Hello All,
Sorry for the rather drastic lapse in time since my last update, but time has been, well, constrained as of late, and further complications with the communications tent only served to increase the frustration of finding both the time, as well as the working equipment to get these dispatches out.
As some of you know, I did get the opportunity to travel home earlier this month for a much appreciated two week rest and relaxation leave. The time flew by and I found myself on a plane distined for the Middle East much too quickly for my taste.
So back to the communication problems that made these dispatches such a bear. The computer tent, one of few viable links to the outside world, had a nasty habit of crashing every four or five seconds. Our crack team of commo wizards (the Commo unit we all love to hate) did a little (and I do stress the adjective "little") research and found that personal laptops were to blame, as they were lifting IP addresses assigned to the permanent PCs at the tent. Ok... simple fix, right? Come now, you've been victim of my foolish rants long enough to know that in the Army, NOTHING is simple. So personal laptops become prohibited from the tent, which means I can no longer pore over my laptop, tweak and trimming my rants at liesure. Now I must focus all my insanity into whatever I can type in the 30 minute timeframe I'm allowed. Ok, I can deal with that -- forces me to think on my feet. Until the computer tent continues to crash like a drunk Kennedy on a bridge. Now the commo wi
zards, who, I believe, fall under the command of a drunk chimpanzee, discover a component has fried, which, apparently, had NOHTING to do with the fact the tent was only recently air conditioned. So a work order is put in... and the wait begins. Now, since everyone from Halliburton to my uncle's ex-college roommate's goldfish has a contract over here, THE WAIT can take anywhere from ten days to a light year. The contractor, who is based further north, decides against traveling through Baghdad and the other scenic locales of Iraq, and requests someone come up to retrieve the component necessary to fix the problem. Now, in a fit of utter brilliance, higher command decides it is not worth the risk of soldiers' lives to get a measly computer part, a decision I for one appluad. So commo continues to be down.
Your fearless narrator goes home on two week R&R, returning to find the computer tent operational, but personal laptops still banned. For the past two weeks I've spent every spare minute of tower duty (which adds up to a lot of minutes) ruminating over what to report from lovely Club Bucca. The first two weeks of duty after returning from home evoked little more that a string of profanities that would make a trucker say "well, I'd never..." and as I try to maintain some semblance of a gentleman, I opted to cool off a bit and wait for the right moment to resume communication with the outside world.
Cooling off is not something easily done in a desert environment, especially during the hottest months of the year, as I found out first hand.
It was a day like any other here. Hot, sandy, and windy. 140 degrees. We were on an escort mission to a British field hospital north of us. Sitting in the drivers' seat of my trusty uparmored, air conditioned HUMMV, which, like very other one, had a broken AC, I thought to myself, "so this it what it feels like to be a pizza." When we arrived at our destination, we did what every troop is wont to do -- we checked out the British version of a PX to see if there was anything they had that we didn't, so we could buy whatever it was, whether we needed it or not, to be the cool kids on the block. Finding nothing that met our stringent criteria, we settled to get some food and a cool drink. Waiting for our food, I noticed I was hardly any cooler than I was in the confines of the HUMMV, and, on the contrary, feeling as though I was actually getting hotter. My team leader advised me to seek some shade and start drinking more water, so I headed for the HUMMV to grab a water
out of the cooler. By "headed for the HUMMV" I mean staggered almost drunkenly in a direction generally towards the HUMMV. Team Leader didn't like that, so he guided me to shade and grabbed my Combat Lifesaver Kit. In a few minutes I was prepping my own IV line, wondering how the hell I was going to stick my own vein, especially when it looked to me as though I had four arms. At that point, a kindly Brit reminded us that we were at a field hospital and actual doctors would happily treat me.
Two days later, I arrived back at Bucca, having survived first a heat-related injury, and then, perhaps, the worst part, two days of British "food." I've since returned to regular duty -- light duty is a joke anyway -- and I currently finding new meaning to the word "hot." Apparently, for the past few days, this area's temps have been THE hottest in the world, leading me to believe Iraq is actually a gateway to Hell and the fires we see burning at oil refineries are actually portals to the underworld.
So that has been my life in a nutshell. A very, very, very HOT nutshell.
I promise I'll try to be better about the dispatches -- I know you all need something to delete from your inboxes with some regularity.
I'll leave you with another installment of "Things I Cannot Do In Iraq."
I cannot name the camel skull we keep in the barracks "Isadore" in tribute to the Camp Commander.
I cannot ask the Brits "so do the car bombs remind you of the good old days of the IRA?" (Erin Go Bragh)
I cannot label my saline solution bags "margarita," "martini," or "Jagermeiester"
I cannot say "so the assassins have failed me again" when greeting a squad leader
I cannot refer to Iraq as the biggest cesspool in the biggest hellhole of the world.
I cannot throw ice cubes at the soldier stationed in the Guardian Angel overwatch tower to remind him of hailstorms
I cannot, while home on leave, call television cameramen "f**king vultures" to their face, even if that is what they are
I cannot, while on pass to Kuwait, ask soldiers stationed there if they actually get paid to do what they do
I cannot blare the Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop" at full volume to "get things started" at four in the morning (hey! ho! let's go!)
I cannot ask Iraqis "why the hell would you WANT to live here?"
I cannot call in "packs of angry ostriches" while in towers (and no, there are no ostriches over here... ...yet)
I cannot announce "that was another waste of day" upon entering the chow hall for dinner chow
I cannot try to fry an egg on the hood of a HUMMV (it does work, though)
Well, there you have it, more things not to do if you wish to remain promotable in IRaq.
For those of you who receive this, please forward it along to anyone who may not have gotten it, as I am still working the issue on updating my ARMY address list from my OUTLOOK list.
Also, 500 bonus points and my undying gratitude to ANYONE who can locate a men's size medium "Punisher" tee shirt. Weird request, I know, but the Punisher is one bad ass character and his skull tee shirt would make one hell of a battle flag when rolling through the streets.
Until later,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
D
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