Hello again from Bagdad.

Monday, 7 June:

It became clear I was never going to get a helo flight out so I kept asking around until I found a bus driver that knew where the Rhino stop was on Victory. So I called the bus company again that supposedly could get me to the right destination and gave them a more clear picture of where I was and where I was going and this time they said they could accommodate me. About ½ hr later I met a small van where I loaded up all my gear…a good 200 lbs if you count the body armor, helmet and back pack also. Why do I keep bringing up the weight? It is hard to strap all that weight to your body and they drag heavy awkward bags over poor terrain for any distance. The van met me about a football field away from where I was all morning so it was no small task dragging it out to the van where the driver was not on contract to help me load up – thanks buddy.

So, we drove from one side of the Victory Base Complex on and near the Baghdad Airport to the other side of the Complex to the actual Victory Base proper. The place where I was to meet the Rhino was a dirt patch between a road and a parking lot hear the Al Faw (sp?) Palace. It is the fancy palace with Sadam’s throne that is on a small man-made lake. Anyway, I arrived 3hr before the Rhinos were to arrive so I sat with my luggage out in the heat and the dust drinking a bottle of water that had been left out in the sun all day (they have water bottle stacked up everywhere here). After about an hour another guy arrived and helped me lug my gear to a nearby building that he had access to. With my gear secured (I couldn’t just leave it on the side of the road to seek shelter) we took a 10 min. walk to The Green Bean which is a Starbucks-like coffee shop. We had mango smoothies and cooled off in their AC. Whew, was that a blessing. About 1.5 hrs later we dragged my gear back to the curb and met the Rhinos which are technically called MRAPS. I do not know what that stands for but they are a sort of wheeled armored personnel carrier that can hold about 8 people to include a driver, navigator, and gunner that stands up in a turret of sorts. There was also an armored baggage truck. After a roll call, mission and emergency procedures briefing, we loaded up several Rhinos and took the 11 mile/30 minute ride from the VBC (Victory Base Complex) or BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) to the IZ (International Zone) and FOB (Forward Operating Base) Union III. The ride was uneventful and the seats were very uncomfortable, especially has you had to strap yourself down very tight with a 5-point harness and lightly padded seats. Baghdad looked rough…3rd world mud huts with satellite dishes to 2-3 story concrete flats like you might find in Okinawa or Ecuador. Lots of dirt fields, little vegetation except palm trees, concrete rubble and debris everywhere and Iraqi police and military check points at every major intersection or bridge. It looked pretty bleak.

Once we arrived at the FOB I was met by one of the guys from my office. He helped me drag my gear to the billeting office where I was assigned a room in the building until I get assigned my permanent living quarters. The room has three beds, three lockers, three little metal cabinets as pseudo night stands. A micro fridge for a few bottles of water and hard tile floors. Very plain but best accommodations to date. Unfortunately the bathroom and showers are located in a trailer in the gravel parking lot out back. I am the only one in the room so I moved the beds and lockers all around to make a semi-private space in the back of the room…just in case I am here for a while and I get roommates.

I went to dinner at the DFAC which is OK. Not as good as at Sather by any means but good enough. Plenty of variety really but they say that it is much the same thing every day so it will get boring. The process to eat at the DFAC is: 1) clear your weapon, 2) show the guard your ID, 3) go into the building and wash your hands, 4) scan your ID to log in, 5) grab plastic plates, bowls, and utensils, 6) get whatever food and drink you want, 7) go into the very busy dining room and eat, 8) carry your tray outside and dump the trash into garbage cans, 9) stack your tray with all the trays of the same color, 10) leave and repeat for the next meal.

I met my boss, Col Vanderwerf or Col “VW” and a few of the guys from the office at dinner. After dinner I went to the office to see my work area and look for the container Leah shipped and the one I shipped. Neither have arrived. Bummer. I can get a long for a while with what I have though.

Tuesday, 8 June

I fell asleep hard and quick around 10 PM and since my new boss said to not come in the first ½ of the day tomorrow, I slept in until 8:30 AM. That is the most sleep I have had since this trip began. It felt good but I think the major time zone shift as well as the heat, dirt, travel, stress, etc. caught up with me. I felt a little out of it for ½ the day. Anyway, I got up, showered, and went to breakfast only to find that breakfast was already over and I would have to wait until 11 AM for the lunch service. I had plenty of water to waiting was not a big deal. I took the time to walk around the FOB a little and explore. It is not a very big place. It has a small Green Bean just in the main entrance to the biggest building (the former Baath Party HQ). At the opposite end of the FOB there is a tiny BX about 1/3rd the size of a basketball court. There are also “Haji shops” where the local vendors sell their wares…movies, shoes, luggage, crystal, rugs, knickknacks, perfume, jewelry, etc. The Haji shops are in the building that was to be the mausoleum for Michael Affleck, a Syrian that was one of the founders of the Baath Party. I understand he was never buried there.

On the FOB we have two ways of doing laundry: 1) two self-service trailers where you can do your own or 2) a drop off facility with a 48 hrs turn around where laborers run your laundry through scalding hot water washers and dryers. #2 is free so guess which one I’ll be using? Apparently they throw your laundry together so in an attempt to keep my whites white I’ll drop them off on the day I pick up my colors and vice versa.

I made the mistake of going by work. Col VW is all excited about me hitting the ground running and doing lots of urgent work so he pontificated about work and why we are so busy and why we need to be there 15 hrs per day. It is not as bad as it may seem since that include lunch and dinner and gym time but still, the philosophy of all you have to do in Iraq is work, eat, poop, and exercise is a little aggressive given that we are no longer in a combat role as much as we are in a security assistance one.

Anyway, the good Col, who actually does seem like a nice guy, gave me a tour of the roof of the building we work in. As I mentioned, it was the former Baath Party HQ but we put a big bomb down the center during the war. Although the center was destroyed, there was a lot of renovation to make office out of the salvageable parts that remained. From the roof top I could see key landmarks in Baghdad that are very close to us like the big Crossed Swords, the Military Parade Grounds, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I could also see the new US Embassy complex, various Mosques, the 14th of July Bridge, the Tigris River and many of the key Iraqi building you would recognize from the pictures from CNN.

After the tour I started working some of my in processing and getting to know the office and my co-workers. When fully staffed there are 8 of us Majors and Lt Cols working for a Colonel who works for a Brigadier General. Our mission is security assistance and that means helping the Iraqi’s procure equipment, skills, and training to build competent capabilities. While we are the Air Force team, we do have some projects that touch some of the other services areas of responsibility. It looks like I’ll be working on arranging pilot training, some fixed and rotary wing maintenance, some fixed and rotary wing simulator operations and maintenance, and the relocation of some of those assets from Kirkuk to Tikrit.

Wednesday, 9 June

I went to the gym last night. It is a pretty well stocked gym. Maybe 10 stationary bikes, 10 elliptical machines, 20 treadmills, 5 rowing machines, 5 stair climbers, free weights, nautilaus-type machines, and cable machines. I understand this is all relatively new. Supposedly the stuff was to go elsewhere but with the pending drawdown of other places they decided to put it all right here. It looks like there will be very little waiting for any machine you might want to use.

Today was my first full regular day at the office. We wear our full battle rattle into work and then only have to keep out primary weapon with us the remainder of the day. My weapon is the 9mm Berretta. At the end of the day you wear your body armor back to your quarters. If the threats increase then we will keep our gear closer or wear it more often. The temperature got hot today. I don’t know for sure but I think it was as least 115 degrees F. Supposedly in a month or two it will peak as high as 140. That is going to be a bit uncomfortable. Already if feels like you are walking into a very large hair dryer when you go outside. Put the body armor on top of that and it gets quite toasty.

To my surprise I was assigned my very own “CHU” today. A CHU is a containerized housing unit. Basically they take those sea-land connex boxes and build living quarters in them. Normally they are divided in half and each side has two people and they are “dry” in that there is no water or plumbing. However, there are some that have a toilet and show in each side and only enough living space for one person. These are “wet” CHUs. I was lucky enough get a wet CHU so no more communal shower or long walks to stinky community bathrooms in the middle of the night. My CHU even has a mini fridge, mini microwave and a TV/DVD. No cable, satellite, or internet so I’ll have to continue to hunt for internet service. The CHUs are somewhat insulated and have a window shaker style AC unit. Also, every few CHUs there are large concrete walls called T-Walls that separate and protect the CHUs and “duck and cover” bunkers every so often for blast protection. Let’s hope we will not need them for this next year.

I hit the gym again late tonight. I am not liking this business of getting to the gym around 10pm.

Thursday, 10 June

Learning my job and all my projects is really difficult since the guy I replaced when home the same day I arrived. The projects are complex and sifting through the piles of papers, notes, files on the computer, databases, etc. is like building a puzzle only you don’t know what the puzzle is supposed to look like. This is the part of the job I hate…not being competent yet being responsible. Tonight I had to update the status on every project and subproject for the General’s notes. What a pain that was because I frankly don’t know what I don’t know. I hope I don’t get hammer tomorrow night when we meet with the General. I got back so late…about 10pm…that I did not go to the gym. Plus I got my boxes today and needed to stow all my gear and that took a while. It is surprising how little stuff I was getting by on since I left San Antonio. Now I feel like I got too much crap. A lot of it is military gear that I really don’t have a need for but was supposed to bring. I also have a very large and heavy chem gear bag that I have to have but hope like heck I never need.

We got a new Marine Lt Col into the office today. He and I tackled the boxes, goodies, and care packages that were strewn around the office and on the conference table. He is a little OCD and he needed something to do because he did not have computer access yet. Anyway, there were goodies, mainly candy and cookies, along with some toiletries and health care items. Some of this stuff has been there for almost a year. There was a ton of Easter candy also. I know the good people who sent these packages with their love and well wishes meant well but the Bunny ears, coloring books and blow up Easter animals probably didn’t understand that a bunch of gun toting guys in a “country in transition” would probably not play with such items. It would be nice to give some of this to kids but I don’t the Muslims would appreciate Easter the same way we do. In general though we are separate from the local populations with concrete walls, checkpoints, and guns so there will not be a lot of interacting with the locals.

I also got my laundry back from the free drop off location today. My green boot socks lost ½ their color. My PT gear looked like it aged a bit too. I dropped my whites off when I picked up my colored laundry. I wonder if all that “lost” color is going to find its way to my whites?

In the office we have a pile of DVDs. Some are from home and some from the Haji shops. I decided to put in the new Russell Crow Robin Hood movie but it would not play in the DVD player in the room so I played it on my laptop. The Haji shop movies are apparently cheap pirated movies. This movie looked and sounded like someone was filming the screen in a movie theater in Russia. All the movie text and sub-titles were in Russian so I did not understand all the historical background. For the first ½ of the movie it looked like someone’s head was blocking the lower right corner of the screen. The quality and audio was so poor that I couldn’t get into the movie and shut it off and when to bed.

Friday, 11 June

Friday is our ½ day off. Apparently the Iraqi’s don’t work on Fridays. We don’t have to come into work until after lunch around 12 or 1 pm. Of course if you stay until 11pm it is not really a ½ day off but maybe a 1/3 or ¼ day off. Anyway, I was able to sleep in until 8:30am and then went to the gym. I came back to my CHU, cleaned up and geared up and went to lunch and then into the office. The body armor did not feel as heavy today. Maybe my body is starting to normalize a little.

At lunch I grabbed a soy milk box. Geez was that nasty! One sip and my throat clenched. I read the side panel and it contained water, soy beans, wheat and barely extract (is this soy beer?), carbonation, seaweed and sea salt. Yuck. It tasted like a thick pesticide shake that was brewed in old stinky shoes. I hate to waste food but that went in the trash.

Friday’s is also when our church meetings are. Me and three others met at the FOB and walk over to the massive new US Embassy compound. It took about 20 minutes to get everyone in through their security and they took my iTouch so I didn’t have my scriptures, hymn books and manuals. I got the iTouch back when I left the compound but it would have been nice for the meeting. About 14 (10 men, 4 women) of us met in a small conference room. It was a strange gathering. We mostly sat around a table with our water bottles. There was no designated head of the room or pulpit. Someone conducted and the Branch Pres. was in a corner of the room and ran a computer that played the music for the hymns we sung w/o books…except the four people with their iTouches!!! Apparently if you have a badge you can take stuff like that in. If you do not, you are out of luck. I need to get me a badge for the Embassy. Anyway the meeting was very simple – hymns, sacrament and a 10 min or less talk. I bet we were done in ½ hour. We then took a short break and had a Sunday School lesson for about 30 minutes where there was little discussion. I ended up participating as much or more than anyone. I found it all a little steril and weird. For example, I only met the people I walked from the FOB to the Embassy with. No one else came up and said hello and no welcomes or introductions were made either. Because I had a meeting with the General and our Air Force Team I got one of the people who came over with me to go back. When you cross between the FOB and the Embassy you always have to have a battle buddy. The road is controlled by the Iraqi’s but it is a little a little war zone’ish, with heavily armored SUVs zipping up and down the street and you are outside the big protective concrete walls. I definitely kept my head on a swivel. I would have felt better if I had a magazine in my gun and a round chambered but the road is supposedly safe…as long as you have a battle buddy that is. Speaking of guns, it was weird wearing a gun in an exposed shoulder holster during church. Maybe next time I’ll take if off during the meeting but the other military guy was wearing his and at least two others hand theirs concealed.

The meeting with the General was OK. A little long and he did call me out with some questions on about four of my projects. I really didn’t have any good answers because I frankly just haven’t unraveled the puzzle on this stuff yet. Did I mention I hate being responsible yet not competent? After the meeting a couple of the guys came up to me and told me not to sweat it. That was nice but I still don’t like this part of the job. I finally left work about 11pm. There were 5 of 9 people still in the office when I left. Crazy.

More later...

Love,
Dad/Gary