An Ignoramus' Tikrit Palace Tour of Art
Duality is implicit to mortality.
This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. One of those basic but mysterious principles of life that we spend a lifetime trying to unravel, understand, then knit back into something meaningful. I love talking about duality and the math behind systems of opposition and psuedo-intellectual things of this ilk, but with most any group of people you bring this sort of thing up with you get everthing from polite smiles, the same you give a child who says he wants to be an astronaut, fireman, and doctor when he grows up, to simple dismissive eye rolling. Trying to subtly segue into a dialogue about anything even remotely philosophical with an infantry platoon is, unfortunately, an exercise in futulity. As matter of fact, the earliest use of the colloquial phrase "exercise in futility" found in writing was in a memoir Plato wrote about his time served in the Roman legions trying fruitlessly to discuss the philosophies of justice with his fellow legionaires. Actually, I just made that up. But it'd be funny if it were true.
Anyway, something I always surprise myself with is how I am able to simultaneously feel both bummed out and excited everytime we get called to go on a mission. Most times I'll be geekin' out on my laptop, engrossed in what I'm doing, and while I work I'll be planning out in the back of my head how I'm going to allot my time to the various tasks I want to accomplish-- weapon cleaning, laundry, reading, responding to email, writing, editing photographs, showering-- then someone will come in and say, "Get dressed! We have a mission. Team leaders and above, op order in fifteen mikes." Then there will be that initial feeling of terrible disappointment knowing that how I will be spending my time is now dictated by the caprice of a mission-- that reaction of laziness denied. I'll think to myself, "Dammit, I don't want to have to do anything right now. I was totally chillaxing, now I have to put on all my shit and go raid some stupid house that won't even have anything in it, get all sweaty, and then go to bed late as hell. Ugh." But not one second later the child-like soldier excitement will kick in. "Fuck yeah! I think it's my team's turn again to do the initial entry. Wait, maybe I can be on the breech team this time. Hell yes! I'm gonna smash the fuck outta that door! It's going to be awesome! What if we make contact? Oh god, this could be so cool!"
Another dichotomous pair of desires regarding this whole combat experience thing are living conditons. When soldiers tell stories, the ones they are most proud of are those that involve things sucking. This goes completely without saying. Black Hawk Down would not have been nearly as interesting if everything went as planned. You never hear soldiers say, "Man, basic training was so easy. I had the easiest training cycle ever." "No way man, my training cycle was way easier. Shit, it was so easy, we got off every day at four. And the drill sergeants didn't even yell at us, they politely asked us if we'd please do push-ups and shit." Hell, we want our soldiering experience to suck as much as possible. We'll of course never openly say this or admit it to ourselves, you can't want things to suck, that would be stupid. It's like you want it to suck, but you don't want to go so far as to ask for it to suck or to purposely make it suck. But the more is sucks, the better the stories. The whole idea is for it to suck so you can try to make it suck less. That's the whole game.
Originally we were told that our company was going to act as the division quick reaction force and that we would be stationed in Tikrit where the division headquarters would be. This changed, as things do in the military. We now live on a smallish ammo bunker complex in a swamp near a smallish town. Accomidations are pretty spartan. But this is good in a way because the experience seems a little more in keeping with the theme of what we are doing, which is combat. Not far from us is a very large base complete with movie theater, chow hall, and lots of girls. One's natural inclination is always to want the better setup, like to move to the base up the street, but we sort of like having our own little base. It's quiet here and we don't get attacked that often. There are things that make living where we do cool, but overall we have it much harder than probably most the servicepeople in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Our platoon has recently made a few trips to Tikrit on various escort missions. I was on two of them. The first trip I went on was brief. We had a chance to grab some chow at the very respectable chow hall at the First Division's headquarters located at the palace complex, then it was back to our mosquito-infested bunkers in the swamp. The second trip afforded us the opportunity to spend the afternoon there. After chow, we headed over to the morale, welfare, and recreation center (MWR) located in what I think was Uday Hussein's old palace. This base is impressive. It pained us to think that this is where we were supposed to be stationed but then weren't. You can't help but envy the lucky bastards that get to do a tour at this place. It's gorgeous. The view of the Tigris is incredible. There is so much cool stuff. I mean, it used to be a fucking palace complex, so there are swimming pools and ridiculously decadent living quarters and all that. When I wake up, I stand on a dirty concrete floor where bombs used to be stacked. There are soldiers in Tikrit that when they wake up, their bare feet kiss cool smooth marble. You can't help but want desperately to be stationed here. Conventional wisdom says that when you go into combat, you must live in a way that is substandard to the way you were previously used to living. Not true here. If I were stationed here, I'd never leave Iraq. I think I would make a crappy dictator. I wouldn't get anything done. I would totally squander my time fucking off all day at my ridiculous palace. Think of the parties you could throw! God, I have to stop thinking about this. The more I do, the more I lose all sense of zen-contentment about living in a swamp. I wanted to strangle all the undeserving pogues that infested this place. And the girls. So many girls. I'm sure people have written about this a thousand times already, but the number of women in combat in Iraq has got to be unprecidented. Then Dan told me about some graffitti he read on the wall in one of the shitters. It read, "All Army girls: How does it feel knowing that when you go back home you'll be ugly again?" The cruelty of this remark gave me respite for all the rooms with marble floors upon which I'll never tread barefooted belonging to female soldiers I'll never know.
Like everything in the world of the buck-sergeant infantryman, you are poorly informed on anything beyond platoon-level operations. I wish I could show you these photos of Tikrit and tell you what all of it is and its history and significance, and all that took place during the assault there, but I can't even tell you definitively which palace belonged to which Hussein. I know very little about architecture and even less about middle-eastern architecture. I don't know the proper names for these structures or any of the style elements. I hated my art history professor in college more than I can express and I'm one of these people that fail classes because he hates the teacher. Had she not been such a raging bitch, I would have paid more attention and had been able to speak more intelligently regarding this sort of thing. But seriously, this lady fucking sucked. On one test you were supposed to match up certain matching terms. I was supposed to match the word 'parallel' with another word. 'Crosshatching' and 'posts' were both options. Both things involved parallelness, so I thought I'd just pick one and hope for the best. I chose posts since posts were always standing straight up and parallel with other posts, such as in stone doorways, e.g. 'posts and lintel'. Crosshatching involved parrallel lines, but only in little textured groups, so I figured she might get stupid and make an issue about that. I chose wrong. Apparently she thought the lines of crosshatching qualified as parallel better. When I met with her a few days later to contest her marking my test wrong, I figured it would be a trivial feat to present how posts were always parallel and therefore I deserved the points. But she refused. So I asked, "When are posts ever not parallel?" I study calculus, dammit, and even a fucking third-grader knows what it means. As long as two lines that go infinitely in both directions don't ever intersect, they are parallel. And you know what her response was? "Look at Stonehenge. Those are posts and they're in a circle, they're not parallel." I was dumbfounded. Circle, not parallel?! Either she was pulling my leg or she was trying to pull some novice-level apples-and-oranges Jedi mind trick or she was just actually that retarded. She kept a straight face. She was serious. Trying to not be condescending I argued, "Fine, they are in a circle, but even so, the lines they represent still never intersect..." She wasn't paying attention. I gave up. I slept in through most the final then showed up absurdly late. I failed the hell out of that class. I was such an idiot. I could have settled for a B+ and never thought about that old maid ever again, but instead I passively failed the class as if to spite her. I have a bad habit of having to learn everything the hard way. So here I am, about to present you with a ton of photos of the palaces in freaking Tikrit, Iraq and I'm going to have to use make-believe terms or something for everything because I refused to absorb anything from Dr. Warma's Art History class at Utah State University eleven years ago. But hey, remember, if things don't work out in your life, you can always just turn to drugs or join the Army.
Here are a ton of photos:
http://www.justanothersoldier.com/blog040521.htm
