, fixing eqiupment, etc.
Then back on more leave (our scheduled summer leave, the one in April was to make up for losing Xmas leave while deployed...) for two weeks. I stayed mostly east, visiting people at various locations between Montreal and Miami! so had a nice time.
when we came back, we rolled straight into our scheduled Intensive Training Cycle (ITC) which meant we were out in the field for the end of June and almost all of July. we were doing various training and missions and weapons ranges, i will post a synopsis of all that later. we got some really good training and i got some good pics and video.

I have been assigned a new weapon system - the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). It is a light machine gun, one per fire team (4 people).Fires the same round as the M4/M16 rifle series. So it was sucky to carry around all the time but its super fun on the ranges and during training missions, cuz the SAW is the main weapon for a fire team and therefore i get to shoot LOTS AND LOTS of bullets from my FULLY AUTOMATIC weapon! super fun!

anyway that is a quick update, i will post more detail later as time permits, hopefully by the end of this week (Aug 6 or so) i should have it updated.

I am also working on a new look / overhaul for this site.

back in the states

2005-04-11T21:50:00.000-04:00

hey all

we are back in the states, we got back last week.

its been a busy few days - unpacking all of our stuff, cleaning our rooms, everyone geting vehicles back and paperwork updated, all that good details of life that got left behind when we deployed way back in late November.

anyways we are back safe and sound.

many thanks to everyone for their support and thoughts and prayers, it is all greatly appreciated.

we get leave starting this friday - so i finally get to head out West for a couple of weeks and chase down what is left of the snow (yesterday i picked up the new board i bought on EBay while in Iraq! super stoked!)

i will have more updates in the next couple of days as we finish our re-deployment and re-integration into society.

up ahead in the coming months:
Expert Infantry Badge testing, sometime this early summer. A big deal.
Pre-Ranger Course - right after that, to get into Ranger School.
Ranger School - hopefully in like July / August timeframe. We will see when classes are available.

gotta run and finish some unpacking, talk to y'all lata

lost in the desert again...sigh

2005-03-21T05:32:00.000-05:00

haha just kidding.

we are here in Kuwait at Camp Doha now. We arrived this morning (about 0530 local time, about 930pm March 20 in America time) from Baghdad.

Since last night was our last night in Iraq, we decided to celebrate - of course a poker game was required. So we upped the stakes a little bit ($40 each) and played for several hours, right up to the minute we had to gather up to leave. I didnt win, but walked away even, so was happy.

then we grabbed our rucksacks, assault packs, and weapons, and piled into big trucks and drove across BIAP to the pickup zone. That was about 0030 (midnight-thirty) and then at the PZ we hung out till about 0230. They took a manifest call (roll call) to make sure everyone was there, then the c-130 rolled up and we packed in, along with a bunch of Air Force dorks going on R+R, so the plane was pretty full.

Took off at 0315, and i took the chance to snooze for a bit on the flight. just moments later it seemed, my buddy was prodding me - Get up, we're there. About thirty seconds later we bumped down and taxied away.

We unloaded, piled into a bus, drove a mile or two, changed busses, and drove for 1.5 hours up here to Doha. Its pretty nice here, just like an american base.

its defintely kind of wierd here though, for a bunch of reasons.

1: we cant carry our weapons around the base. now its kind of nice to not have my ungainly rifle/203 combo bumping around on my back everywehre i go, but that rifle has been with me every minute of the day since Dec 5, so it freeks me out just a bit to not have it, having grown so used to having it there. i wonder if thats what cops feel like at the end of the day.

2: there are so many people here NOT wearing DCUs (desert camo uniforms), all walking around in civvies and whatever. again, thats all we've been seeing for the past four months, and we have grown a bit suspicious of anyone not in Army colors. not a bit thing, just a little bit unsettling.

3: there are Mucho females around. not that *I* per se have a problem with this, but it mostly means we infantry dirty grunts have to be a bit more aware of what we are saying and who we say it around - the infantry not being known to have the cleanest mouths ever!

4: its just like an american base - cars driving around, fast food joints, really good food. hell they even have a Starbucks here! and this internet is really fast! but with all that comes the higher prices. in Iraq we would pay $1.50 for two packs of smokes, $2 for a haircut or a double DVD, super cheap. not so up here...

5: traffic.

so its gonna be a little bit of a transition to get back into Normal Thinking mode, but its definitely a nice place to stay.

We fly back in like five days or something. We leave out here at 8pm local time on March 26, and arrive in Bragg at 6am March 27th, if we stay on schedule. so real soon we will be back in the states.

Check the next post below to see what BIAP life is like.

See everyone in a few weeks!

man talk about a long layover at the Airport...

2005-03-18T06:17:00.000-05:00

so we are here at BIAP. had a cool and safe helicopter ride from the IZ. we rode in CH-47 Chinooks - the really big ones with two rotors. they fly more like an airplane, even the inside looks more like the inside of a C-130 than a chopper. they are stinkin' HUGE. the coolest part was the guy who gets to sit on the back tailgate and man the M-60 machine gun - like riding on the back of a truck with the tailgate down - if the truck happens to be 1,000 feet up and gently swooping over the baghdad night lights. pretty cool.

BIAP (Baghdad Intl Airport) is okay. its super crowded as it is the transition place for everyone going home or just getting here. chow is really good and they serve it four times a day - including midnight chow.

rain storms left us with flooded tents and huge mud puddles and ravines everywhere (wish i had my truck to play in the mud!) and Heuer so far has been the only one to fall in the mud - that figures, he is the clumsiest guy i've ever met.

they have Hajii shops, a Hajii cafe, basket ball courts, gyms, and some MWR (Morale Welfare and Recreation) tents with video games, TVs movies, ping pong tables etc.

this First Sgt and I have been battling for the title of Base Champion of Ping Pong. he is in his 40s, about 6'2", about 230, and built like a brick shithouse, as they say. (Imagine Vin Diesel, black, but bigger and stronger. Yeah. thats what I said when i saw him.) He plays pong like he is about to kill somebody with the ball and or paddle, and I dont doubt he could do it!

anyway, he is SUPER GOOD and has a slight edge on me (4 games to 2) but as I am the only one to beat him in two deployments I am happy with that. we DO have some epic games, battling back and forth, dripping sweat, the ball flying back and forth (we hear the comment a lot - Hey you guys play like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump! sot thats cool). all of our games are very close, and it is a lot of fun. he and I have destroyed everyone else on the FOB, including the dorks who call them selves the champoins of the weekly tournaments they hold. if we were here for one, we would take it.

but its a lot of fun. we dont have anything to do, so we get up, eat, do whatever, on our own schedule. we still do PT once a day to stay a little bit in shape. but everyone's looking forward to being home - we are really close to leaving now. we go to Kuwait in a few days, and then on to Fort Bragg.

gotta go play some Ping Pong....

its almost time to leave the big sandbox

2005-03-14T07:33:00.000-05:00

hey all

i threw up some updates about the last two weeks or so. there hasnt been much going on but a few events that were halfway fun or otherwise the only things going on!

RE the post title, we have got some good dates esterday about our re-deployment to the States.

i cant be very specific in case any Al-Qaeda happen to read this blog (who knows, stranger things have happened!!!) and so it would not be smart to tell them where and when we are moving...but anyways here is the basics of it.

within the next few days we will be moving to Baghdad Intl Airport (via helicopter, at least we will get one last cool trip over Baghdad before we leave) and we will be there for a few days or a week or 10 days max. we are mostly waiting on available flights - since we are in the middle of normal troop rotations also, there are a couple of Division-Sized elements returning and that is a LOT of troops and flights!

So we will wait at BIAP for several days, and then hop on c-130's to Kuwait City Airport. There we will wait for at least a day and maybe a few, its hard to tell - again waiting on available birds to take us home. Most likely we will be hoppiong on civilian jets to fly home, which will be much more comfortable than riding military C17s or C130s. We will probably have the same flight route as on the way over here - straight to Europe somewhere to refuel, and then directly to Fort Bragg.

We arrive at something they call Green Ramp. I guess its like you see in the movies a bit - some family and friends waiting when the plane gets there, the Army Band to play some cheesy war music, and a General of some kind will make a speech, hopefully a very short one.

Then we will go and turn in our weapons and sensitive items - Night Vision, etc. After that we are free to go for the day. Our first weekend back is a three day weekend. Unfortunately, for the first ten days after a deployment, we have accountability formations every day... sigh. For about the first week we really wont be doing much. Just show up mid-morning, maybe clean weapons a little bit. They will give us a lot of free time to unpack all our junk, straighten up licenses, vehicle registrations, etc so we are good to go with all that junk. We will also have a bunch of briefings, debriefing, rebriefings, and all that junk. The reason we have to show up every day is to make sure that nobody got too drunk and drove into a ditch, or got in a bar fight and got hospitalized, or got drunk and killed their wife (like happened a year or two ago) - basically to make sure everyone is alive and semi-okay for the first few weeks of being back in America and free again. Remember, we've been cooped up over here with no alcohol, no fun off-work times - its Army 24/7 over here, and everyone will unwind a lot.

So that is the tentative schedule. We will probably fly back around the 26-28 or March if things go as planned.

After that we will have leave from April 15 to May 2nd. That will be sweet - I am gonna go find some snow and ride the brand new Rome snowboard i just bought on EBay, go visit family and friends, ride my DK General Lee BMX bike a lot, drink some beer, everything except be in the Army for a couple of weeks.

I am ambivalent about going home. It will be nice to be back in the states for a while, with time off and skate parks and stuff like that available. But its pretty cool to be over here, deployed to combat. In this environment, the bullshit factor of the Army goes way down. Back at Bragg, it can get kind of anal sometimes. But that is what you have to put up with to get the cool stuff like this. Plus we will be doing some good training in the next few months, some jumps too, and I am gonna try to go to Ranger School as soon as I can.

So that is the latest on our schedule... talk to y'all later. Our internet access may be a bit limited until we get home - the facilities at BIAP are not nearly as nice as those here at Camp Al-Izdehar.

A typical Day at the Green Zone

2005-03-13T08:39:00.000-05:00

Well since we are here just waiting to re-deploy, we really dont have that much going on. A normal day is kind of the following:

Wake up around 0600-0800, for the most part. Its pretty laid back, since we dont have much to do. Sometimes we will do some training classes in the morning, like how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble the machine gun, or something like that. Mostly that is to keep up our knowledge level. Mostly tho, we dont have too much going on.

So we wake up and shower and shave, then go to breakfast chow. I usually try to stay out of the tent for most of the day if possible, to avoid all the leadership. If you are sitting around the tent doing nothing they will gripe at you, or make you do some stupid detail just because they are bored too.

A lot of the time I go and surf the internet, and try to keep up with my web page skills, or go wander around the base and check things out, or try to get on every trip to get off post. Since I am now a qualified driver, i can often get in as a driver and take people places they need to go, which is at least amusing and halfway interesting.

The other day we made Post Office runs all day, in preparation for going home. I spent the rainy day drivng back and forth in the Humvee taking people. haha I got a bunch of people good. We had the Humvee packed full, cuz everyone needed to go. So one guy was standing up in the turret every trip, which sucked cuz it was raining like crazy, monsoon season i guess or something. so they were getting soaked enough already. then of course there is crazy Scott driving the Humvee, hauling ass around the Green Zone as fast as possible (the speeed limit is 35 but that doesnt bother me in the least - these Humvees do at least 55), dodging Hajii traffic, puddles, ditches, speed bumps, and other army trucks. Well since intersections are the most dangerous place (IEDs, RPGs etc) we are supposed to REALLY haul ass through them... Well by one intersection happened to be this big puddle about 10 meters long and pretty deep. So Scott amused himself by hitting this puddle as fast as possible, usaully around 45 mph, and then speeding through the intersection, covered in water, hoping nobody is coming the other way. The best part about all this is that when you hit a big puddle like that in the Humvee, it sends up this HUGE wall of water right over the top and absolutely SOAKS the guy in the turret. hahaha they got pretty pissed off, but oh well, that is the way it goes. They would do the same (and they have, whenever *I* ride up there) so its kind of a running contest to see who can get the other person the wettest. I think i got the title today...

anyway, then dinner is at 1700 till 2000. we usually try and do some PT in the evening. I run a few days a week and go to the gym a few days to try and stay in shape. A lot of evenings we will get a good size poker game going on, that usually kills a few hours.

A few nights ago Barnes and I snuck into some tunnels below the palace. Allegedly this is where Saddam hid his armored Merceded, trunks of cash, weapons, etc. Well its all been cleaned out, so all thats left is rubble. Its still cool to go wander around tho. We had to put on our NOD (night vision), sneak past the guards, creep through thigh-high nasty sludge, and emerge into the tunnel system. it is hugely extensive - one could get anywhere within the green zone in these tunnels. we didnt go too far so as to not get lost, plus we didnt have too much time.

there really isnt too much to do here. sometimes we watch movies, listen to CDs, read books. really pretty boring when we are not out on combat patrols or something. so that's a normal day here on the FOB. it will be nice to get back to somewhere that has stuff to do besides watch movies and be lazy...

so here's what we've been up to for the last few weeks:

2005-03-10T07:51:00.000-05:00

well since we got here to the Green Zone there hasnt really been too much going on. This is somewhat intentional - since we were the only company from our battalion that was deployed outside of the IZ, they are kind of giving us some down time before we return home. Nevertheless, like any day in the Army, you never know what is going to happen or what you will end up doing. Here are some highlights...

Army Driving School

They sent a bunch of us to Army Driving School so we would be licensed to drive Humvees (AKA 998 / 9111 's )and big trucks called a *5-ton* (so called because they have a 5 ton cargo capacity! oddly enough). I am sure you have all seen pics of Humvees, and the 5-Ton is like a big flatbed truck with benches in the back for carrying lots of troops around when they wont fit in a Humvee. So they grab up about 20 of us from the company, looks like its gonna be one BIG class, and we head over to FOB Honor where they teach the classes.

Day 1:
We leave out at 0715, or at least we load the trucks then. Sit around till 0745 when the drivers come out, and rumble over there, arriving at 0800 on the dot. Instructors werent even awake, nor were they aware they had a class to teach. So our only Sgt went up into their Building (used to be Saddam's Ministry of Something or Other) and tracked them down and woke them up. In the meanwhile, we all took off our IBA and stretched out on the sidewalk for a nap.

Around 1015, they finally strolled down and broke us down into two groups of ten. Sgt Sal, the teacher, gave us a brief intro to the trucks
Hello, My name is Sgt Sal and I will be your primary instructor for the following 15 minute block of instruction on familiarization and pre-operation checklist for proper operation of the m998 / m91111 family of vehicles... - that is what an army class sounds like. UUGGGGGGHHHHHHH.....)
and then walked us around the truck, explaining what to check out before we hopped in and drove. Since I have my CDL and have been driving big commercial trucks in the US for almost ten years now, it was pretty easy for me to pick it all up. After the initial walk-around inspection, he oriented us with the cab and controls, and then we sat around while the second group got the same talk. This took us until 1100 - time to break for lunch chow.

When we got back around 1300, we fired the beast up and started driving around for *familiarization and operation practice* - only in the Army do they give 19 year old privates a huge cargo trucks and say, Practice by driving around DownTown Baghdad...hahahaha it was amusing for the first 10 minutes. Riding around in the back got old quickly however, as 20 of us were crammed into 14 seats, and the new drivers had never driven a vehicle with air brakes which are much touchier than normal car brakes! so we spent the rest of the day lurching back and forth while they tried to not screech to a halt or run over the scooters and hajii running around all over the streets.

We drove around till 1630, then quit for the day. The next morning we came back and started drive tests. I went first since I had already practiced driving the day before, and was not too worried about passing the test. I neednt have worried; apparently the class was Pass/Fail and showing up pretty much ensured a Pass (like many schools in the Army). After my test was done we sat around till lunch, then ate, and took the Humvee test in the afternon. This consisted of going to an empty parking lot and hauling ass around for a while, after which we went to the PX. So now I have my truck license, which is better than walking and is something to do which is somewhat enjoyable.

Its pretty cool cuz the trucks are all open air, they have no roofs or anything, and since we are the Army, we just drive around Baghdad, go wherever we want, and dont have to worry about traffic rules or anything. Red lights, turn signals, all mean nothing. We convoy around and everyone gets out of our way. So in a way its a bit like playing Grand Theft Auto on the PlayStation, kinda cool.

A HardCore Mission
A few days later we had our last combat mission. They scouted out an alleged *complex* where rebels were hiding, and set up this huge battalion sized combat raid.

The morning of, we woke up at 0100, and geared up, checked our night vision, and drove out to the PZ( Pickup Zone) to wait on the BlackHawks. They rolled in about 0355, and the first lift of guys jumped in and roared off into the night sky. At 0415 they came back and the rest of us loaded up and lifted off. The flight was cool - the doors were open and I was sitting on the outside, my feet dangling high over the dark baghdad streets. It was super windy, so i was grateful for my clear goggles to keep the worst of the wind out of my face. they flew slow and low, not wanting to rush the timeline too much, so we had a really cool 1/2 hour ride over the darkened city, past the edges of town, and out into the country.

We thumped down in the middle of a huge field, jumped off and lay in the prone while the bird took off. Within a few seconds the eerie quiet of the desert at night replaced the whirring thunder of the chopper blades, and we began to move into our security position. After a few minutes, we began our movement to the houses we were gonna raid, with our squad walking point (first) for the whole battalion. The field was treacherous - cow pies and dirt clods everywhere, demanding close attention to not twist an ankle. We closed in on our objective (Building L), and our team provided security while Bravo team kicked in the door (Knock, Knock, anyone home, WHAM kick it in!!!) and flowed inside and cleared the mostly empty farmhouse. They secured the women and children inside, and we set up security outside. We briefly searched inside, but waited for the sky to lighten a bit for a better search. Light of day revealed nothing inside but the usual poor farmhouse stuff - a stove, some mats to sleep on, and some clothes.

When dawn broke, we searched the farmyard and fields, finding nothing except some trash and a pissed off donkey, bull, and goat. Of course the goat was standing on an old ammo box, so my team leader tells me to move it and search the box. So i grabbed the goat and muscled it off and turned the (empty) box over, fully expecting to get head-butted by this angry goat. I escaped unscathed and we kept looking, finding nothing.

The birds were not supposed to return to get us till 1045, so we kind of poked around and pretended like we were looking. We searched a few nearby buildings, but it was clear we would find nothing, so mostly sat around and tried to look busy.

At 1030 we heard they had changed plans and were sending tracks out to pick us up.... ugggh, we hate those things. they are loud and noisy and like sitting on top of a jackhammer and we had to ride 30 miles and about 45 minutes...so we loaded up in the first lift and rumbled off back to baghdad. What a waste of millions of dollars - flight time and fuel, equipment, everything. Oh well, at least we got a cool helicopter ride out of it.

we are chillin here in the GreenZone now

2005-03-04T11:17:00.000-05:00

hey all

sorry its been a few days since i updated the blog. not that we have been particularly busy (we havent) or that we havent had access to internet (its open 24hrs) but there reallly hasnt been that much going on at all.

we left the palace a few weeks ago, and moved to FOB Independence. we were there for a bout a week before we packed up and came here to the GreenZone. we are currently at FOB Prosperity (Camp Al-Izdehar in arabic if anyone cares).

so we have been here since about the 21st of Feb or so. we moved all into a big huge tent, just like the ones we were in when we first deployed here. our schedule was tentatively to get a little bit of rest and relaxation since our company was the only company out of 8 that were sent over here that was out at the palace doing actual combat missions. the rest of our battalions were back at the IZ doing gate guard and stupid stuff like that.

our company is pretty pleased with the mission we had. after all, everyone else was stuck in the iZ doing guard and we got to go out and do all the good combat missions. so we are happy with what we got to do.

we have a mission coming up, cant put up too much now but will be able to after it happens.

we should be moving to Baghdad Intl Apt on the 17th or so, then flying to Kuwait a week later. then between the 25th to 30ish, we should be on a plane back to Ft Bragg. since we were out of the IZ for this deployment, we should be one of the first lifts back stateside. it will be nice to be back, since we are done here.

stuck at the green zone

2005-02-20T07:47:00.000-05:00

okay so we moved out of the palace, and back to our little FOB Independence

well those guys are about to go back home next month, and so are we, so they have sent us to the green zone.

we are at fob prosperity, a bunch of tents - altho we do have AC and heat if wanted. we are a QRF force if needed, and we are going to be running some patrols and missions, altho much fewer than in the palace.

we have one patrol tonight, and tomorrow we leave for a three day Air
Assault mission. we will be riding around in BlackHawks looking for some bad guys, around the area where the winners of the Jan 30 elections will be meeting. apparently the bad guys have been mortaring the meetings of the electin winners, so we need to go find them.

its okay here, we dont really have much to do, but our Platoon Sgt is a dork and is always pissed off and wants to smoke us all the time, plus we have to wear our stupid ballistic goggles ALL THE TIME - they suck.

and its much more crowded here, and all the higher up commanders are around, so we have to be perfect as far as uniform and shaven and all that, its really quite ridiculous. oh well.

well i've never moved out of a palace before...

2005-02-12T10:16:00.000-05:00

heheh i have moved around quite a bit in my life, but the past two months were my first time ever living in a palace...

on the 10th we got our official orders:
We are done here, Mission Accomplished. we would be moving out on the 12th and turning over the palace to the Iraqi National Guard. of course, they had to get one last day of work out of us, so that day we spent on guard all day.

and its been freezing cold lately - i dunno whether this is normal for Iraq, but it certainly is not any warmer than some places in the states for the last week or so. in the past month we have even had two frosts - and would have had more if it wasnt so arid here.

so we spent the 10ht on guard duty, and then commenced our packing up and getting ready to leave. everyone started to condense all of our various war trophies - iraqi IDs, piles of worthless Dinar, various trinkets from abandoned houses, the occasional really cool thing like my hookah (which i am still trying to figger out how to smuggle back to the US... heehee good luck to me).

on the 11th we had a brief mission - a morning patrol from 0730 till 0900. mostly it was just a presence patrol, a walk through our sector to remind the bad guys that we are still here. we came off guard at 0700 and racked out for 1/2 hour, and then got up and put all our gear back on and headed out into the frigid desert morning. at this early hour, the residents and rebels are both still sleeping, and we are mainly the only people out. (hey iraqis are like everyone else in the world - they sleep late whenever they can! and in the war-torn chaos that is modern day baghdad, few people have steady jobs and schools are sporadic at best. the kids only go when both us and the rebels stay inside, for fear of getting caught in the crossifre.)

so we walked around for a while, and then got bored and decided to search some cars. we commenced pounding on doors and making loud noises and yelling to wake up the locals - Hey, if we gotta be up, then they do to!

the sleepy iraqis came out fairly quickly, as they knew from experience that the Americans will open and search a car regardless of whether the owner is there or the keys either! (we have big Hooligan Tools designed for this stuff! )

with most of us being tired and grumpy from guard all night and then straight into a mission, we were not terribly polite or friendly and subsequently did not win any hearts and minds this morning... oh well, we werent doing that terribly well anyhow.

and of course the platoon sgt decides we can take the long way back so HE and the Lt can stop by the bakery and get some fresh bread for breakfast... of course, i forgot its ALL ABOUT THEM.

after that we hung out in the palace all day and played a few final games of cards, continued to pack and clean, and caught up on sleep - all in all a nice and quiet day.

the 12th was moveout day, but we still made time to get up at 0330 and go out on one last patrol - Lord knows why, absolutely NOBODY is out at this time of the night. the good side to that is that if we see anyone we can snatch them up cuz they should know better than to be out that late / early.

we didnt see anyone, and again in the spirit of general grumpiness that has pervaded the company, we searched some random houses, mostly out of boredom. we searched one sort of, which means that we walked up to the roof and looked around. Sgt H. wanted to use one of his last flares, so lit it from the roof and left it there.

that was fine until we got back outside and noticed a large flickering orange glow coming from the roof - apparentlyt Sgt H had left the flare on a pile of burlap bags which had caught fire. so we burst back in the house (again) and ran upstairs and put it out.

then we got back and piled all of our stuff into the Bradleys and 113s and drove back to the FOB... last time at the palace. we got the obligatory pictures and videos of us, squads, teams, platoons, etc all in front of the Tigris and the palace.

we will probably spend a few days here and then off to the Green Zone for a few weeeks and then home sweet home.

i am kind of ambivalent about re-deploying: as much bullshit as there is here, there will be infinitely more back at Bragg. and we have gotten used to the combat missions, and we look forward to mission day as the one day that makes all the bullshit worthwhile. so back to the grind...

hey hey hey i won some money in poker today

2005-02-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

okay so we were all pumped up when we got back from mission last night - had a good mission, and going back to the FOB early! so of course we started a poker game to kill the time. surprisingly enough, i did rather well. i have set myself a limit ($70) to learn to play Texas Hold Em, and then i will quit. so not having reached my limit yet, i bought in, and we had to cut the game short to leave, but i was up $10, so a good night.

then we got to the FOB, and started a new game, with 9 people - $10 each, so $90 in the pot. we started at 10.00 pm... i was doing well until the first five people went out. for a bit i had the biggest stack on the table. then my inexperience kicked in, and i lost most of it. i hung in though, barely, for a good while. around 3.00 AM it was down to 3 of us, me with about $2 left. with some good luck and some good raising, i took a bunch of Heuer's money and by 0500 was up to $40 to his $70. needing at least a bit of sleep, we called it quits and cashed out - my biggest win ever so far!

i am not one for throwing away lots of money on gambling, but there isnt much else to do here. it is a bit of excitement, and once i reach my limit of $70 loss, i will quit. all in all, its pretty cheap entertainment - $10 per game, at least 3-5 hours per game. i've only pissed away about $40 so far this deployment on poker, in about 7 or 8 games, so i am happy. we will play again tonight, with my winnings from last night... haha good luck to me!

my team leader almost got killed today

2005-02-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

okay so today was our detail day...

since everyone else except me and Barnes went back to the FOB to drink their 2 beers last night, it was nice and quiet and deserted in the palace - just us two rattling around in the big empty building. Barnes was sick, so he was just racked out, snoring away. i watched a couple of movies and then got a good full night's sleep in the silent marble room... it was way nice to be away from everyone for a change.

so i got to sleep until around 0830 or so, when all those guys rolled back from the FOB, with the accompanying ruckus, noise, and loud sounds that seem to be a part of the infantry... oh well at least i got a few hours break from them!

we got the day's schedule - clean up a little bit, police up some trash and burn it, and then get ready for a brief mission to assist third platoon. i walked downstairs, said Screw It, and started cleaning up the chow area, dressed in only my DCU pants, flip flops, and a sweatshirt. It's only a matter of time before somebody says something, but today i really don't care - I am fed up with the Army's bullshit. So screw 'em, i will wear what i want.

We emptied all the trash containers, cleaned up all the bottom floor, and I took it all out, dumped it in the smoldering burn pit, and lit the pile on fire. Poore came out and we took turns dumping diesel fuel on the fire to completely burn all the waste - being eminently careful not to douse my bare feet with the fuel! then, seeing as it was a bit of a chilly day, i pulled out my razor and shaving cream and grabbed a styrofoam cup full of warm water from the coffee urn. i took my junk outside and decided to shave by the fire - that was the warmest place, thanks to the ten foot flames. my buddies gave me some weird looks when they saw my shaving-cream-covered face shaving next to a burning trash pile, but i've done stranger things!

after that we got the OpOrder for the mission. Third platoon would be out in sector patrolling, and my team was assigned to Bldg 40 - an 8story high-rise where we would go to the highest floors with a sniper team and overwatch 3rd.

at noon we moved out, dropping off two squads in different buildings along Haifa St to completely watch our sector. we rolled down to Taleel Square and moved up the 8 sets of stairs. i kicked the door in and we thundered into a warm, well furnished apt - not what we were expecting. after a quick discussion the Sgts realized we were in the wrong building, so he and i went up to the roof to recon. the error was easily remedied - we simply climbed over the 5 foot wall to the adjoining roof and down into the correct building, where we each took a different vantage point of the slums below. our SAW gunner was watching the square, and i took a spot by a blown out wall with a huge field of fire - maybe i will get lucky and see some rebels. my spot was good but i got yelled at twice for being too visible, so i lay down in the prone and watched my area.

there was plenty of sketchiness going on in Sector Bravo 2. the usual groups of kids running around, looking for chances to throw grenades at Americans, the unemployed twenty-something males, women cleaning and dragging around babies, the old men squatting against the wall bullshitting with each other. constant honking horns were occasionally interrupted by squealing tires as the baghdad drivers threw traffic rules out the window and took the path of least resistance - which is usually on the wrong side of the road at a high rate of speed!

pretty shortly we spotted the ING patrolling in the narrow alleys below us. we ratcheted the alertness up a level for two reasons:
1: the ING ALWAYS get shot up, the rebels hate them more than they do us.
2: our guys were around down there too, and a 2-meter wide alley quickly becomes a deadly chokepoint with a grenade thrown from a roof.

it went well until the ING and 3rd platoon stopped in one area for 45 minutes - a big no NO down here. rebels tossed a couple of grenades at them, and layed down some AK fire, with no real effect. then the rebels started launching mortar rounds toward 3rd platoon - missing them but instead they hit an Anti-American mosque, critically wounding the imam there. 3rd platoon called in the 113 tracked vehicles - to MedEvan the imam. they popped colored smoke grenades to mask the track's arrival, layed down serious cover fire with their 240 machine guns, and loaded the wounded priest in and took him to the hospital. kind of messed up - they shoot at us, wound one of their own clerics, and we have to risk getting shot up to get him out.

for an hour or so all was quiet, until four humvees came roaring down 17th st. as they passed out building, two loud BAMMMM's rang out, raising a huge white dust cloud. a couple of kids had thrown a pair of grenades as the humvees passed. no damage or injuries, except a few blown up bags of flour. unfortunately, we didnt get eyes on the throwers. i saw the explosions - they were right in the middle of my sector, and i had seen several shady people lingering a bit too conspicuously - so kept my eyes peeled. my luck ran out, and we didnt see them again.

we moved positions several times to prevent boredom. around 1600, i went up on the roof with sgt H to scan some dead space we couldnt see very well from the apt. we watched for a good 30 minutes, when sgt H called me over:
Nigloschy, TRP 2 (Target Reference Point - a pre-established target, for quick acquisition and firing), see the group of guys there? they are passing grenades!"
I acknowledged, as he watched through the binos.
'nigloschy, prep 203!"
roger, Sgt.!
'launch 203'
Roger (ploonnkk!!!!)

as soon as i squeezed the trigger and the High Explosive round left my 203, Sgt H's m-4 was rocking and rolling. he ripped off 5 shots before my grenade detonated on top of a wall about 4 meters from the grenade-ers. the guy passing out grenades took two to the chest and dropped like a rock as everyone scattered left and right. by this time i had my m-4 on Semi and was sending rounds in their general direction as fast as i could.

it was all over in about 2-3 seconds - my 1 HEDP round, Sgt H's 1/2 dozen shots, and about 5 or 6 from my rifle. one guy lay on the ground, obviously dead, everyone else split. in a moment or so, two of the dead guy's buddies crept back to drag him away.
'Sgt h, they are back! Permission to engage!"
"Negative, i do not have visuals on weapons!"

we both knew they were the bad guys, but Sgt H elected not to shoot any more, as they were unarmed at the moment. (in retrospect, we should have killed them all, and it was permissible under our rules of Engagement - they had weapons previosuly and we could positivley ID them as such.)

Sgt H radioed up higher:
'B-Main, this is 1-1. Be advised we have a group of AIF (Anti Iraqi forces) distributing grenades, Sector Bravo-1, vicinity Grenade Alley (how appropriate the name of that street!). We have engaged, 1 enemy KIA, several enemy WIA, say again, 1 enemy KIA, several enemy WIA, no friendly wounded, over."

Sgt W came up to watch with me, and sgt H went down to continue radio reports. We were watching the streets and alleys for the bad guys who got away, when a single sharp CERACK rang out, followed immediately by a HISS-THWIPP as a cloud of dust appeared next to Sgt W's head. apparently the bad guys got out a sniper rifle and took a single, very accurate shot at us up there once they saw us shoot at them.

accurate it was - it impacted about 6 inches below W's head on the thick adobe-concrete wall of the roof. we ducked down and tried to pinpoint the shot, with no luck. for the next 1/2 hour i would poke my head over the parapet, trying to draw another shot so we could see the muzzle flash, but no dice. the bad guys didnt wanna play any more.

we waited until dusk, then climbed back over the wall and down the first building. we hustled up haifa, picked up the other elements we had dropped off, and snuck back into the palace.

1 bad guy dead, several wounded, and we stopped an active grenade handout - a good day, overall. in addition, we are going back to teh FOB early tonight - it'll be kind of nice. let's get a poker game going, eh guys???

been a boring couple of days...

2005-02-07T11:18:00.000-05:00

okay so the past few days have really been a large scale waste of time...

Feb 4: came back from the FOB, had interior guard - manning the towers and gates at the palace. once again we had the late shift - 2pm - 8 pm and 2am to 8am.... sigh... i am tired of the second shift.

Feb 5: Mission Day: we had an OP today (observation post). we went down Haifa st, across Taleel Sq, to bldg 22. we hadnt been here before, and it was pretty far from our base at the palace, so we had some good prospects to maybe see some action. we were supposed to stay semi-covert tho (despite an insertion at 11am - yeah, like they didnt notice a whole squad of Army guys in full battle rattle invading their apt building at lunch time... ummm yeah WAY TO GO COMMANDERS, REAL COVERT!!!!!).

so anyway, it had potential. we got up there and set up, and we started switching off on guard duties - one guy at the front stairs to watch our back, a couple guys at various windows, team and squad leaders roaming around checking on us and generally slacking off while we pulled guard. Barnes got caught dozing like four times today, he is way tired from a wierd guard schedule...

so on the hours off we got a bit bored, so went downstaris to the abandoned apartments below and looked for cool souvenirs. i got a bunch of neat stuff - some brass teapots, some battle-axe type things you would hang on the wall, a bunch of OLD iraqi cash from Saddam era, and best of all.... a premium original authentic Iraqi HOOKAH!!!! yaay, that is the coolest souvenir ever, everyone is so jealous. now all i have to do is figger out how to smuggle it back into the states.... ummm lets start thinking of something deviant to hide it in! ooops, its three feet tall... um this will take some planning.

anyways, the day passed uneventfully, we saw plenty of nasty characters doing shady things but didnt see any weapons or grenades, so just watched and kept our eyes open. after the day had whiled away, Sgt H and I went down to the bomb shelter in the basement, and explored it. every building in Baghdad has a bomb shelter... its crazy. they are big enough to hold about 50 people for a qood while, apparently Saddam was prepared for us to come in! we checked that out, and then crawled around in some tunnels we found. rumor has it that someehwere in our sector are secret tunnels coming from our palace - escape tunnels Saddam built. we know they are there, we just havent found them yet. so we poked around the dark, musty, filthy tunnels from the bomb shelter. one of them went up to a manhole in the middle of haifa st. i crawled up the shaft and slowly cranked open the cover, raising the manhole cover a few inches... i poked my head up to look and was greeted by car tires and shoes at my eye level, whizzing inches away! i took some pictures and some video, and we closed it up and went back in the apartment building.

the day finally diappeared, and we walked back up Haifa to the palace. another day gone...

Feb 6: guard duty again. exterior guard this time - the OPs by the back gate. ING have taken over one of them, so we only had one to man, and only one 6hour shift today. a nice rest day, lets get ready for mission tomorrow. we rigged up a "borrowed" sattelite dish from a nearby apartment and a TV to get the Super Bowl - its on an 0400 our time tonight, so to bed early tonight and get up early and watch it!!!

Feb 7:
mission day rolls around again. we moved out with some ING today. they are accompanying us on patrols around our sector to learn the area, study our tactics, and learn how to control an area. they have a bad habit of shooting at anything that moves (including US) and getting drunk and shooting all their ammo into the air, so we have to help them out a little bit in those areas. we were assigned to overwatch the patrol from Building 61, while the resat of the platoon took some ING down PowerStation Road and searched a few buildings. i listened to the radio crackle as squad leaders searched buildings and cars and walked the mostly quiet streets in the early afternoon. after 1.5 hours, they came back without incident - a remarkable feat. Every day we treat ING who get shot up - they are the most hated in Iraq, more so than us. they are viewed as collaborators, fighting agasinst their own people. they respect the US as conquerors at least, but the iraqis hate when their own turn against them. (altho, wouldnt you feel the same way about an invading army and any of us who sided with them?
we had another patrol scheduled for shortly after dusk but the ING got scared of the dark so we cancelled it.

some good news today:
the satellite dish didnt work out, so they taped the super bowl last night, so we can watch it when we go back to the FOB!
they will have two beers each for us, to celebrate the SuperBowl! that is amazing, beer and liquor are banned in iraq. way to go, Army! i am gonna stay here at the palace tho, while everyone else goes back to drink their two beers. (they're Bud lights, anyway... bleech) i dont really care to drink two bud Lights, and it will be nice and peaceful and quiet at the palace with them all gone.

good news and bad news

2005-02-03T08:27:00.000-05:00

haha Dan Rather did a spot about us last week. its located at:
http://www.cbsnews.com
on the top toolbar, click on "Free CBS News Video", then search for "baghdad"
and the article is titled:
"On patrol with U.S. troops on one of Iraq's most dangerous streets. (1/26/05) | January 26, 2005"

its a video clip. its pretty cool, about a third of the way in, theres a nice shot of Dan at our palace, and also some footage of me and Barnes tearing up a truck we found mortars in, and other general footage of our platoon / company on various missions. so that's kind of cool....
thats the good news

the not-so-good news is that a couple of guys in my company got blown up by a grenade today. apparently the Battalion Commander was out at the palace, doing his little entourage tour thing, and they were all clustered in one spot like idiots. (if you notice any pics or video i take, we are always spread out to prevent just this) so some Hajii kid threw a frag at them and wounded like four of them. not too bad, but wounded them nonetheless. they will be alright. i really could care less about the Commander (he is kind of way high up there and out of touch with reality) but they did get my buddy Doc Woodley with a nice chunk of shrapnel in the shoulder. He will be alright tho.

so we go back tomorrow, back into mission and guard cycles, hopefully WE will see some action this time instead of everyone else getting all the fun.

well the election drama is pretty much over now...

2005-02-03T05:50:00.000-05:00

whewwwwwwwww........... talk about stinky sockx - we are finally back here at the FOB for 24 hours break. been wearing the same DCU's since a while ago (ummm i think about two weeks) and only had two pairs of socks in that timeframe. plus we've been running around doing patrols, so we have been getting good and grungy and dirty - sweat from running around in IBA, dirt from the nastiness that is Baghdad's streets, and scum and filth from searching houses and cars. so all in all

WE SMELL REALLY BAD NOW.

so its about time to come back here and get some clean clothes on, take a shower, and scrub the green funk from between my toes... **sigh**

just kidding, although it has been a while since i changed clothes and i do smell pretty bad, we have wet wipes and stuff like that and we wash our feet every day or so, take off socks at night, and air out a little bit. so we stay on the hygienic side of dirtiness, but barely.

the sense around town is that we are mostly done with our election type stuff. sometime this month the Iraqi National Guard (ING) will move into our palace and attempt to take over security for our sector. that is kind of unlikely, since the rebels hate them more than us and target them with an exponential amount of violence. they know they cant get us, so they go after the ING.

every day we have been having wounded ING come to our back gate to see our medic - shot up, blown up, stabbed, whatever. apparently their idea of intelligent urban combat consists of standing in the middle of the street (far away from any cover... idiots) and blast away at each other with automaatic AKs. no wonder we rolled over them when we invaded. so the ING are constantly getting beat up by the insurgents and come to us to get stitched up.

the other side of having them next door is that we are now targets by affinity. since they moved in outside our gates, we have gotten daily mortar barrages and small arms fire and RPGs. granted, most of the time the ING is the target, but the bad guy's aim is so bad they usually miss the ING and end up shooting us instead or blowing up our palace.

at least it makes for some excitement, it was getting kind of boring over here with no action.

we go back to the palace tomorrow, and will begin gradually packing up to move back here to the FOB for a while.

moving out of the IP station today

2005-02-02T05:07:00.000-05:00

man i am tired today, i had guard duty from 0000 - 0200 in the morning, and then surfed the Web till 0500, so didnt get much sleep, probably due to the handful of Pepsi's and candy bars at midnight. (beats falling asleep on guard though)

then had guard at the front door of the IP station from 0800-1000. its kind of amusing, all the IPs recognize me now and know that i have picked up some Arabic, so they walk by and say things in Arabic, they usually bring me tea (chai) also. that's good stuff, nice and hot in the cool morning breeze and helps keep me awake. the IP Chief even had one of his lackeys bring me out some tea.

after guard, we packed up all our stuff and sat around for a while. one of our purposes here is to guard the American mini-HQ they set up, so wait until that is torn down and then we leave. we played spades on the roof for a while with the LT - he's never played before too much, but his team got really good cards and they won anyways. oh well, better not to piss off the platoon leader i guess.

after the game was done, it was noon and time to go, so we packed up all our stuff, and picked up the extra ammo. of course they gave me the biggest box - jerks. i really dont care though, whatever. wimps. we run out to the 113's, pile in, and haul ass over to the palace.

so we got there, and it seems its once again my turn to burn poop - how does that happen? so me and Barnes went out there (screw the IBA this time, its too hot out) and poured it all into the burn pit, soaked it in fuel, and lit it on fire. that went well for a bit until the ING outsude the gate got mortared or RPGed or something, the huge BANG didnt even throw us for a loop though. we just kept on our mission of burning the shit.

after that, back inside for a few games of spades, some hot chow for the first time in a while, and lets clean up and get ready to go back to the FOB tomorrow. it'll be nice to get back and shower and change and chill out for a while after being cooped up in that IP staiton for a week.

well today is payday

2005-02-01T05:33:00.000-05:00

altho i suppose it doesnt really matter, since i am caged up in some nasty-ass police station in Baghdad. oh well.

we're not doing too much around here today, we have a couple of guard shifts and that's about all. two hour shifts, probably a lot of sitting around playing cards and getting yelled at by the platoon Sgt. (he is such a dirtbag, lazy, worthless piece of doodoo. par for the course for the army.)

well after guard, about noon, i take off my socks and start to wash my feet in the bathroom sink
(plug the nose, raw sewage smells not nice ewwee)
and of course as soon as i have both boots off and one foot in the water i hear "Get It On". looks like we are going somewhere, and as usual they give you no advance notice. instead they get ready, and TEHN tell us we are leaving, and yell at us when we didnt read their mind and arent ready also. there is a serious amount of bullsh** of this type to put up with in the army. 80% of the time is BS, 10% is guard duty, and 10% is actual fun stuff. not a good ratio, but the fun stuff is really fun, so kind of makes up for it. oh well... not much i can do about it now, altho i do make it known fairly loudly that the leadership sucks, and usually when their bluff is called they dont do too much cuz they know they're wrong.

so throw on the IBA, and we start walking to the Palace. apparently the PL has to talk to the CO (company commmanding officer) about something, and we need to go with him for security. get to the palace, and then told to load up into 113s --- we are going to the FOB to find him.

rumble off to the FOB, and get a few hours to chill out and relax. its nice, but lets go do something, i am bored.

drive back out to the palace... we have guard tonight. the IP guys are sitting around smoking the hookah and BSing, so natuarlly we join in, bring our cards, and start playing Texas Hold Em poker on the floor of their lounging room. in between smoking the hookah and playing poker, hours roll away quickly and before i know it its midnbight and i've lost ten buxks.... DAMN i need to improve my poker gameif i intend to play at all. of course since this was our last night here, the IP guys are bringing in all their stuff and we are exchanging gifts and moreso - Trading. my arabic has goten good enough that i am required to broker the deals between my guys and them - trading cameras for hookahs, dollars for hats, knives for lights, all kinds of deals, you name it they will trade it.

once a few guys get IP stuff - hats, armbands, patches, etc - for a few dollars, the IPs see dollars changing hands and suddenly the room explodes as EVERYTHING is for sale. they are pulling my arm and i run back and forth translating one deal after another, and for 45 minutes chaos ensues, dollars fly back and forth, gear changes hands, and mostly everyone is happy. i drive hard bargains for my fellow soldiers, but the Iraqi's seem to respect a good bartering session and both sides walk away happy. of course the IPs got the better deal since most of their gear was given to them by the US govt and then we come and buy it all back wth american $$$$ hahaa thats kind of funny!

we have guard from midnight (0000) till 0200 and then again at 0800.... we should pack up and leave tomorrow hopefully.

the morning after... best day at the IP place yet

2005-01-31T05:45:00.000-05:00

well the elections were over yesterday, and things were after all pretty quiet in our neck of the woods. Baghdad did see its share of violence and attacks, but not too bad really, considering what the bad guys had been promising.

despite that fact that my squad had pulled 24 out of 26 hours of guard over the last day, we got stuck on guard again today. sometimes it sucks that my squad leader is so gung-ho. once in a while he needs to pop up and say Hell No We aint Doing That. but his mentality is "Ok We Are Tough and will do Anything they Ask to Demonstrate" altho he does get frustrated with our lack of quality leadership too.

so we did some guard this morning, which is just sitting by a door checking IDs. altho i dont terribly like guard duty, its not too bad here, because i am picking up some Arabic from the IPs - they like to teach me words and help me out. often one of them will bring me some Chai tea also.

the culture here seems to have a lot in common with Far Eastern culture in a few ways:

1: there is a lot that you cannot really come out and say. IE if you ask them for something, it is rude for them to refuse, so they will dance around it and make excuses why they cant do it without actually saying NO.

2: it is a big deal when they call you a Friend. it is a significant thing for them to say that (and its usually accompanied by an offer of Chai).

3: they like to give small gifts. and when one gives or gets a gift, the recipient is supposed to give a more extravagant gift back. for example they will sit down and teach me some Arabic words, and then ask for milk for their kids, or chocolate. also, often they will exchange items with friends, such as pocketknives, glowsticks (for us anyaways), pens, etc.

4: they LOVE to sit around and smoke the hookah and talk and laugh and socialize. we have probably done more of that than anything else today.

5: they dont fistfight, they dont even understand the concept. instead, they would rather just go get their AK (cuz everyone has one) and shoot the guy. an interesting approach to violence - no in between, you are either safe or you are DEAD!!!

so today was a pretty informative day in that regard. we also did one patrol out to the stadium where the balloting had been, and sat there for about an hour watching over the ballots until the got piocked up. got some cool souvenir posters and watched Hajii almost kill each other over stupid stuff.

this evening we sat around for several hours and talked in the lounge room with Hajii, smoked many bowls from several hookahs, and exchanged a bunch of gifts - we gave them knives, candy, little flashlights, etc, and they gave us other weird stuff - dinar, switchblades, some police caps, etc. it was a great time - perhaps the most enjoyable evening i've had in Iraq yet.

in the end, my Arabic had improved enough for a broken conversation. the IPs wanted to tell us that the 82nd were different from other soldiers - we were better they said. well at least they liked us better. anyway, they wanted to express their friendship and call us Brothers with the Iraqi police. so that was pretty cool, it doesnt happen too often like that. we are supposed to leave tomorrow, but we will see.

ELECTION DAY

2005-01-30T14:10:00.000-05:00

okay the elections are today... and of course my particular fire-team gets picked for the high-risk, high-profile, high-reward GUARD DUTY....

AAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

man these stupid nationwide elections, the first ever, and i am sitting up inside the police station, guarding our stuff.... I HATE THE ARMY.

well i really do hate the army, but after all we didnt get stuck with guard all day. only until noon. then off for an hour of break, and out on patrol.

this is a presence patrol. what that means is basically we go out in force, act all tough, and try to pick a fight, hoping that someone will attack us. its like "Hey here we are, come try and kill us" in the hopes that the rebels will show themselves.

it was actually semi-warm today, so after a few minutes of fast walking, i am sweating a bunch. Baghdad, normally hooting and honking and cars bashing and traffic blaring and people shouting, is eerily quiet today. vehicular traffic is banned today to prevent IEDs and car bombs. this also means that everyone is home, and most of them therefore didnt go to work (not that most of them work anyways). so as we walk the streets around, crowds quickly gather and its a bit like a parade, if you imagine that the people watching the parade probably want to kill you instead of laughing and cheering.

we looped around the streets for a while, and then walked into a really slummy, nasty, broken-down, poor, Sunni part of town. the walls are scrawled with "Down USA" and "Down Boosh" and such niceties, mosques everywhere, and deserted strets. the occasional football (soccer) game quickly halts in the streets and the players silently stand there glaring at us.

suddenly one of the squad leaders shouts - he has seen an armed man running. we pursue, and he runs into Sheik Marouf Cemetery, the largest in Baghdad. noramlly we could not enter, but since we saw an armed man fleeing, we may pursue this time.

i break out the hooligan tool and we prepare to break in the locked gate, but another door is luckily found and saves us the time and trouble. we enter into the silent and deserted cemetery. the graves are more crypts and tombs than graves - ther is no dirt in sight. the crypts are so close together we are forced to run across the top of them, leaping across the narrow passageways in between. occasionally one will feel loose, and we briefly stop to check for hidden weapons. we find none, but have only looked in four or five. at a quick rest break, it seems that everyone at once has to urinate, and we do so in shifts, watching our buddy's back and then he watches ours.

as we continue our pursuit, even the sound of our footsteps seems muffled, as if the dead do not want to be disturbed. we come to a 3 meter wall separating us from the main cemetery, and i clamber up to investigate. a white Mercedes is parked in the road on the other side, but nobody is in sight. i climb over the wall and find myself on top of a porch-like structure, probably used for prayers. the pavement is about 8 feet below, so i holler back. Sgt H. climbs over, kneels next to me, and levels his rifle, scanning the area for enemies as i jump down. i pull security as the rest of the squad follows, almost everyone falling on their ass excepe me and Sgt H.

the air seems almost stifling, though we are in the open, and the overcast sky leands a grey tint to this world of dull, rough-cut stone slabs. the ground on this side slopes gently uphill as we steadily rise up, still clambering over tombs and crypts, though our squad formation has dissolved as each soldier finds his own best path over the dead.

we come to a part of Sheik Marouf that is obviously older - the slabs are weatherd and many are cracked and broken, giving only marginally treacherous footing. ahead of us, on the small mound, lies one of the biggest mosques in Baghdad - Sheik Marouf Mosque. we continue our race uphill and detour around the base of the mosque as AK fire breaks out somewhere to our left, several hundred meters away. its impossible to tell who they are shooting at, but we dont hear any rounds whizzing by too close, so we push on.

around the mosque and now moving downhill... more of the same slate colored graves, and the wind picks up a bit, whistling among the stone corridors. finally it is obvious we have lost our prey, so we begin to pick our way back to a gate where the rest of our platoon waits outside.

when we get to the gate, i am last in line and watching our rear as the lead guys, now several hundred meters away, climb over the gate. Bobo has a hard time making it (he has shorter arms and legs than Sgt H) so they yell for the tool and I sprint the last bit and slide the tool underneathh. they quickly break the lock from outside and open and gate and we slink back into the streets that suddenly seem alive and vibrant, tho empty.

anit-american graffiti reminds us to stay on our guard as we walk towards the IP staation. gradually as we leave the Sunni part of town, we see individuals and then small groups and finally people sitting out front and kids playing football in the street. slowly and steadily color and sound floods back into the world...

back at the IP station we take off our armor and chow down on some MREs. later on we meet up with off-duty IPs, and they invite us in to smoke the hookah with them. we of course accept (it would be rude not to heehee) and the cool, strawberry flaovureed blend they have is soothing and relaxing after the tenseness of the past few days and especially today. they laugh and get a kick out of watching the younger guys in the platoon try and inhale and hold it, only to cough it out, gasping and choking, but are equally impressed with the couple of us older guys who have smoked once or twice.

we spend the next few hours smoking, laughing, and trying to communicate as best we can. despite the langugae barrier, we make friends pretty easily and the evening passes quickly, perhaps too quickly.

3333333333333333

what a lack of planning for a national election

2005-01-29T15:48:00.000-05:00

the election is tomorrow, and still the Army has neglected to properly prepare our area of operations (AO) for our tasks.

we go out on patrol after breakfast, surveying the local area - its a bit outside our normal sector- checking out possible Observation Posts and deciding which areas to improve security in. we find two OP sites and my team sits up in the one we checked out yesterday. i post on the roof and survey the fairly quiet street, until some local kids see us up there. that means that everyone on the street hangs out outside, looking at us and seeing what our intetions are. after last night's vehicles searches, it seems our new AO is pretty quiet, so there is not much to watch for either us or them. the kids amuse themselve by shouting up at us:
"Meester, Meester, give me One, give me One"
(One of what, i dont know, but they obviously want one!@!)
which they will do for the next two hours as i overwatch.

meanwhile, other squads roam around the strets and square nearby, stringing up razor wire (c-wire) to restrict vechicles and funnel the pedestrian traffic the way we want it to go. I watch for potential threats but see nothing (Meester, Meester, give mee chokolatay!!!)

finally about lunch time we head down and back to the IP station for chow, then back out on a patrol. we pop back into the OP again for just a few minutes, then walk around the neighborhood for an hour or so and then head in for dinner.

of course after dinner the platoon leader (the LT) decides we need to put up big movable barriers to reinforce the station, which wont come until later tonight. so e rack out to get some sleep at 1800, and wake up at 1930. we go stand outside to wait for the barriers to arrive, and immediately see and hear machine gun tracer fire strike the riverbank 50 meters ahead of where my squad is put. not too exciting tho, and it eventuially quits as we wait in the darkness. a curfew was enacted for a few days, so traffic is null and we silently wait. finally the flatbed truck rolls up and deposits the 450-lb barrier, which we grab all together and muscle into place, followed by the second one. finally around 2130 we are done and go back inside to get a bit of sleep - my team has guard all day tomowwor.

maybe i am crazy, but it seems that this is a lot of last minute preparation that could and should have been done at least days ago, considering the size and scope of these elections. then again, nobody ever accused the Army of being too smart.
(least of all me... they are mostly dumb idiots i think)

we're moving again

2005-01-27T08:10:00.000-05:00

we are moving out today to the IP station. we will be assisting them with election security. should be a cool task - we are the only platoon from our company tasked out for this, and we will be right in the middle of the elections. i am looking forward to some excitement, a change of scenery, and perhaps some enjoyable chaos for once!

but before we moved out we had to do some details - burning trash and cleaning up and such. so we went outside and built this big-size bonfire and burned all the trash. me and Barnes took turns jumping through it while the other one threw diesel fuel on it to make it bigger, with the other guys (who were highly amused at our stupidity) cheering us on.

then i took off my shirt and started trying to do snowboard tricks over the fire - spins, flips, misty flips. i busted my ass a couple of times and then went for a big old Misty.... only i didnt quite finish the rotation and ate it pretty hard into a pile of burning trash, just a bit short of the far side of the fire. it would've been okay, but i landed in a puddle of burning diesel fuel and burned my arm. but its getting better now, doesnt hurt too much anymnore.

but ya gotta have fun when you can.

late night sneaky freaky mission today

2005-01-26T15:50:00.000-05:00

our mission today was not until late - 2200. we got plenty of extra sleep today and also the news that we would be moving out soon to help secure an Iraqi police station for the elections.

our night mission was to make a sector raid with a whole two three platoons and the cavalry sealing off the sector and provide perimeter security. we are looking for some bad guys who live here. we will gather up every male from 18-40 and check identities and question them.

we geared up at 2100 - plenty of flex-cuffs, ID tags for prisoners, Hooligan Tool to break in if they dont answer, not much else, lets travel light tonight, we wont be out long, mount NODs on helmet for night vision, ready, check, lock and load, Out we go.

silently we walk out the main gate, our huge line slowly filing out and keeping a good distance from the man in front in case a grenade is thrown. second platoon setup in place first, and then we jogged out to our street and arranged our fire-teams on assigned houeses.

squad leaders report readiness to the officers, and over the radio crackles the mission Go code word - "Irene, I say again, Mission is Irene".

This bad memory from BlackHawk Down sends a momentary chill down all our spines as we stand in the silent darkness - the power is sketchy at best and streetlights are dim and orange. "Irene" is heard and the silence is shattered by 16 doors silmultaneously getting knocked on and kicked in by 2 platoons. we rush in and quickly clear the house, making sure there are no threats or weapons. the family is huddled in one room, clutching each other fearfully. when the house has been cleared, we relax a bit, but not much. we are ordered to detain the 45 year old man and take him down the street. he will be back shortly after being asked a few questions, but the interpreter is elsewhere and we cannot tell them this with our limited Arabic, so tears start to flow and wailing begins when the wife and sister think we are arresting her husband. we take him outside, photograph him by his house, and sit him on the curb wth other detainees being collected up.

we move next door and repeat the process. we end up kicking in most doors. when the people here hear shouts and slamming and doors exploding at night, they know better than to investigate or answer. the best they hope for is that we pass their house by. long years of systematic wanton torture and murder by Saddem et al has left them demoralized and slightly apathetic about death. nevertheless, each time we detain someone, the drama arrives and much wailing and gnashing of teeth is heard. although it is difficult, we know dangerous insurgents are here and we must find them. so we take the males - although we let them dress, put on shoes and a coat first. most soldiers dont care but my team leader and I give them at least that much dignity - nobody wants to be arrested in his pajamas.

my team clears five houses before a halt is called. the detainees are all downstreet being talked to. most of them walk back after a few minutes, but a few we keep. we have found the bad guys.

operations like tonights are difficult at best. not because the are so dangerous or demanding as that it sucks to have to resort to such brutal police state tactics. so although i must do what i am ordered, i try my best to do it in a somewhat polite manner, as to not further alienate these people who already hate us enough.

got some new neighbors today

2005-01-25T07:38:00.000-05:00

the Iraqi National Guard has moved in with us....

the row of townhouses immediately outside our gates are mostly empty (not really a surprise, anyone interested in some cheap war-zone real estate?? heheh)

one old lady still lives there, as she has most of her life, and she aint leaving. but the other six are empty. the one at the corner we use to have an exterior OP, and today ING moved into the other four empty ones - about 30 or 40 of them.

should be interesting for a while. the rebels target teh ING much more than they do us. one reason is the ING are less trained and tend to stand around in big clusters, kind of like a big gang, and shoot rounds off in the air and not have any left to fight with. also, when they get shot at, they just stand there and fire back, instead of finding cover or something smart like that. so we should see a little more excitement from now on.

eventually they will be taking over from us, sometime when we get the sector locked down and can train them in how to be effective.

i was on guard all day again today, the normal schedule. guard, mission, guard, mission, two days off. not too bad all around.

hey hey the bad guys came out to play today

2005-01-24T07:06:00.000-05:00

we had guard duty yesterday. nothing terribly eventful, but they did let us get on the First Shift (0800-1400 and 2000-0200) which is nice cuz after the second part of it we go to bed at 2am and get somne sleep before the mission this morning.

we did find out that while we were at the FOB, another car got shot up at the palace. Apparently this week was Idiot Driver week in Baghdad, cause they seemd not to notice the big barriers and machine guns and drove in our perimeter anyhow!!! So the car went around the barriers and the guys up in the tower shot the hell out of it with the SAW machine gun, killing 1 guy and wounding 1 and wrecking the car. Man, I miss all the good stuff and fun times. It seems they are still probing us to try and get a vehicle-IED into us. Good luck... maybe that dissuaded them. (I DO however have some pictures of it, even tho I didnt get to see it...)

So after guard and a bit of sleep, we go out to patrol in Sector Bravo-1 - a real slummy trashy area about a kilometer from the palace. We left the palace and wandered along the riverbank, taking a different route to keep the rebels on their toes. Our plan was to walk down with the whole platoon, leave some guys and scouts and snipers in a building, and most of us walk back. theoretically leaving a team behind unknown to the enemy... THEORETICALLY anyhow.

Anyway, as we pulled in off the riverback and approaced the main avenue, some idiot with an AK jumped out from an alley in front of us, about 150 meters, and spit out his magazine in our general direction. i happened to be third in formation, and the wall of the house i was standing next to exploded into dust and chips raining doiwn on my helmet as the round he fired tore into the wall about two feet over me (man these guus really cant shoot.... they suck pretty bad). i dropped to a knee, rifle at the ready, but the guys in front of me and my squad leader in front of me were in my field of fire and I couldnt safely fire over them. Sgt H dropped quickly to a knee and sent about 20 rounds back at Ali Baba, trying to make the difficult shot past the kids playing and over the shoulder of some fat Iraqi lady in a red dress. He missed, and Ali jumped into the side alley. Sgt H yelled, and Sgt W and I kicked a door in of the house i was next to and ran upstairs to the roof for better sight, Sgt Waterman letting me lead as my bigger size let me bash through doors a big quicker than he.

within 30 seconds we were up on the roof, he grabbed right and I looked left down the street and into alleys. i caught a glimpse of the shooter's ligh shirt about 200 meters away and was able to squeeze off 1/2 dozen shots at him. one of them clipped him, but he wasnt badly injured and kept running off out of sight. i continued to fire as he ran, with no luck.

half a moment later, my Sgt hollered over to me to keep an eye out for a guy he spotted on a roof that way. i spotted the man - he was yelling down to the street, giving directions for more insurgents to come attack us. when he saw me raise my rifle his direction, he ducked back behind a wall. a moment later he popped out again, this time waving and talking on his cell phone. i squeezed the trigger and a red cloud sprayed around him as the rounds from my rifle slammed into his chest and he fell out of sight.

apparently by this time they had had enough, and no more fire came our way. we waited several minutes to be sure they were gone, and then flowed back downstairs. no one was wounded on our side, so we regrouped and dropped off the OP team and walked back toward the palace.

heheh we're famous !(well sort of i guess)

2005-01-22T11:58:00.000-05:00

haha we have three reporters with us full time now.

one CBS staff guy, he's old and was doing this since Vietnam, but he's way cool. so keep your eyes open on CBS - apparently they will be doing updates on specifically us every thursday - two days ago (Jan 20) was he second; last week Jan 13 was the first one. Barnes said his family saw all of us on TV (cool points!) raiding some Iraqi houses. that's kinda cool!

also i guess some of that guy's footage gets sent to CNN, cause they seen us there also.

so keep your eyes on the CBS evening news, especially on Thursdays's. And even cooler, Dan Rather is gonna be coming out to our palace next week for a day. That should be neat, methinks.

We also have some guy from a German TV station, i dunno where his footage goes. And then there is some wierd English dude who freelances his pictures - he mentioned Esquire and some other magazines, and he's got some good pictures of us already. I am gonna try to get him to slip me some good pics of my squad before he leaves.

These guys will be with us through the elections, so there should be some good coverage. If anybody happens to see my squad on TV and gets it on video tape, please let me know - that would be way cool to have.

In addition, here are some good places to get info, news, etc about us:
www.cnn.com
www.cbsnews.com
www.foxnews.com
www.defendamerica.gov
dallasnews.com - The Dallas Morning News - we are attached to a unit from 1-9 Cavalry, Ft Hood Texas, so "DMN" has an embedded reporter with them - Gretchen

When you are looking on these sites, search for any of the following:
82nd Airborne
haifa St.
Predator Palace
1/9 Cavalry

R & R at the FOB today, here are some links

2005-01-22T11:34:00.000-05:00

back to the FOB today for R&R...
our entire platoon came back today, cuz we have a huge mission for tomorrow. we are gonna go out and search this huge area for cars, buildings, and weapons and such. hopefully we can find as much as last time, that would be cool.

the CO said this morning that they shot up another car that was trying to get past our barricades to our gates. i guess they are still probing to see if they could vehicle-IED our little palace... good luck. never gonna happen.

here are a couple of links to some news articles i dug up today:
(none of them too recent, but mostly about when we first moved into the palace):

Paratroopers Dig In on Haifa Street
http://www.defendamerica.gov/articles/jan2005/a010705wm1.html

US Army's 82nd Airborne moves in on Baghdad's Wild West - TukishPress.Com
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?ID=35741

U.S. troops set up base in Baghdad's dangerous Haifa street - Indiana Publishing Co.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1078&dept_id=151021&newsid=13702011&PAG=461&rfi=9

standing on guard and talking about the Flood with Sgt UGG

2005-01-21T12:55:00.000-05:00

guard duty again...

man, we keep getting stuck with second shift... Sgt UGG promises next week we will have the first shift (0800 - 1400, and 2000-0200); which is much nicer as you actually get sleep before the next day begins.

the first shift (1400-2000) went quickly. Barnes and Sgt W and myself were all awake and spent the six hours talking and joking and mostly sharing guard, which makes for a nicer and faster shift. then back for dinner and a few hours of bed... back out at 0200...

Sgt UGG came with us tonight, and he and I passed my shift talking, joking and bullshitting. he is a Christian also, so we talked about all kinds of questions we had, evolution vs creationism, Noah and the Flood, the tower of Babel, and the fact that we were sitting in ancient Babylon today... kind of in one of the last years of the Crusades, if you think of it that way. (wow, that's a wierd thought... but seems to fit a bit)

boring mission and a little excitement later on

2005-01-20T12:50:00.000-05:00

Second mission day:
our only mission today was to go out and do like a PR thing. we packed up a couple of hundred backpacks with school supplies and went out to hand them out to local kids. one squad was out with Navy Seals on an OP, so we got to kick it back at the palace and hand out swag to the kids. we walked out around early afternoon and set up near the local corner store. like normal, at first the kids were a bit shy, wondering if we were gonna shoo them away or just shoot them. they soon saw us bring out the goods and we were soon surrounded by a gaggle of screaming iraqi kids. normally we see maybe two dozen kids in our sector - today there was at least fifty out, jumping on each other, yelling "Meester, Meester, give Me, give ME!", and running around trying to make out with the most free stuff from the americans. i was getting overrun by a pile so i tried the tactic of pulling backpacks out and flinging them ten meters away, which seemed to lessen the mob just a bit. finally all the packs were given out, but the kids still swarmed around, begging for anything and everything.

i went back to my corner and pulled security, and saw a shy little boy of about 8 or 9 walk up with his mother. he seemed much more hesitant to approach us - perhaps a relative of his had been killed or beaten by a soldier, who knows. i waved Hello to them, and he hid behind his mother, so i waved to them to come closer. the mother said, "Makoo? Makoo?" - "No More, NO More?" I said no, but pulled a bunch of candy from my pocket, which the boy shyly took as if i was gonna bite him.

after we got back to the palace, we stayed out in the yard conducting Ongoing Training - a class on the .50 caliber machine gun, which is a very large machine gun. we do these classes on a continual basis so even if we don't use the weapon all the time, hopefully we retain some level of familiarity with it if we ever DO need to use it. so we went over how to assemble, disassemble, and fire it, when all of a sudden we heard the .50 cal OUTSIDE the gates open up, followed by the 240B above us in the tower...

since we were all outside and in our IBA already armed, we ran out to the gates to see what happened. when we got there we found a small red car just barely rolling to a stop about twenty meters from the west gate, with many bullet holes in it. the driver had tried to make it past our barricades and defenses when he got lit up by one .50 cal and a 240B. we ran over and flex-cuffd him and dragged him out of the car, dripping blood everywhere. (at least he was alive - which you are lucky to be when the .50 cal opens up on you!)

we setup security and a squad leader searched the car, as i stood out the outside perimeter, watching the roofs and alleys for any other signs of attack. we found nothing in the vehicle, or on the driver. his only wounds were broken glass on his face, and a grazing wound from the 50 which had torn a flap of muscle from his thigh. we called out our medics, who stitched him up a bit, and loaded him into a track and took him to the IZ's hospital for further attention.

apparently this guy was about 16 years old, and hadnt been driving long. in addition, he wasnt from this area of baghdad and didnt know it too well. when he pulled over to ask directions, we guess that he talked to the insurgents, because they told him it was fine to drive right past our barriers and by our compound, and that he would be okay. well needless to say, that is untrue. apparently the bi gmetal signs saying Turn Around, and the huge green three foot tall metal barriers we placed out there didnt persuade him to turn around either. a hard lesson learned for him, but at least he is alive and not hurt badly - two inches up or right and the round would have severd his femoral artery and he would have bled to death in minutes.

so that was the big excitement for the day. then we went back to the palace and continued to play cards and lose money to each other. thankfully the cards mostly evens out, so very little money actually exchanges hands - we just keep track and it usually balances out. a good couple of days, a nice mellow evening, and an early bedtime, a rare luxury over here.

got to destroy a Chevy truck today

2005-01-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

first mission we had today:

went up into a highrise (bldg 54) to overwatch the slums as 1-9 cav guys did a few raids. for the first part we were covert and stayed well hidden, standing back from the windows so as to not be seen. after about 45 minutes, when the kids started staring and pointing up at us and yelling "Meester, Meester, give me Do-llars" we figured that they knew we were here. it didnt matter much now if they saw us, so we opened windows and blinds and occasionally moved out into the balconies for better viewing and security.

the time passed quickly as i idly chatted with the CBS staffer who was along with us. we talked about his job, our job, his really nice camera, different places he'd been, and how this war is different from the others he's covered. the biggest difference for him and other western reporters is the lack of roundness they have - now it is not safe enough for them to go out along into the streets and interview people or just look for good footage. the risk of being killed or taken hostage is too great, so they are limited to traveling along with the military on missions - which usually gets them good footage but leaves a pretty single sided perspective.

every few moments gunfire would erupt somewhere nearby, but not in our sector, and the reporter would ask a few questions about what i thought was going on, and i obliged with good-sounding bullshit. he also got some cool camera shots of me and my team on lookout, scanning our sector and stuff like that.

after an hour, the gunfire moved a bit closer and we heard and then saw the line of 7 Brad's move down Power Station Road on the way to setup security for the 19 troops as they raided. shortly after that the 1-9 cav guys came into view, cautiously moving through the crowded, smelly slums. i had a great view from the upper floor we were occupying and watched as they kicked out fire teams to secure the perimeter as the assault team bashed in the objective door and cleared and searched the building. i kept my attention on two alleys in particular, where i had noticed some iraqi kids poking their heads out, seeing the americans, and hiding again. this is unusual behavior - either the kids are gone for fear of getting shot or they run right up to you and beg for candy, dollars, pens, watches, grenades, whatever they can get. when they act furtively, hididng, peeking around corners, they are almost always gonnna
throw a grenade at you or something. so i kept my eye on these kids as 1-9 moved beneath me.

i made eye contact with one security team down there - always a good thing, so they expect me to be up here and dont see my weapon from the corner of their eye and shoot first, ask later! as they slowly moved through my sector, i noticed their horrible movement discipline - way too close together, not moving in sequence, clustered up, and not keeping security in the proper sectors. no wonder they are always getting blown up...

after the Brad's pulled back up, the 1-9 guys piled in and disappeared in a cloud of dust and screaming treads back to the FOB. we broke down our position and prepared to exfil - taking a different exit to prevent easy grenade attacks by going out the same way we went in. it made enough difference but not much, as about two hundred meters outisde the high-rise door a hollow-THUMP rose up with a cloud of dust - a cheap foreign grenade. at this point we are not even fazed - we simply maintain our security, perhaps even elevating our awareness just a bit, but not being too concerned. we dont need to be - unlike the 1-9 legs, we maintain proper patrol discipline and therefore have much safer times here.

when we got back to the palace and just took off our IBA, w then got called out on a Quick Response Force mission. apparently in downtown Baghdad, not too far from our palace, some driver blew up his vehicle with IED outside the police station. (lots of pics on the CBS news) we loaded up into 113s, hauled ass out there, adrenaline pumping with the prospect of real danger, perhaps even a legitimate firefight. when we got there, was a big clusterfuck.

all kinds of US forces, lots of ING (Iraqi National Guard) zooming around everywhere in pickup trucks and waving AKs every direction. They are our biggest threat - they have automatic weapons and tend to shoot anywhere and everywhere, even at us friendlies. so we got out there, and the place is swarming with ING and US forces, as well as Iraqi police. we jumped out and our two teams sat there and provided security on one of the intersecting streets for about an hour. we could have left but the CO wanted to come out just to look around, so we had to wait around for him to get there.

the guy blew himself up pretty well - there wasnt much left of his body, let alone his vehicle. CBS has a pretty good picture of the twisted hunk of charred metal that is his car, but they didnt show any pictures of his guts spread around the street, or the pieces of him that looked like raw steak chunks, not to mention the piles of mush we stepped in, or his single foot lying in the gutter, and they certainly didnt show any pictures of his severed head about 10 feet up in a tree, still dripping a little bit of blood. all in all the guy did a great job of blowing himself up and injuring and killing some others, but like normal, mostly Iraqis got hurt.

we could see that ING had the site pretty well secured, so we loaded back up into the 113s and headed back to the palace to prepare for our second mission of the day.

we got back around 1300, ate some quick MREs, and relaxed for a few. mission got pushed back to a bit later, so we got a little nap in there also (since we had just come off of guard that morning at 0800 with a mission at 0945).

we walked out kind of late in the afternoon with our cameramen in tow. (there wasnt enough room for them on the IED call). our mission was to go out and search all the vehicles within a certain sector. two Brad's pulled up on two ends of the street and blocked all traffic as well as providing some security for our search. our two squads split up, and i moved with Barnes tosearch our assigned vechicles. we were nice enough to let the people open the doors and trunks instead of bashing them in with my Hooligan tool, which they seemed to appreciate. we searched three cars and found nothing, so I was set in by an alley pulling security for the other teams as they continued searching. the big commotion behind me alerted me when they found a trunk full of grenades, which were promptly photographed and confiscated. then our LT dropped a Fire Frag in the engine - an incendiary grenade that will melt an entire car in minutes. the engine quickly melted, then caught on fire, and soon the
gas lines caught and black clouds were billowing up into the sky. its not like hollywood - cars rarely explode on their own, they simply burn very hot and dirty.

the cameramen were loving this good find and great footage. the owner of the car parked next to the burning one (he only parked about 18 inches away) came running out and wanted to move his car, but his hood was already on fire and we could not safely allow him to move it.

once all that hullabaloo died down, i was sent with Barnes to search a nearby orange 1968 Chevy truck. i ripped open the door, threw the seat forward, and was rewarded for my patience by discovering a burlap rice sack - only instead of being filled with rice it was filled with a mortar tube and tripod - probably the same one that had been used to launch the daily nortar attacks on our palace. this greatly pleased my squad leader (and the camera guys) who ordered us to "make sure this truck never moves again" which we gleefully set about doing. we pulled out our knives and tools and very quickly reduced the truck to a mish-mash of flat tires, cut wires, and sliced hoses - the best we could do in about two minutes.

we continued to search the neighborhood. our LT found an RPG round, brand new in the
plastic, next to the truck in a pile of sheet metal. we thoroughly searched every vehicle in our sector, and also a couple of abandaned buildings. after running down alleys, ransacking vehicles, breaking in abandoned cars, clearing and searching a couple of buildings and the surrounding grounds, and generally looking in every nook and cranny, we had amassed a fair size pile of bad-guy weapons and were covered in sweat, but satisfied.

our last objective was to search the perimeter of a boys school, which we did without incident until we found ourselves in a locked courtyard. Sgt. UGG asked me if I wanted to break the lock, since i was the one humping around the heavy Hooligan Tool. without hesitation my team leader jokingly ordered me: "Bob, destroy!!!" (They have taken to calling me Bob, apparently its easier than my last name. thats fine by me) and with the cameras rolling i ran up to the gate and bashed the lock open - one last burst of energy and satisfaction to round out a successful day. We don't have too many days like this one...

boring boring guard day again

2005-01-18T08:11:00.000-05:00

guard day today, of course since we are just coming off of our rotation from the FOB for R&R we get stuck with the late shift - 1400-2000, and then 0200-0800 in the morning. that sucks. i sat up in the guard tower all day today for the first shift, manning the machine gun. it's nice up there becuz you don't have to talk to anybody and nobody comes to bug you, so you get a few hours of time almost to yourself - a rare commodity in the army.

then we had a break until 2am, so we got dinner and racked out for a few hours, to be woken up at 0130 for our second shift - manning the machine gun down by the river.

back at the FOB for a day...

2005-01-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

hey hey,

back here at the FOB to shower for the first time in a while, surf the web for a while, chill out, and relax.

here's the latest news:
- lost my digital camera last night; when i went to bed it was attached to my body armor, when i woke up it was gone. i am pretty sure i put it there but when we go back to the palace tomorrow AM we will search thoroughly. hopefully it turns up and someone didnt walk off with it (considering the only people in the palace and specifically in my room are my platoon...)

- haha so far the elections are gonna be a joke; i highly doubt many people know how to vote or who is running or what they are voting for...

- updated this blog a bunch today, re-arranged the left side to be more useful and added some links over there; two news sites, one blog of a lady who lives here in Baghdad, and a link to DjCirus.com, a website made by a guy in my platoon who has more free time than I do (he temporarily lost his hearing in a firefight, so is staying back at the FOB till it returns...)

- many thanks to all for the packages and goodies that have been sent, they are much appreciated - especially cookies (homemade or store-bought; we are not picky here!) which usually last about 7 or 8 minutes before total demolishment by a bunch of hungry soldiers eatin Army chow all the time!

- internet here is acting up, so i have not been able to get into any of my email acounts today, so sorry for no emails this week. but again, many many many thanks for all support, thoughts, prayers, and packages (coffee and Oreo's - YAAAYYYY!!!! what else do you need? nothing!)

i think all we do here is pull guard... ARRGGHH

2005-01-16T11:41:00.000-05:00

guard duty again...

man, we keep getting stuck with second shift... Sgt UGG promises next week we will have the first shift (0800 - 1400, and 2000-0200); which is much nicer as you actually get sleep before the next day begins.

the first shift today (1400-2000) went quickly. Barnes and Sgt W and myself were all awake and spent the six hours talking and joking and mostly sharing guard, which makes for a nicer and faster shift. then back for dinner and a few hours of bed... back out at 0200...

Sgt UGG came with us tonight, and he and I passed my shift talking, joking and bullshitting. he is a Christian also, so we talked about all kinds of questions we had, evolution vs creationism, Noah and the Flood, the tower of Babel, and the fact that we were sitting in ancient Babylon today... kind of in one of the last years of the Crusades, if you think of it that way. (wow, that's a wierd thought... but seems to fit a bit)

got attacked today

2005-01-16T10:59:00.000-05:00

so today is supposed to be the day my platoon does labor around the palace - cleaning the outhouses and burning the waste, burning the trash, setting up and serving meals, basically all the housekeeping stuff to keep our lovely little palace (home to 160) running smoothly.

but first we had to go out and provide extra security for a mission 3rd platoon was doing. their task was to conduct a "Cordon and Search" - which means they seal off an area and search houses of suspected insurgents for weapons or whatever. apparently today they needed some extra manpower on the perimeter, so they called us.

most of my squad accompanied a team of Navy SEALs who set up a sniper position in the Carter high-rises. my team and my squad leader went down into the slummy section we were securing, where we set up an overwatching position on the roof of a three story building. up that high we could watch our sector for suspicious activity from up close.

the infil and setup and first 1.5 hours went as normal - walk into sector, nod and smile at the locals, who nod and smile back and curse us under their breath, pick a good house, and go up onto the roof. every building here has roof stairs - the roof is used almost as another living space in this overcrowded city.

as we watched the people wander around the streets doing their thing, we didnt notice
anything particularly noxious, until we got a radio call from our squad's other team in the high rise. they had noticed a 30-ish man go into a shop and load his pockets with what appeared to be grenades. they called it in and we were sent out to investigate.

we tramped down the stairs, through the hallways filled with trash, and ventured out to check it out. after passing several alleys (gotta watch out there, they like to toss grenades over walls from adjoining alleys...) we found the right shop, and went in and quickly searched it. the 10x15 foot woodworking shop was nearly empty except for several cabinets under construction, so we crossed the street to check out the junkyard / car shop.

i parked myself by the gate to anyone from coming in or leaving and kept an eye on passing traffic - who in turn kept a wary eye on me to see if i was going to unexpectedly open fire! my team searched around for 4 or 5 minutes, only to find nothing but a sleeping dog, a couple of playing kids, and some nuts and bolts in the mechanic's pockets. (go figure!)

we turned to leave and my team passed by me as i continued to pull security at the gate. i began to cross the road when a small PFFT-POP (a grenade fuse) was followed by the hollow WHAMBAM of a grenade being tossed into the junkyard we just left. two little kids, probably about 10 or 12, dressed all in black like the rebels love to do, threw two frags from the alley, over the wall into the junkyard by where we were standing. (talk about good timing on our squad leader's decision to go!)

everyone ran to the nearest wall to get cover. i spun around to look where we just came from and a huge cloud of smoke and dust was still mushrooming up. Sgt UGG (squad leader) ran back across to check it out, and we followed him back toward the junkyard. he turned right and our team sprinted dead-out for the next alley, where the frag came from. we stacked up on the wall and he and my team leader poked around to look. he barely saw the two kids poke their heads out - they saw us and disappeared into the maze of trash-filled alleys.

we all wanted to follow, but Sgt UGG got the call on the radio from higher up - Time to Exfil. We turned around and headed out of our sector. as we walk our heads and eyes scan all sectors - high left, high right, rear, constantly surveying and checking for any threats. as we passed the junkyard gate we caught a glimpse of one of the small children who just moments earlier had been playing, laying on the ground bleeding and twitching, as his father clutched his head and wailed.

we quickly made our way to re-join our other troops and made our way the several hundred meters back to our fortified palace.

that's the really shitty part about this war. today was a prime example of the senselessness and atrocty of the insurgents. they have no qualms about giving two pre-teenagers grenades to throw at us, not caring if those kids get killed accidentally, or who the grenade hurts or kills besides us.

plus when we got back we had to do all of our housekeeping chores.... that sucks. that means i get to go empty out the outhouse, put all of the poop in a big pit, pour diesel fuel on it, and light it on fire... well at least i get to burn something today.

goodie goodie another "covert mission"

2005-01-15T06:38:00.000-05:00

yay, mission day for us. what covert really means is to hide inside somewhere, don't get to shoot anyone or do anything productive. we just sit there and watch. its kind of creepy - like being a peeping tom or something.

we had guard yesterday, so finished our guard shift at 0200 this morning, and then had to prep for our 0300 mission. we geared up and walked out at 0330 in the cold pre-dawn darkness (man this is Iraq - its supposed to be hot!!! Arrgh!)

we went back to Talil Square today, one of the deadliest intersections for Americans in Baghdad. we set up in a high-rise we'd been in before - as evidenced by the note on the door of the apartment:"Plees, key is under carpit" (sic)so we would not break their door again! this apartment belonged to a middle aged Christian Iraqi lady. we set up (with strict instructions from the squad leader not to steal anything). the other joes wandered around poking through her stuff - i got stuck with the first guard shift overlooking the river and bridge.cold, cold, cold... so i bundled up in my woobie and sat down.1 hour of guard...1 hour of sleep...2 hours guard, 2 hours sleep, 2 hours guard...2 hours off, then break down and walk back to the palace.
another exciting day in the US Army!

of course everyone was bored, tired and frustrated when we got back, so naturally we sat down to gamble away our paychecks over a card game.
i partnered with Heuer (remember idiot me, first rule is: only two games with Heuer, then he starts to suck...) and we were up $40 after the first two games of spades. then played a third one, and of course, Heuer gets cocky and goes downhill and pisses me off and we lost $50 - but only down $10 for the night. not too bad for a few hours of excitement. well of course i was pissed at Heuer so went outside in my sweatshirt to cool off.

as i sat outside, i took a good look around and saw how much we had really built up our palace. i was still pissed off at the army though, so just to spite them i snuck down by the river and outside the compound. remember, the guards are supposed to be watching this! so after sneaking around a bit outside the walls (ooops, shoulda brought my rifle! haha) i snuck back in (quick, they're not looking, if i get caught i am REALLY screwed) and went back upstairs. so much for perimeter security... stupid 1-9 Cavalry dorks.

upstairs everyone was pissed off and talking trash, so i sat back and watched until Heuer came over to my battle buddy and they started grappling. i stayed out until they double teamd Barnes (my buddy and team-mate) so I picked up Heuer and threw him across the room and started beating him. i had Heuer until i noticed Miller on my back applying a vicious choke-hold, so when i finally was about to pass out i tapped out, and miller jumped off. meanwhile the rest of Heuer's squad was assaulting Barnes and my Sgt, so I ran over there, jumped back in, and threw a couple of people off. then i grabbed Storms and body slammed him on the radio operators bunk (oops he's still sleeping and we just broke his bunk underneath him heehee) and the brawl continued until everyone was too tired to fight anymore.

one black eye, a broken cot, one pair of broken headphones, and a huge mess later, and of course the platoon Sgt and Lt are watching with huge grins as we destroy each other.

we clean up the mess, and mostly people are okay with each other again now after blowing off some steam and getting out some agressive energy... nothing like a good thumping to let out some anger.

we found out today that the QRF (Quck Response Force) mission we did last week was a huge failure. apparently the next day CNN reported that an Iraqi police chief and another police were found shot dead on 17th Street not far from where we had been...

that really sucks, if only the Army could pass information down the food chain a bit faster perhaps we could have made a difference, but then again maybe not. all we can do is try our best and follow orders sometimes...
back to the FOB in two more days for showers, the first showers in two weeks. they have hot water there too!

on guard all day today...

2005-01-14T07:01:00.000-05:00

got exterior guard this time. that means we go just outside the secure palace perimeter and set up and OP (Observation Post) to monitor if anyone's gonna come get us. yeah right, like the rebels are that dumb to come attack our palace...

our shift is from 0800 to 0800 tomorrow, when we will have a mission.

my team is assigned from 1400-2000, so we go to No Name OP, and settle in. we pull 1 hour shifts with 2 hours off in between. on guard we sit on the balcony and watch over the nearby streets for anything suspicious. its important not to get complacent and actually watch - last shift they noticed some suspicious guys circling around on a scooter, so they went out and picked them up. chemical hand swabs revealed they had recently handled TNT - probably making IEDs or something. so we took them in they got interrogated.

after 2000, go back and eat dinner, and then get the word that our mission leaves out at 0400 tomorrow morning. so our guard is shortened (yay) but we go right into mission with no sleep (boo). we sleep for 2 hours, prep our stuf for mission, and finish guard from 2330 to 0300. gonna be tired tomorrow...

actually a good mission today, got to kick in some door and break some stuff

2005-01-13T07:27:00.000-05:00

0200 comes around all too early, especially when i am still on guard from the night before.

run upstairs, pack for todays mission - a covert insertion into an enemy-held sector we are always getting contact from, then wait quietly all day and spring out at 1300 to surprise and search them.

we walk out at 0300 with our whole platoon silently following behind us. the dead silence is eerie, considering we are in the middle of a city of millions. as we walk near the Tigris River to avoid being seen on the streets, we navigate around obstacles using our green-tinged NOD to see in the near-total blackness. (psst, hey, watch out for that wire!)

we arrive at the objective - a deserted maternity ward held by Iraqi friendlies. our lead squad clears the entry and we slowly file in, past piles of twisted steel junk and old desks and who knows what... every inch of this city is covered in filth and trash. its disgusting sometimes...

up to the fourth floor, and we all pile into one room with some chairs and floor space. after getting yelled at for making too much noise, we settle down to sleep until noon...

i crash out and wake up only once to pee in our makeshift toilet - a red plastic bucket - and go back to sleep. wake up again around noon, everyone is eating an MRE, so i pull out some snacks and quietly chow down.

after chow i wander around a bit in the deserted building, through the empty rooms filled with wierd medical benches and equipment, empty incubators, bookshelves with books crumbling to dust... kind of spooky but i like the sense of desolation. i find my way back into an abandoned corner and find a souvenir - a box of Russian gas masks. i take one to give to someone back home as a gift from baghdad, and go back to wait with my guys.

at 1300 we move out and wait in the courtyard for several minutes, then (with full body armor and accessories on) thunder out in a dead run across the mid-day alleys and streets and trash heaps to secure our sector and search it. we quickly set up security and after some confusion about which alley we are in (umm is it 14 or 13?) we stack up outside a door, kick it in, and stram into the house. we enter quietly, my team flowing in with the comfortable ease from many hours spent drilling and doing urban missions. quiet, that is, until we see the inhabitants, whereupon we change to screaming "Get Down Get Down" and although they dont speak english, the barrels of our rifles seem to enhance their understanding somewhat and they hit the ground. we put them all in one room of this terrorists house and commence the destruction.

the command comes from above:
"Make this house an example - destroy it."

Happy to comply for once, me and Barnes my battle buddy start searching. Hajii will hide guns, grenades, anything - and anywhere. Rifles in sacks of rice, grenades in the freezer, IED's in plaster walls. So our very thorough search is thorough indeed, and when we are done, there is little intact left inside the house. Piles of now-trash items fill the rooms as we search every nook and cranny, but this time they have beat us again and moved the goods elsewhere.

Undismayed, we have the whole alley locked down by other squads so we continue to search every house - about 20 total. There is a German TV reporter video-ing us, another random TV camera, and some English freelance photog running around snapping shots of everything, so naturally our juices are flowing as we knock on doors and politely request permission to search. The other houses are (possibly) not terrorists, so we take more care in there and dont really break much - intentionally that is. When you are wearing IBA armor, you are about twice as large as normal, so a bit clumsy, but we try to not break stuff.

Sgt UGG is in rare form in front of the cameras, even for him. Locked doors last only seconds before him and his Hooligan Tool, or just his booted foot and huge Mule Kick. He even takes out one entire doorway - frame and all - and leaves it in the dusty filthy alley as we search.

From house to house, run inside, search (man, these people are disgusting - it reminds me of medieval stories i've read - clay houses, sewage everywhere, open roofs, filth and trash strewn about...) then on to the next one. Houses are close together here, and we climb up to roofs and look for weapons in the sea of abobe, crumbling ramshackle buildings. One brick and mud wall collapses as we break down the door, raining rubble down into the courtyard below and missing Barnes' head by inches (whew that was close, watch out Barnes!!!)

We do find some disks with intel on them, and some computer boards, so we take them to be checked out. Probably nothing, but better safe than sorry, in these days of IED's built into sidewalks.

1.5 hours of search-and-destroying leaves us smoked, sweating profusely, and tired. The Bradley's have pulled up and command comes squawking over commo to get out, so we jog our tired legs out into the more-open streets towards the vehicles. Of course, mine is the furthest away, so we another 1/2 KM to run. Ramps drop as we approach, and we pile in, soaked with sweat and bone-tired, but grinning and exhilirated at the chance to actually get out and do something and break some stuf and hopefully get some good intel...

Let's go back and rack out, we're all tired...

guard day... again

2005-01-12T07:22:00.000-05:00

jeez dont they ever let us sleep in ever?

got up early and left the FOB at 0700, just in time to return to the palace to take over guard duty today. our shift is from 1400-2000 and then from 0200-0800 toimorrow morning.

interior guard today, which means we are manning the towers inside the palace.

not much happened first shift, except around evening / dusk time one of our guys noticed someone placing a sketchy bag near our palace and leaving. so we called EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal - the Army Bomb Squad) and they came and blew it up in place. kinda cool, big explosion... but i'm getting b0red. someone needs to come attack us or something. oh well, at least a mission tomorrow.

around 2100 we got the news our mision starts at 0300 tomorrow, so we will be releived from guard early and go straight out...

more to come tomorrow i am sure, looks like a good mission.

a good mission with bad results

2005-01-11T13:11:00.000-05:00

i was out burning the poop from the outhouses today... i tell ya, i am doing great things for my country, eh?!?!?

after all that was done, what a sweaty mess i am... go upstairs in the palace and chill out for about five minutes when the entire palace kicks into action - squad and platoon leaders running around barking orders, everyone gearing up all of a sudden.

looks like we have a QRF mission right now. someone higher up just got some intel that anti-Iraqi forces (AIF) are holding somebody hostage in our sector somewhere.

so we gear up and line up by the gate... when everyone is ready and accounted for we head out into the streets. for some reason right now the sky is a wierd orange-grey color, like thick smoke... it has a strange feel about it, like an impending apocalypse or something.

we get a quick brief on the mission and route (you go here, we go this way, surround this objective and rescue the dudes inside...) and once out element is outside and together we take off in a hurried walk that quickly turns into a full-on run (with full combat gear on, about 60-70 lbs of junk, ammo, armor, etc). we sprint through narrow alleys, dodging trash piles and trying not to step in the river of raw sewage flowing down the middle to drain into the Tigris. (cradle of civilization, eh???)

its slight chaos - everyone at squad leader level and above is shouting orders and trying to tell us (we are the lead team) where to go, to turn... the captain steers us wrong, right into a dead end and into someones house. she looks confused and a bit terrified until we figger out we cant go that way and exit just as quickly as we barged in...

we make our roundabout running way onto a neighboring road and around the objective. as we run the dusk deepens to evening and finally to twilight. (man, i really need to pull over and pee, Sgt! "Shut up and Keep Running!!!") about the time i figger i am gonna pee my pants and the cramp in my side is feeling like a red-hot poker, we stop and set up local security. i am walking point this time (a cool thing, as well as a big honor) so i keep a watch straight down the street in the direction we are heading.

command is still trying to locate the building the alleged hostages are in, unsuccessfully. in the meantime, we have set up a temporary vehicle checkpoint - perhaps the bandits are calling in reinforcements or trying to escape. for the moment no cars are driving down this road... but in a few seconds one comes roaring up at around 35-40 mph. i step out in the street about 30 meters in front of him, levelling my rifle at his windshield and turning on my blazing tac-lite on my rifle. as soon as he sees that i am an american soldier, he lights up the brakes and reverses with a speed i did not know could be attained from such a small junky car!

we are now ordered to stop and search all cars... cool, at least this will be interesting we think! we take up semi-concealed positions beside the road (i am behind a broke down junker sitting there) and in a couple of moments another taxi comes flying up the road. this time i wait until he is about 10 meters away and i ump out in front of him, screaming my head off, my tac-lite blazing in his face (i just hope he can see the tac-lite thru his headlights!?!) and the taxi screeches to a stop about 1-2 meters from my feet. he attempts to make a 3point turn and run, butmy squad leader yells to search him. at this point, i have had enough - i spent all day burning shit in a hole, then missed dinner and had to get in full battle rattle and run 2 miles down the worst section of baghdad while idiot command sends us wrong places. so i run at the turning taxi, screaming "Stop motherfucker! Get the fuck out of the vehicle!" Apparently my calm and polite request did not persuade him to stop, cause he makes a more violent attempt to turn around; at which point i reach the side of the car. i think the fist i put through his window convinced him that we were serious, cause he hit the brakes and stopped short. i ripped the door open and stuck my rifle in his face - hopefully that will terrify him enough to not run over my feet. with my free hand i reach in and grab the taxi driver by the shirt and lunge backwards with my fist full of his shirt. he comes flying out of the taxi and stumbles to the ground in front of me. after he tried to run, we are not taking any chances, so i drop the full weight of my knee into his back, pinnning him to the ground, while i keep my weapon on the car's other occupants as my buddies come running up to help search. they secure the driver and search the vehicle; i moved a bit further down the road to stop oncoming traffic. within a few moments we have a 1/2 dozen vehicles at our hasty checkpoint waiting to be searched. one minivan catches my attention - its full of younger males - too full. they flash me cocky grins as my tac-lite illuminates the interior. this isn't right - they are normally not this arrogant to us... but due to time constraints we couldnt search thoroughtly and had to let them go. (the same van later returned, empty...) and those guys were seen in the vicinity of the bad news we later got.

second squad was busy searching a house nearby, finding a small cache of AK-47s and some grenades, but no hostages, so we packed up and walked a different route back to the palace to prevent attacks.

a little bit of a rush, but man that combat run sucks in full gear, especially when i am running point and have to set a nasty pace cuz the whole platoon is behind me and needs plenty of room. turns out that the intel came down too late for us to do anything - some rebels had kidnapped an Iraqi police chief and his wife and killed them and left their bodies on 17th street - a good ways away from where our intel sent us...

that kind of news is always a bummer to hear, especially when it is apparent that with quicker action from the top of the chain of command, perhaps two lives could have been saved or insurgents caught and this type of thing prevented.

lwell got my first big OOPS today

2005-01-11T11:21:00.000-05:00

so today is our turn to go back to the rear, shower, clean up a bit, check email, etc.

somehow we still get stuck setting up and serving breakfast chow... arrgh it is supposed to be someone else's duty today...

after that, about 0845, we got outside with whatever we were taking, and loaded up into the APC (Armored Personnel carrier - basically a tin can on tracks) and drove over here to the FOB Independence.

one of our guys needed to see a doctor (not a medic) for an ear infection, so we arranged a little trip to the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad - the closest thing to normal american life we will see here (a bigger PX with actual stuff we need, see Finance and get some cash, etc etc) so some of us jumped on the chance to go, as well as drive around in Humvee's and see a little of Baghdad. mostly we drive around in APCs or Bradleys so we cant see out and dont really get to see much of the city except our two bases and on our foot patrols. so i was happy to go to the Green Zone.

i even jumped at the chance to sit up top of the Humvee in the turret and man the 240B gun as we drove - seemed very cool thing to do. i had to bug my squad leader into letting me, since i am not normally the machine gunner, but he let me.

so after getting a quick haircut and picking up / dropping off laundry, we gear up to go, and i climb up into the turret. of course they give me the gun with the broken mount, so you have to hold it up as you drive, and the gun hasnt been oiled either. so as i am loading, it is not cooperating at all. nonetheless, i am doing my best to load it when suddenly.... BRAT-BRAT-BRAT-BRAT-BRAT goes my gun...

OH SHIT says me.... and IMMEDIATELY everyone else around us looks up and the squad leader starts screaming What Happened?

yeah, i had an Accidental Discharge - AD for short. One of the very worst things you can do in the Army. seems that with my bad luck on getting a poorly maintained gun along with the 240 not being my regular weapon, it shot off a few rounds. thankfully, i had the muzzle pointed in a safe direction, one of the things they drill into you until its unconscious. it paid off today - just a 1/2 dozen rounds shooting off into the sky.

nonetheless, it remains to be seen how much trouble i will get in for my AD. my squad leader takes it very personally, and he will probably get in a bit of trouble also. that is how the army works. he was the one responsible for allowing me to get up there. so there will be a little bit of poo thrown my way. not a lot, since i do my job well normally and have made a good impression on my teammates and superiors, but definitrely i have landed myself in a puddle of it this time. only time will tell what they will choose to do to me.

oh well, not much i can do now, so no sense worrying about it. just fly under the radar for a while and keep doing good things and it will all blow over eventually. the green zone was fun, it was nice to see other americans for a bit, had a slice of pizza for the first time since november also.

we go back to the palace tomorrow morning to continue patrolling and missions... should be more fun to come soon...

well we did indeed get a mission today, kind of

2005-01-10T13:19:00.000-05:00

okay we got our mission:
apparently there was gonna be about a 2,000 man operation going on in our sector. ING (Iraqi National guard) and other Iraqi *good guys* (altho they occasionally shoot at us too) are supposed to flush out some bad guys from the next sector over into ours, where we would set up OP's and shoot the bad guys running from Iraqi good guys.

so we walked out in force, our whole platoon (about 40 guys) plus another platoon. we traveled down Haifa St. (the main artery here, full of bad guys and tall apt. buildings for them to drop frag grenades on us from) and set up our OPs on the tops of a 1/2 dozen buildings. we got lucky and got on top of the one with the best view of the area, of Talil Square, and our sector. we set up on top of the eight story building and... did nothing. we watched our sector for three and a half hours, sitting up there in the cold wind and light drizzle. seems that when we roll out in force, the bad guys know better than to mess with us. but when we go out in squad level (9 guys) or less, we make contact every time. oh well, maybe next time...

so we pack it up and march back to the palace.

sure enough, later on that day, we hear large bursts of automatic fire (apparently from ING fighting the rebels) in our sector, but too bad, no fun for us today, the bad guys dont wanna come out and play.

maybe next time...

boring boring boring... two days on guard now

2005-01-09T13:19:00.000-05:00

okay so i know it has to be done, especially as seeing how we occupy a palace in what is widely considered the worst part of baghdad right now, but still, two days in a row of pulling guard really sucks.

at least we were only on guard for 12-14 hours per day, better than the 18 of last time. we pulled 6 on, 6 off shifts for both days. nothing really happens while you are on guard, except that you get to sit in a little bunker, be really bored and try not to sleep, and wait for the bad guys to break in.
just kidding, the bad guys are not that dumb. instead of breaking in, all they do is sit across the river and fire random shots at us. kind of breaks the monotony, but not too exciting.
**sigh** at least tomorrow we will have a mission, allegedly...

HOLY COW the Army actually made progress today

2005-01-06T10:54:00.000-05:00

ok back in the palace now, after a day back at the FOB to rest and clean up. now we rotate back into the mission cycle.

after we got up and ate breakfast at the FOB, we jumped in the tracks and rolled (clanked?!?) back to Predator Palace, ready to go for another week. we got in and unpacked our clean laundry, and got the word to get ready to go out on mission soon.

around 1000 we walked out through Saddamia, our sector of high-rises and slums. as we walked out the neighborhood kids surrounded us as normal, asking for pens, flashlights, money, candy, anything they could get. and as usual, we ignored them. sometimes i remember to bring candy to hand out, but i didnt have any time today, so they were out of luck.

our main objective today was to walk around with the interpreter and survey people to see how many will actually vote this month's elections. according to the interpreter, when the Army asks, about 2/3 will vote. when he asks on his own, not in uniform, about 1/5 will vote. after all, if they will be killed for voting, there is not much we can offer in the way of vague promises of a better life, eh?

anyway, my squad was tasked with providing security for the interview team. we also had one squad set up along the river, watching the river, the far side, and the big bridge a few hundred meters away. the last squad was at the far end of the street by the bridge, watching for direct approaches from neighboring sectors.

all went well for the first forty minutes. then we suddenly heard the loud rasp of an AK-47 spitting rounds somewhere not too far away. the radios were babbbling as leadership tried to figure out what was going on. we took what cover we could find and everyone looked for the source of the fire. ya konw, finding cover takes on a sudden and previously-unknown urgency when the dust explodes from the building next to you and you have no idea where the rounds are coming from.

meanwhile, 2nd squad, at the end of the street, took some initiative and returned fire and moved up a bit. 3rd squad, by the river, laid down enough fire to suppress the enemy so he couldnt move too much. then we (\1st squad) moved up to the base of the bridge, and finally got word from above to conduct a hasty aqssault on the warehouse we suspected fire was coming from. our SAW gunner and I dashed across the open streets, under the bridge, and took up positions by a wall, covering the assault team's rear and flank from enemy attack. (damn, i got left out of the fight AGAIN...l)

our B Team and some of 2nd Squad moved in and cleared the warehouse, after breaking down the door and several locked gates with our handy dandy Hooligan Tool. they gatherred all the occupants and quickly searched them and then zip-tied their hands. in a situation like this, its impossible to tell who has what weapons. in addition, one of the favorite methods the rebels use is to pay a child $100 to throw a grenade at us. so quite often we will find frags in kid's pockets. this necessitates securing EVERYONE in the building, regardless of age or gender. not nice, but one of the realities of this war. so we zip tied the men, and zipped the childrens' wrists to their mothers hands (heheh talk about kids tying you down haha sorry bad joke heehee) and searched them all.

after searching them and the interpreter asking some questions, we secured two men to bring back and question further, and conducted a search of the warehouse. this time we didn't find much, but that doesn't mean anything. we have taken fire from this warehouse before, and often old men will stand outside waiting to pay kids and give them frags to throw at us, so we know if we raid it often enough, we will hit pay dirt sometime.

after all that, we exfil-ed back to the palace for a break and some chow.

later, around 1400, we went back out to finish the survey. this time we were tasked to pull secutrity on the far corner of our sector, just by the bridge. this promised fun, as every time we hang out on this corner we make contact.

we rolled out and established a perimeter and began our overwatch of the survey team. all 9 of us were watching down the street a ways, keeping an eye on the suspicious groups forming and disbanding and reforming elsewhere. we could see a group about 300 meters away, clustering around an alley and building courtyard. even with our 7x binoculars, we couldnt see much, but knew they were up to something. the group grew larger, and often would look our way and gesture wildly. our team leaders and squad leader were constantly checking on us, and we never took eyes off the threat.

for a while nothing happened, except the evening call to prayer from the surrounding local mosques. when one calls, the others immediately begin to try to outdo him, in both volums, anti-american ferocity and length of singing... its kind of cool sounding but gets old cuaes they do it five times a day; as well as occasionally ranting in Arabic which the translator says is urging them kill all the infidel invaders. the evening call to prayer ended... and then they quit praying and started spraying!

because before we knew it, the sudden loud BOOM of an RPG whistled down the street from their direction and struck the bridge about 20 meters in front of us. good thing Hajii really cant shoot, cause an RPG will do some damage. as soon as it exploded, AKs began coughing rounds toward us. immediately my squad leaped into action and behind cover, returning a hail of 5.56 toward the rebels. i sent about 1/2 a magazine down and then switched over to my M203 grenade launcher. i already had a HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) round ready to go, so i ran up to the forward position by my team leader, hollered out "203!!!" and let one rip. the hollow THOONK of the 203 launching was quickly replaced by the sharp CRACK_THUD of its landing on top of a car right next to the alleyway the rebels were using. my team leader screamed for one more, so i adjusted my trajectory just a bit and dumped another one down that way, missing slightly this time. (well if you can call overshooting by 150 meters missing slightly... actually the round disapperared from sight and we are all like " umm where did that one go" until we heard it blow something up somewhere...) then he hollered again with a new target for me and i threw a fourth 203 HEDP onto the same car. by this time the rebels had ceased fire and were probably running for their lives, due to the amount of HEDP and M4 rifle and SAW ammo heading their way. nevertheless, we continued to pump rounds downrange, taking turns firing with our battle buddies. that way there is a constant stream of fire without one guy being all out of ammo, or overheating his weapon.

i grabbed the other 203 gunner (didnt want him to miss out of the fun) and gave him my target - the little white car that was suffering the brunt of our attack. he THWOOMPed one out and nailed the balcony above the car, raining rubble, sandstone, and dust down on top of it...

CEASE FIRE, CEASE FIRE, CEASE FIRE... yells the squad leader.

we pause, and the adrenaline flow ebbs just a little bit, leaving hearts racing and muscles twitching, but everyone is safe, no one hurt. we once again scan the sector, but we see nothing. the guys on the roofs cant see anyone either. that's a pretty typical attack - they pop up, spray some rounds or an RPG, and burn out before we can really counter attack. they know they wont win a conventional war, so they use guerilla tactics. our platoon quickly regrouped, assesed the situation, and since no more action was forthcoming and the firefight kind of dampened the survey prospects, we headed back tot he palace, walking through the empty streets as dusk deepened.

first week in predator palace

2005-01-05T12:32:00.001-05:00

hey hey we are back here at the FOB for a day of R and R
or at least a day of showering, eating hot chow, checking email, and stuff like that. our rotation is four days of missions and guard duty, one day of working around the palace, and then one day back here. internet time is limited now, so here is a quick breakdown of what we've been doing:

today, jan 05:
came back to the FOB, showered, got a haircut, got paid, checked email, all that junk we cant do out at the palace. i am also gonna pick up my CD player and some more gear to make life at the palace a bit more comfortable.

jan 04:
we got up early and served breakfast, then assisted 3rd platoon with a quick mission: we pulled perimeter security while they searched a section of the slums for a set of twin iraqis who were paying children to throw grenades at us. (they got em... yay)

had details all day. most of the guys moved sandbags, but i did my own thing and worked on some other projects like taking out trash and cleaning up the area and playing with the Bobcat Loader the engineers left sitting out. (haha they should have known better with me around) technically one is supposed to have a class and be certified to run the loader and forklift and that junk but i just go ahead and jump on it and drive their stuff around when we need it for our work, and so far no one has said anything. the captain is cool with it since he knows i am not such an idiot and wont damage the heavy equipment, but our first sergeant is more of a jerk and would probably flip his lid... but my team leaders, squad and platoon sgts, and other guys in the platoon get a big kick out of it, and since it makes our job easier and faster they kind of look the other way.
thought of the day: 3rd squad is a bunch of dirtbags. today they and us (1st squad) had details and we did most of them, including settting up, service, and taking down chow.

jan o3:
our misson day. we walked down to Taleel Square - the most feared intersection around here. (according to the wimp 1-9 Cav guys that is). we cleared out a couple of arpartment buildings and searched all the (mostly empty) rooms. a few people were living there, but not too many. we didnt' find too much of military value but did get some good souvenirs from empty apts. i got some good video and pictures also. i am still waiting for my helmet camera to show up... soon soon.

jan 02:
our guard day. we fulled four 4-hour shifts of guard over a 24 hours period. 4 hrs inside on guard, then 4 hrs on an exterior OP, then 4 off, then the cycle again. makes for a long day, since we got from 8am to 8am and the next day we have a mission at 0930... sigh this is one of the times the army really sucks, but we gotta do this bullshit to have the fun missions.

happy new years

2005-01-01T12:17:00.000-05:00

hey all

we have left the FOB and moved into Predator Palace, located in the Garka district of downtown Baghdad, on Haifa St -one of the alleged most dangerous streets in Baghdad right now. Personally it doesn't seem that bad - I think that the 1-9 Cavalry unit we are attached to simply let it get out of control. Although they are Nat Guard guys from Arkansas, so they cannot be expected to perform up to the standards of the 82nd Airborne. After all, this is what we do, and what we train for every day.

anyway new years was a bit different from previous years. dec 31 we moved out into the palace, and spent the whole day carrying sandbags and fortifying the palace. that night we had guard from 2200 to 0200. 10pm to 2am. all the iraqis shot off all their guns at midnight to celebrate, kind of like in phoenix arizona. i wanted to shoot off a signal firework from my 203 grenade launcher but my sgt was around so i couldnt. instead we played laser tag with my battle buddy and our InfraRed laser pointers. if nothing else the army is good for cool toys...

had a patrol the next morning, uneventful. went out on mission the afternoon of jan1 and got in a firefight. it was fun, there was actually a bit of excitement. we took effective and accurate fire from a guy with an AK, Callo's SAW jammed, and we all had to take cover and then we laid down some serious return fire from both our squads. haha barnes my battle buddy got scared and hid behind me, the big dork. next time he does that i told him i am gonna kick him in the teeth. we also got to launch some 203 high exposive grenades, but i didnt. then we ran into a building and took it over and set up an OP on the roof to watch for the guy. we saw him running away but couldnt get a clean shot at him so he got away. then we spotted a bunch of rebels and kept an eye on them. eventually we could tell they set up a mortar tube and started shelling the palace a few hundred meters away. 2nd squad had them in sight and killed both guys who were shelling us. (the next day we went back and confiscated the mortar tube.)

so that was an eventful new years holiday.

we have moved out of the FOB and into Predator Palace for good now. we will be there for a while. we come back here to teh FOB once a week to shower and clean up and use the phone and internet, so updates to my blog will come about once a week for a while. I will fill in the blanks as best i can as i have time, but we are getting busier by the day.

back for more

2004-12-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

well on Xmas Day we got an OpOrder (Operations Order) - basically orders for a mission. We are supposed to return to the same OP as we were in on Dec. 24. Same mission, different day.

This time we roll in on Bradleys around 0530. It is a lot nicer riding in the Bradley than walking, but I would almost prefer to walk as it provides better security as well as a chance to get out of the FOB we are stuck in 24 hours a day.

Jump out of the track, run into the building, straight up to the 7th floor. I am in the lead this time, and my adrenaliine is pumping so I take the stairs a bit too quickly and my buddy behind me has to reel me in with the grab handle on my backpack to avoid leaving my team behind. (I tell myself the magic words - "slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is effective") as I slow down. Remember, we have 14 flights of stairs to climb in full combat gear (9 30-round M4 magazines, 18 rounds for my grenade launcher, 45-lb IBA body armor, CamelBak, MRE for lunch, some snacks, Woobie to stay warm, ACH Kevlar helmet with goggles, M4 Carbine, smoke grenade, frag grenade, first aid gear - IV bag and kit and bandages - and a few misc items like notepad, pen, binoculars, etc.). At about floor 4 we slow down a bit more - some of the guys in back with bigger weapons are sucking and need a breather. When we finally arrive at the 7th floor and pound on the doors of the same apartements as last time, the families are less than thrilled to be woken up by the US Army again. We have an interpreter with us, and thankfully many people here speak a bit of English. As it turns out, the college student / daughter in one family speaks good English. In true Middle Eastern bartering fashion, they try to negotiate to have the rest of the building join THEM in THIER apartment here on the 7th floor. My squad leader quickiy tires of this (Remember, the US doesn't negotiate!) so we have to resort to a bit of rudeness and move the people out along with the second family on that floor. However, this time they will be allowed to come up occasionally to get food or whatever, and they only have to move down two floors. At least this way they think they won something, I guess. Its not too pleasant to kick a family out of their home this way, but tactically this is the position we need to be secure and have the best chance to get the bad guys. We even promise to be a bit neater and try not to break too much stuff.

We set up the CP again, and kick out Bravo Team for the first guard shift, since we (Alpha Team) had first shift last time. We immediately stretch out on the floor, again huddling together under our Woobies. (Geez, dont' these people believe in HEAT?!?). I go with my squad leader to check on an alternate exfil route, out the next building. We don't like to use the same route twice if we can avoid it. We sneak across the roof, and into the attached building through the stairway. Silently we creep down the stairs to the street gate, only to find it padlocked. Sgt calls on the radio for the Hooligan Tool, which is basically a huge prybar made to break down doors and locks. As we wait we look thru our NOD in the morning gloom at the deserted street. Finally the tool is brought down, and Sgt. Ugg smashes the lock off to provide us with a clear exit. We return to the next building to our CP and rest for a bit.

Our two hour shift comes up all too soon, and we get up and disperse. My first shift is on the balcony, overlooking the slums and some nearby alleys. Luckily for us, the enemy has already marked our prior position and as the sun comes up they waste no time organizing a few skirmish parties to shoot at us. (In their Quite Infinite Wisdom our leadership has put us EXACTLY where we were two days ago...sigh...) I am overlooking Predator Palace, the building we hope to occupy soon. It is now deserted except for a friendly team that came with us today. I stare across the street at them, when suddenly the BRAP-BRAP of an AK echoes in my ears, immediately followed by the THOOK-THOOK-THOOK of our 240B's returning fire. Following our SOP, I stick my rifle out the metal grating surrounding my position and blast away at an approaching vehicle. After a few rounds bouncing off his hood, the driver decides traffic would probably be better on a different route to work and high-tails it into reverse, disappearing from my view. Nothing else happens on my first shift, and I wander off to the CP to warm up.

During my first rest time they continue to attack sporadically, and since I can't sleep I go to the rear balcony and add some firepower. There's not much to see or shoot at but it Does make it a bit more interesting than simply looking at slums all day. Around 0900 the first rounds come flying our way. This time I actually have a decent shot and squeeze off some rounds at some rebels with AKs a few hundred meters away. I miss (they were running in some narrow alley) but oh well, at least they know its not only one-sided fire this time.For the next several hours they pop in and out, firing a few rounds and then ducking back into the rubbish piles and clay houses nearby. Every 15 or 20 minutes I hear the loud BOOM of the snipers rifles from the roof above and occasional M4 fire from our apartment location. My shift ends, I am relieved by the next guy, and I drift off to nap, accompnied by the sound of the 240B machine gun blasting away outside.

Rebels run around the slums for most of the rest of the day. This at least provides some excitement for us, and perhaps a chance to engage someone. From the balcony I shoot at a couple of targets of opportunity with no results - too far away and moving too quickly. One of my squad leaders does get to fire at a younger man trying to throw a grenade at us. Apparently he's not too smart, since he gets pinned down about 75 meters away and seven floors below - well out of range for his arm, but not for our m4's. The squad leader shoots at him twice and finally wounds him. He crawls behind a building and we watch as passerby and vehicles slow down as they notice him wounded, but they know better and no one helps him. We cannot engage him from our angle, but keep an eye out.

As the day progresses, ROE change a bit and we are now allowed to shoot anyone with a weapon, or anyone we can positively ID who puts their weapon down, since they have previously attacked us. I spot two guys who ditch their weapons and run into the mosque across the street, but as they are unarmed I hesitate to shoot. They hide in the mosque and we never do see them come out. Cowards - they know we can't go in there and get them.

Around supper time I go with my squad leader to recon the attached building which will be our exfil route this time. We run across the exposed roof, keeping a low silhouette, and begin to creep down the stairs, double-checking our morning recon. The building is still deserted and the bottom gate is still open. We post a team to watch and go back up to the roof. Up on the roof we meet up with the Captain and bullshit a bit about the day's activities - generally a success. We started out as a covert and as the enenmy came we treansitioned to an effective overt position. We have engaged most of the enemy we saw and have several enemy killed. The snipers have killed 7 rebels, and we have about 3.

Suddenly, a CRACK - an M4 fires a warning shot. A car has stopped in the street between us and the palace, and a guy leaps out and tries to get a bomb out of his trunk. He never makes it - after the warning shot, about 8 of us decide he's had enough warning and we light him up. The 240B is thundering, M4s are screaming, and tracer rounds stream into the car like laser rounds out of Star War. I empty half a magazine into the car, my team leader empties a full one. Some idiot across the street fires a Star Cluster (a signal for us, like a firework) from his grenade launcher. I am loading an HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) into my 203 when I hear "Cease Fire, Cease Fire". Dang, I wasn't quick enough... Maybe next time I will get to shoot my 203. The guy is not moving, neither is the car, which just sits there smoking. Nevertheless, the Capt takes no chances and calls in a Bradley to destroy the disable IED-vehicle. He also requests an early exfil. My squad runs down the second building, our new exfil route, as the Bradley's 25mm cannon - ZZZT, ZZZT, ZZZT - fires a few bursts into the car. We watch from a stariway window as the car bursts into flame, looking like something from an Arnold movie.

My team quickly kicks out security and we wait impatiently for the tracks to get us out of what has become a decent-sized firefight. The tracks come screaming in and conduct a "false grab" - they pull up and drop the ramp, sit for a few seconds, then raise ramp and zoom out. This is supposed to fool the enemy into thinking we already left and showing himself, but they don't fall for it.

As we wait for the tracks to circle the block and return for us, another vehicle-IED comes zipping in, a little white coupe. Sgt Ugg silently steps out and opens fire, shooting the radiator and one of the tires. The coupe quickly begins to reverse away, smoking and screeching. As it passes thru my sector I add a dozen or so shots to encourage him to leave us alone. His backwards path puts him at high speed right into a platoon of Bradleys - oops for him. We never see or hear him again.

The Brad's roar up again, and drop ramp. One by one, the teams with us silently run out to their tracks. I am impressed with the speed, professionalism, and discipline demonstrated as we exit the hostile zone.

We load up, bang the door ("Ramp Up, NOW) and rumble off to return to the FOB. The day was cut a little short, but was exciting and we actually got some of the bad guys. Everyone came home safe today, another success.

Baba Noel (that means Santa Claus in Arabic)

2004-12-25T02:36:00.000-05:00

merry christmas!

christmas morning in iraq, well i have spent christmas in some strange places but here in baghdad definitely is one of the most interesting...

haha instead of christmas carols i wake up and go to breakfast and hear the muzzein's Call to Prayer blaring from the surrounding mosques!

i guess since we were all naughty boys and blew up a handful of vehicles yesterday, Santa will bring us coal.

its raining today, i like it. its a pleasant rain, not too cold, not warm like spring rain though. my christmas present to myself today will be a good thorough cleaning of my weapon (its kind of dirty due to yesterday's firefight).

hope all out there are having a good christmas, and i hope someone is enjoying the snow for me!

christmas eve on haifa st, baghdad

2004-12-24T14:31:00.000-05:00

well we left this morning for an OP - Observation Post. That is when you go and set up a covert or overt little mini-base to watch a certain area that higher-ups want watched. Today was supposed to be Covert - i.e. we don't get to blow anything up, unless they shoot at us first. My squad is providing security for a sniper team on the roof who are looking for some bad guys in our sector.

We left at about 0200 and started walking out to the OP - walking instead of taking Bradleys so as to be a bit more covert. We got there about 0330 and set up local security around the base of the building (an 8 story apartment building). The other elements flowed inside and started clearing the mostly deserted building. My squad quickly followed in and we started climbing up to the 7th floor. When we got there, the other fire team in the squad cleared the two apartments and kicked out the people living there. I was sent up to the roof with a battle buddy to clear it and scope out the situation since this was our first time on this particular building. Silmultaneously, other squads and the snipers were securing the bottom floor so no one could leave and searching the middle floors. Anyone living there was detained, searched and then collected and all were placed in two apartments on the third floor. We removed all land phones and confiscated (temporarily) all cell phones in order to prevent news of our arrival from leaking.

My team's SAW gunner and I cleared the roof and found a stairway going down to the adjacent building. Here in Baghdad, almost every building is attached to the one next to it via the roof or adjoining hallways. This makes it easy for rebels to throw or launch grenades or fire AK-47s at us and simply drop the weapon and run to the next building and usually escape.

The clearing process took about an hour, while Callo and I pulled security just inside the roof door, sitting on a freezing marble staircase and shivering in the stiff cold morning breeze blowing in the shattered stairwell windows. After all the floors were secured and all the occupants -about 75 total - were on one floor, my squad set up a security rotation. Callo and I drew the first roof guard and simply maintained in our spot. It was cold enough up there that the two of us huddled underneath a Woobie (AKA a poncho liner - basically a really warm, light blanket that we carry everywhere for situtations like these), sharing our body heat to stay warm and taking turns snoozing for a few moments. After about four hours of sitting there freezing, our time was up and we went down two floors to our temporary CP (Command Point - a base of sorts) to warm up and get a quick nap.

Two hours on, and two hours off was our setup today. We had several positions to man - one person up on the roof stairs making sure no one came from the next building, one person downstairs making sure no one came up, and two on balconies on the front and rear of the building. The balcony's purpose was to watch for people placing IED's near our exit, watch for targets of opportunity (anyone walking around with an AK or RPG etc) and generally watch the immediate area. The snipers were above us on the roof with their high-powered rifles and scopes, scanning the nearby slums for the rebels that intel told us were there.

The only few moments of excitement came mid-morning. I happened to be on the rear balcony when I heard the sharp crack of someone's M4 carbine, followed by the deeper BANG of the sniper's rifles. A group of rebels had emerged from the slums behind us and had been spotted by the snipers carrying AKs and walking around in a group. Our Rules of Engagement (ROE) permitted us to engage any armed personnel in our sector, since there were no friendlies nearby. From 0930 until about 1115 we had sporadic chances when the rebels would come in view and we would try to shoot them. No major engagements or huge firefights like you see in the movies, just an occsaional burst of fire from them and a returning volley from us or the snipers. After lunch time they kind of disappeared (maybe they got hungry or something...).

We continued to rotate guard duty, two hours at a time, until 1900. Occasionally throughout the day the radio would crackle from the squad downstairs as a civilian would enter the (unbeknownst to him/her) occupied building and our downstairs security would snatch them up and detain them with the others. By the time we left we had almost 90 persons on the one floor - men, women, squalling babies, rowdy kids.

As evening drew in and the sunlight faded, we prepred to Exfil (leave - exfiltrate). The snipers pulled in and we all condensed towards the bottom floors, being careful not to cluster too tightly together in case of an RPG or mortar attack. My team was assigned to pull outside security. We kicked out the security about 1845, hustling out the front door in the dusty darkness and the four of us setting up in positions where we could see all directions. Looking through our NOD (Night Observation Device)'s greenish-tinge, we could see comfortable in the near-total darkness that had already descended. We waited there for about 30 minutes - way too long to be comfortbly exposed in urban warfare like this. Finally the Bradley's arrived and the rest of our platoon flowed out of the doors behind us as we kneeled behind cover and watched to the sides for any surprise exit attacks. No one even came close enough to be visible, however. As the rest of our guys ran past us yelling "last Man, Last Man" to let us know everyone had gone by, we stood up and hustled to the last empty Bradley. I stood to the side and pulled rear security until almost everyone had piled in to the tight, dark, cramped, metal interior of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I wedged myself onto the seat and my team and squad leaders followed behind me, wedging eight fully combat-loaded people with body armor and gear and weapons into a space made for seven unloaded dwarves.

The guys at the front of the track banged on the commander's turret, yelling "Ramp Up, Ramp Up" to let us know the rear hatch was closing. The hydraulic hinge whined and the ramp smashed shut with a huge CLANK. The track's engine cycled up, the driver let out the clutch and spun us around toward the FOB.

Just as we thought we were good, Came a loud and thunderous BANG-POW outside the track. I looked at my Sgt. and over the roar of the track he yelled 'IED, IED". Apparently someone had placed one after all (I told you hajii were sneaky). Fortunately for us, the Bradley shook it off (they are huge and tough and very rarely are damaged) and we screamed off back to the FOB.

Back home safe, another day, another successful mission with no casualties. Good job, guys...

movement to Iraq

2004-12-07T02:10:00.000-05:00

well like anything else in the army, moving two battallions (about 600 soldiers each) takes an incredibly long time to accomplish...

Sunday night, 1900 (7.00 pm)

First movement formation - accountability. The squad and platoon leaders made sure everyone was here. Then we went inside and started locking up the barracks. Squad leaders were pissed off because as usual, people didnt finish preparing their rooms by the deadline, so we all had to clean up the last things. Rooms had to be "sterile" - i.e. look as if no one lived there. Everything had to go into a wall locker. My wall locker had been broken by the previous user, so I had to tote all my stuff down the hall into an empty one. Although i had thought my room was good to go, I apparently forgot the Army adage that goes something like: "If your buddy is screwed up then you are screwed up and its your fault also." So naturally when my roommates half of the room was not ready, it was somehow *my* fault (of course, what could I have been thinking???). Then we all got chewed out be cause nobody defrosted their refrigerator ahead of time. The squad leader's solution to all of this is to run around screaming at us, making us do push-ups everywhere, and generally being an asshole. (Heaven forbid that our team or squad leaders could have come in 24 or 12 hours earlier to check all this stuff... no, that would not be right!)

2230 hours

Finally, the barracks pass muster. At 2300 the First Sergeant will come around and inspect. With a half hour to wait, of course, we "Stand by." (Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait, DAMN IT YOU ARE NOT WAITING FAST ENOUGH!!!!!!!!) ;-)

2300 Hours

First Sergeant gradually gets everything locked up. They put little metal bands on the lockers and room doors that are tamper-resistant. So when we come back, we will know if anyone got in our junk. I turned my broken locker around the face the wall and stuffed my BMX bike in it. hopefully 1st Sgt wont notice it has no doors or locks...

2345 hours

1st Sgt. finishes locking up. Now we all go outside to sit with our bags and wait until 0300, which is the first actual movement time.

0015 hours (12.15 am)

All the various sgts. get tired of sitting out in the cold, so they post one man to guard all our stuff and we all go into the dayroom (lounge room, with a handful of chairs and a broken TV) to wait and sleep a little bit.

0230 hours

Movement is at 0300, which naturally means we have to get in formation 30 min early, put on our 60 pound rucksack (which also has our 50 lb Body Armor attached), pick up our Assault Pack (20lbs) and weapon, and stand there in formation until 0300.

0255

We start to move out to the first Manifest Call.

0305

Arrive across Ardennes St. to the parking lot by battallion HQ. We kind of cluster/ gaggle around until someone yells and we get in something apporaching a formation. more waiting...

0330

start taking Manifest Call. This is a master list of everyone who is going. A Battallion consists of 4 companies, which consist of 4 platoons, which consist of 4 squads of about 9 people each. We also have "attached" people like some medics, some Forward Observers (they call in mortar strikes if needed), a handful of Scouts, and some random people. All told, about 550- 600 people per battallion. So naturally, they just read names in a random order from a list. And when you can't hear your name because the 500 other people around you are talking to0 their buddy, it is of course your fault that you don't sound off to the 1st Sgt. reading the list. (Gee, stupid me...heaven forbid they could get everyone to SHUT UP for a few moments.

0355

Done with manifest.

0405

Luggage trucks pull up. They need bodies to load all the luggage. Yup, you guessed it, here come the privates to save the day. (The best thing about the Army is that once you advance past a private, you never have to do any work again.) They pick 6 of us and everyone throws their rucksacks at us and we stack them in a big flatbed truck.

0435

Done loading luggage. Everyone piles onto busses that seat 44 people (assuming said people are in elementary school). This means that we also have to fit 44 people, because that is what the bus label says we can fit. never mind the fact that we are bigger than your average elementary schooler, plus we have assault packs and various weapons (including machine guns, mortars, tripods, etc.) SGT: "DAMN IT, PACK IT IN!!!!!!!!!! WHO IS TAKING UP MORE THAN THEIR SHARE?????" Of course, the one guy taking up two seats is some Staff Sergeant... sigh.

0445

Done loading. Drive down to the base's airfield. Everyone sits on the busses while the same six of us privates unload the trucks and put the luggage on an aircraft loader.
Then everyone gets off teh busses, and we all stand on a truck scale so they know how much we weigh with all our gear. This is so they can figure out how much fuel to put in the plane.

0505

Done loading luggage and being weighed. back into the busses, and drive down to the Harness Shed (which is where we all get suited up for our Airborne jumps). Basically its a large warehouse with rows of huge wooden benches. we all pile in, each platoon gets a row of benches, and everyone stretches out to get a bit of sleep. The bathrooms are a madhouse of course, and the coffee and Gatorade machines sell out quickly. leadership passes out MRE-like things packed with jimmy Dean Vienna Sausages, some fruit juice, and some nasty rolls. No one eats them...

0650

leave-out is 0700. Everyone gets up and gets their stuff on and gets ready to get on the plane. Form up in lines... and then Wait.

0705, monday Morning, Dec. 6

Our platoon starts to move out to the planes. As we leave the Shed, there is a reception line made up of colonels, Generals, and the various Commanding People who have decided that we should be the ones going over to Iraq. They shake our hands and wish us good luck. As they do so, I sound off with a Loud and Thunderous "Kill" which gets a laugh from a general and the sergeant major, who reply with "Airborne!!!".

0710

We make our way onto the plane. its a commercial airliner, complete with pretty stewardesses and everything. No first class seats though, they took those out. We sit down, and everyone crams their assault packs into over or under storage. Stewardesses look slightly concerned at the amount of weaponry on board and nervously smile at us and ask that we place the assault rifles under the seats. In response, I sound off with a Loud and Thunderous 'Kill". (Haha, score one for me! Now they look twice as nervous...)

0715

Plane slowly taxis around, spins up engines, and ponderously lifts off with our bloated selves on board. Here we go, off to the Big Sandbox!!!

0930

Stewardesses have calmed down enough to serve breakfast (its not half bad, some omelet thing and a bagel and coffee/ juice) and start the movie. Almost everyone goes to sleep. Sleeping or not, in grand army tradition, a meal is plopped in your lap. (Remember, in the Army, it doesnt matter if you eat the food or not, but DAMNIT WE PROVIDE YOU WITH THREE MEALS A DAY, YOU WILL TAKE THEM!!!)

1230, Ft. Bragg time

Somewhere over the Atlantic. Lunch is served somewhere off the coast of Greenland. Apparently we are taking the Arctic route... aqccordinng to the little map that pops up on the TV monitors sporadically.

1530

We set down in Shannon Airport, Ireland. Its dinner time locally, and dark out already. (Somehow the Army has cheated us out of another day of sunlight. I swear they are all vampires or something...) Thoughtfully, the Defense Dept. has called ahead and arranged for the airport to lock us into our own private wing, for our safekeeping of course. (After all, you know those Irish terrorists... they wouldn't think twice about attacking a plane full of 250 heavily armed American soldiers...) They have also shut down all the concessions except for a stand selling lukewarm coffee and tea (but no Guiness for us either). The Dutry Free shop is open however, and happy to take our American $$$$. We swarm in and decimate it. The biggest hit is the Irish cigarettes, which carry slogans like: "SMOKERS DIE YOUNGER, SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND THOSE AROUND YOU, and the favorite warning, SMOKING DECREASES YOUR SEX DRIVE." No wimpy American type Surgeon General polite warnings here. Another big hit are boxes of Cuban cigars, banned in the US but freely available here. (Also very thoughtfully, the Shannon airport just days ago became 100% smoke free.) All the nicotine-deprived soldiers lounge around waiting to refuel and go on.

1730 Bragg time, 2330 ireland time

load up again and fly out. Good bye Ireland... Everyone almost immediately goes to sleep. Our body clocks are seriously whacked out at this point, but being in the Army means you can sleep anywhere, anytime, through anything.

2030

i wake up for dinner (another mandatory passing out of food, despite the fact that 95% of the plane is sleeping.) I amuse myself by debating with another awake soldier about what the meal actually is. i bet on Stuffed Chicken, he thinks its Veal Parm.

2330 Bragg time

We touch down in kuwait City. our first view is from the air. We approach from the ocean, flying over a vast expanse of brush-covered sand. Kind of looks like southern Arizona, with a lot less vegetation. (We never did find out what dinner was... oh well, no big deal.) We get off the stretch our legs on the cracked pavement. The first thing we notice is the stench - kind of like burned sulfur. From the guys who were here before, this is normal.

2345 Bragg time, monday dec. 6, 0745 Kuwait City Time, Tuesday, Dec. 7

We all get on busses. Except for, you guessed it, us six privates who get to unload the plane and put all the rucksacks onto a tractor trailer. We drive to an American base about two hours away. I fall asleep on the bus. I wake up as we pull into the base, feeling as if i never slept at all.

0145 Bragg Time 0945 Kuwait City Time, Tues. Dec. 7

We get off the busses at Camp Something-or-Other. move in to another warehouse and plop down on cots. A few people head off to get showers, most everyone else sleeps. We wander down to the chow hall and PX. They have Burger king, Pizza hut, KFC, even a Starbucks, along with assorted Arab shops selling cheap trinkets, rugs, wooden boxes, and various other cheap or imported, fake-name-brand stuff. Rolexes for $35! What a Deal!

0445 Bragg Time, 1245 Kuwait City Time

load back on busses to go back to Kuwait City Airport.

0645 Bragg, 1445 Kuwait Time

Arrive back at the airport. (Why did we ever leave in teh first place? Four hours on busses to spend three hours at a base??? Sometimes i really dont understand the Army... oh well.) We unload into a hangar, and go to sleep again.
Sometime this afternoon they pass out the initial combat load of ammo. We will be taking C-130s to Baghdad later on tonight.

2100 Kuwait time, 1300 Bragg time

We load onto the 130s. We are crammed on there, onto little webbing seats, with our assault packs and weapons. they did, however, load all the rucksacks onto a pallet, so it can be moved with a forklift onto a cargo plane. That would really suck to have to carry those...

2230 Baghdad time, 1430 in Fort Bragg

We touch down in Baghdad. Flying over is a bit unnerving. Most of the city is dark, and lights are sporadic at best. Its like flying into a rural airport back home, except this rural airport is the size of Chicago's OHare. We gather our bags, and load all of our rucksacks onto LMTV's (light Medium Tactical Vehicle - a big cargo truck) and they will drive those to our destination - a tent city here on BIAP - Baghdad Intl Airport. We take busses around the airport, pick up our rucks, and walk into the tent city.

0200 Baghdad, 1700 Fort Brag, Tues. Dec. 7

We flop down onto cots. They make up a guard roster, and everyone falls asleep.

Grand Totals:

Hours in the air - approx 14.5
Miles - approx 6472, according to www.indo.com/distance
Countries stopped in - Ireland, Kuwait, then Iraq
Travel time - from 1900 Sunday to 1700 tuesday, 46 hours

Looks like we will be here for a day or two, until they arrange transportation and figure out exactly where we will be going.

deployment got delayed a couple of days...

2004-12-03T09:13:00.000-05:00

Well, indeed it has been a long week.

Monday - we got the news we were deploying to Iraq, probably Baghdad. Spent all day Monday preparing our packing list - one Assault pack, one RuckSack, and two duffel bags full of all the gear they said we would need. Talk about packing heavy - four of everything, almost all of the BDU's and Army clothes I own. I just about emptied my wall locker into this packing list. And this is only what THEY want me to bring - it doesn't include stuff like paper and envelopes, a CD or DVD player, any extra things like that to provide a little bit of comfort and entertainment while we are over there.

Tuesday - went over the packing list - AGAIN... Apparently most people in the Army are either stupid or lazy enough that we laid out the packing list three times in our rooms, and then our entire squad did it again outside so we could go over the packing list one item at a time. The squad leader read the list and called each item out; as he did so, we would hold it up and the team leader would verify that we did, Indeed, pack it. **SIGH** sometimes i hate the army.

Wednesday - went to the range to Zero my weapon. they just switched my weapon system. I was originally supposed to be a SAW gunner when i first got here, but my SAW was in the shop being rebuilt. Then my squad leader designated me as the Rifleman for my team. Then lastly they switched again and finally decided I will be carrying the M4 with attached M203 grenade launcher. This is a bit heavier than the plain M4 but I dont mind too much due to the fact that I will get to launch grenades and blow stuff up.

Thursday - We went to get our RFI issue (Rapid Fielding Initiative). This is some of the newer and better gear that the Army is issuing out quickly. The whole New, More Flexible Army thing.
We got new Helmets (lighter, padded, built-in Airborne straps, options to mount commo, etc.); a bunch of synthetic clothes (polypro, long underwear, etc.); some more boots (Gore-Tex winter and summer, along with nice socks) and some other misc stuff. In the afternoon us new guys also went to get our MOLLE gear - Body Armor, MOLLE rucksack, assault pack (like a small backpack, for missions); and all the associated pouches and magazine and grenade holders, etc.

Friday - Didnt do too much today. We loaded the Connex (little storage container) with our A and B bags (the two extra duffel bags that contain all of our extra supplies) and locked it up and got it ready to go. Everyone was finishing all the last minute details - turn off phone, internet, cable, etc. People are paying bills, turning off services, doing all the last minute stuff to get ready to leave for four months. We got the official word today - leaving out early Monday morning. So our first movement formation is 1900 Sunday night. Got to have everything ready to go then, all bags packed, wearing DCU's, rooms all packed up and cleaned up and ready to be locked up.

Let's go have one good last weekend!!!

happy birthday to me!

2004-11-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

well this morning at morning formation we got some good news:

We are going to Iraq for a few months! Yay!

(I bet the generals somewhere way up there knew that it was my birthday and decided to give me a cool present - an all expense paid four month trip to the Middle East! How kewl of them!)

Right now all we know is that we will leave late this week, possibly Friday, or Saturday. We will probably b going to Baghdad in order to provide extra security for the elections. That means we better hurry up and get all of our gear ready to go... gonna be a long week.