Weekends...

You know, you think that a weekend is just a construct of our 40 hour work week, but here, I feel myself much less motivated on the "weekend." Most times I don't even know what day it is, but I have a harder time waking up. (Yes, hardER time. We all know I have a hard time waking up as it is. Except this one time, I got a buddy of mine to wake me up and hand me a cup of coffee. That was awesome!) Anyway, so it's Sunday here and I have the wonderful opportunity to be in my PTs at 10 am! (Also drinking some WONDERFUL black coffee.)
So, another little story about the trash cleanup day. We're driving around, giving out trash bags and taking pictures of people cleaning up. We get to this one apartment were no one is working. So, we get out of the truck and are trying to figure out who is the apartment manager. Meanwhile, bunches of kids start showing up (I swear they have kiddie observation posts to track the CPT's movements). They're doing their typical "Meeeeester Meeeeester! Gimmie food. Gimmie water. Gimmie that. Gimmie this." (Donk, I know you know what I'm talking about here.) We're trying to get them to help out picking up trash but they (all of a sudden) don't understand any English. We're trying for about 5 minutes and then the Captain asks us for one dollar bills. He does nothing more than flash a few one dollar bills and the kids go NUTS! They're grabbing bags from each other, flinging trash in the bags, RUNNING to pick it up. It was like the Tazmanian Devil at work. Amazing what a simple good old American dollar bill will do here. If only everyone was like that. Here IGC, here's a dollar. Play nice with each other and get this country working again. You need candy too? Okay, here's two butterscotch disks. Go rebuild Iraq.
June 30th is going to be a VERY interesting time. Iraq is becoming a soverign nation. I have to say, it's pretty cool to be here at the birth of a nation. And for all of you who think the new government of Iraq will ask the American soldiers to leave. Not a chance. If that happens, they'll be a new government in Iraq the next day. Yeah, say Hi to Mr. Coup. The Iraqis do NOT want us to leave. They love having us here protecting them and keeping them safe. Do not let the media tell you different. B

Crazy days...and fun trash cleanup...

Yesterday I saw something I did not think I would see here. We had an cleanup day in the apartments in our sector. I truthfully thought that no one would really come out to clean, especially since the apartments have been TRASHED for forever. When we rolled into the apartment complex, almost everyone was hard at work. Picking up garbage, sweeping sidewalks, trimming bushes. It was amazing. Iraqis actually taking pride in their living areas and putting in several hours in 110 degree heat to make it nicer. I swear we gave out about a hundred big trashbags. Amazing. After they got finished, the area looked SO GOOD. It was absolutely shocking. Actually, the shocking thing was that the majority of the residents wanted to do this at LEAST once a month. That's almost unheard of here. WOW. Maybe we are making a good impression here and positively influencing people. So, time to get back to work. B

Much better day

This has been a phenominally better day than yesterday. I'm actually in a good mood. Lol. Gotta finish typing up these debriefs, drop them off, and then maybe do some PT. I'll type a better entry later. B


Quote of the Day: While I was taking a picture of a man and his family. He points to his wife (who knows no English) and says in a perfect monotone "This is my wife. I want to push her in the river. Stand right there honey."

.............

Since when am I the commander's babysitter? He's a freaking CPT but I'm supposed to tell him what to do. RIIIIIGHT.

These two days have been the hardest here. I just want to come home.

By the way, Happy Birthday to Me.

Loooooooong Day....

Today was an INCREDIBLY long day. Wow. I finally got back at 9:30 pm. No dinner and I hate MREs. But I ate one anyway. Started out wierd...ended weird...lots of wierd in the middle. For some reason today was "Fire lots of Rockets into the Green Zone day." We had 5 impacts here today. Um, that's an increase from normal by...um...FIVE. Lol. No damage and no injuries, thank God. The one I got to analyize did make a heck of a crater. It was about 2 feet deep and 3 feet wide. A pretty nice one. Anyway, I think I'm going to tuck myself into bed now and prepare for another fun "Meet the Community" Tuesday. Whoopie! They usually turn into LT Hall takes names and pictures to issue ungodly numbers of badges.

Quote of the day: "Bring my truck here, I need my phone." Said from the commander to his driver 200 feet away.

Crazy nights...

So, here's another one for my great stories collection. I've finally sat down, loosened up my boots, and started to watch a little TV. One of the guys on radio comes in and tells me that we have a situation. The guy controling power to a large part of the Green Zone has shut down the power and locked himself in the power station until he gets paid. So, I jump up and go to the radio to find out more information. This guy has gotten 4 guys with AK-47s to protect him inside the building and is demanding 4 or 5 dollars to turn back on the power. FOUR or FIVE DOLLARS? I call back and ask if someone has considered just giving him 5 dollars. Of course I'm shaking my head. They come back that he wants 5 dollars from EACH FAMILY he supplies power to. He supplies 30 families so that makes about 150 dollars. He's shut off power to an American checkpoint for 150 dollars. That not make sense to anyone else? And of course, after briefing our Commanding officer, he goes running out to the checkpoint to, I assume, meet the business end of MR. LONG RIFLE. :-) LOL. So, I'm still waiting to hear the end of this one. I'll update this when I find out.

UPDATE: Sure enough, they did a cordon and raid. Meaning, they surrounded the building and then told the people inside we would shoot them if they didn't come out. There were 2 armed guards (who were FPS Workers, Iraqis we hire, give uniforms and weapons to guard things in Iraq) who tried keep their weapons. Apparently, put your weapon down or we WILL shoot is an effective statement outside of movies. So, endstate is power back on to the checkpoint and to the families.

Abu Ghraib

Every day I check the news and swear for a week there's been something about Abu Ghraib there. Yes, it was no way to treat prisioners but I have a few observations. First, we're supposed to treat prisioners with respect but what happens when an American soldier gets captured? He's beaten, tortured, hung from a bridge, beheaded, need I go on? But that still doesn't give us a right to treat prisioners badly. Next, the people in Baghdad do not care. I've had the opportunity to ask around and no one cares. The comment I've heard most is that if they hadn't done something bad in the first place, they never would have ended up in Abu Ghraib. The media has built this up into some sort of atrocity that has outraged the Iraqi people. The day (last Wednesday) that the first American soldier was put on trial, we were expecting a protest to number in the thousands. 100 people showed up. ONE HUNDRED. That's it. And most of them had signs saying "No to Terror." They walked around for about an hour and left. That doesn't seem to me to be widespread outrage of the Iraqi people.
And lastly, we were having a conversation about the subject and an NCO made this point. It's never the front-line combat soldiers that do this type of thing. It's always some rear echelon non-combat puke 3 times removed from the action that does it. There are so many good men here that would never do anything like that. Especially taking orders from who they're claiming they took orders from.
I hope all that made sense. After another cup of coffee I'm going to reread it and make sure it makes sense. Just to be clear I do NOT condone what happened at that prision. But it is not the outrage here among the Iraqi people that the media is making it out to be.

Tic Tacs

Tic Tacs are addictive. I keep reading the label but can't find anything that would cause me to eat them non-stop. AHHH. Must....stop....eating....tic tacs...

Friday's Off

One of the interesting things here is that Friday is the day off here. Yeah, the only day off. So, you know what that means. All the Iraqis get drunk and party on Thursday night. Lol. And yes, for those of you who thought like me, that there's a stigma on alcohol. NOPE. They get raging drunk just like us. They especially like to get drunk and drive by our FOB flipping us the bird. We just laugh. And, humorously, they have no minimun drinking age. That reminds me of a funny story. Me and this SSG are sitting in the back of a Humvee chilling waiting for the XO to get done with an errand. And of course, as we sit there, all the kids are driving up on their little scooters (I swear, all of them have one) asking us if we want to buy DVDs. These two ride up and I notice that the scooter is kinda swerving. The kid gets close and I swear he'd been smoking some wacky weed. So, the SSG and I are teasing him. "Dude, you're stoned out of your mind." He finally goes "3 beers!" and almost falls off his scooter. At that point, I'm ROLLING. Then he zips off, swerving all over the road. ROTFLOL!

What I would give for a full night's sleep

But as my boss says, sleep is overrated and that's why coffee is very much my friend. I don't even put anything in it anymore. Black as motor oil to get me going in the morning. But at least it's always something different waking me up earlier than I want to. Sometimes it's car bombs, sometimes rockets, sometimes people at one of the checkpoints who have "information", and sometimes just choppers buzzing our building for no apparent reason. Like I said, at least it changes. Green Day's Time of Your Life just came on the radio. Wow that brings be back to freshman year in college. Who would have thought I'd be sitting in Iraq 5 years later. Jeez. Anyway. I gotta get back to entering the rest of the Iraqi names I've got into my database. I swear these people need birth control bad. Dude 60 years old, 10 kids...in a 2 room apartment. Something just wrong with that. But props to the old dude. ;-) Lata.

i hate badges

Today was a badge making day. For those of you not up to speed on what's going on, I'll put together a post explaining all about my job here. But for now, all you need to know is that I'm in the Green Zone of Baghdad, Iraq, responsible for the security here. In that job, we have to make sure that the only people in the GZ are the ones that live here. In order to regualate that, we have to make badges. These badges are such a pain in my butt. Instead of just making a decision to issue out all new badges to everyone living here, the powers that be are trying to pass the buck to someone else. The CPA wants us to do it. We want the CPA to issue a badge. I'm thinking that it'll end up being ME and my company issuing badges. The badges issued by the unit before us were VERY simple. One sided and easy to make. But also, very easy to counterfeit. Battalion decided we needed to make badges that were hard to dupe. Without getting into the details of it, I enlisted the help of some SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) in the field of ID card making (;-)) and came up with a pretty good badge, if I do say so myself. But the kicker is that they're harder and more time consuming to make. This isn't a big problem when you're making 10 or 20. But for the 10,000 people that live in the Green Zone, it's a BIG deal. I only made 70 today and it took me all afternoon. Heaven help me when it's decided I have to make all 10,000 badges. Well, 9930 badges. Alright. Time for a shower and my bed. Later!

First Post...

My first post on here. I've thought about doing one of these for a while now and finally decided it might be a good way to keep track of what goes on while I'm in Baghdad. Quite a lot of interesting stuff goes on here, and I'll do my best to keep up with it. I hope ya'll enjoy reading about it and please let me know if you do. B