How To Blow-Up Trucks, Dogs, and Mosques

Okay, this is going to be a quick entry because I'm lazy. The great thing about being lazy when writing about combat in Iraq is that the facts and photos sorta speak for themselves and you don't really have to talk it up. I tend to elaborate on things because it's cathartic for me. You might feel as though you are reading about Iraq, but in reality you and the several hundred other people reading my screeds are actually my collective of therapists. I don't need therapy today, but I want to share a few quick things because they are interesting.

A couple days ago me and about fifteen guys from my platoon were doing our NAI run ("named area of interest") along with the EOD ("blow shit up") guys. There was an alleged cache of mortar rounds or something near the NAIs that the EOD guys wanted to blow up. So we drove to the first one, dismounted, checked things out, mounted up, and moved out. We came to the area that the cache was supposed to be, but didn't find shit. Then we went to the second NAI.

The NAIs are somewhat large areas of real estate, so each time we go we try to inspect a different part of them. This time when tooling around, we found an abandoned tractor trailer. Abandon vehicles are never a good thing in Iraq, so we usually destroy them when we have the means. This time we happened to have EOD with us who didn't get to blow the cache of mortar rounds that never materialized, so as they say: you do the math.

First we had John, one of our .50 cal gunners, unload a few bursts into it. For the non-killers out there, mounted machine guns have a device on them called a T&E that controls the weapon's traversal and elevation. Basically it's just a thing that keeps the gun from climbing up as you fire it while allowing it to freely swing side-to-side. When John shot the truck, he didn't have the T&E engaged. This is called free-gunning. It's fine that he chose to free-gun it, it was good experience, but it made it so he could only put a short burst into it before it started to climb. We try to be careful about this sorta thing because, after all, there are people living all over the place and collateral damage from errant bullets isn't cool. Anyway, I only mention this for the guys that read this who will be manning .50 cals in Iraq soon. Free-gunning is cool when you need the freedom of movement, say for a close-range engagement, but if you want to actually put lead into something accurately with nice long bursts, use the damn T&E.

I have some super-crappy footage of this if you want to see what I mean. The .avi is about 3.9 megs. Here's the link: http://www.justanothersoldier.com/50cal01.avi

After shooting the truck, EOD decided to blow it up. They had several bricks of some Russian explosives they wanted to expend, so they put the whole shit in the cab of the truck on a timed fuse. We then drove several hundred meters away and waited patiently. "Thirty seconds!", the EOD guy yelled. So we're all watching the truck, waiting for the fireworks display, when, Hey, wait a second, is that a dog? Oh, shit! What are you doing? Get the fuck away from there you stupid mutt!

A dog had wandered toward the truck right as it was about to explode. I've never seen so many dogs get fucked up in my life as I have over here. This one had the luckiest day of his life, though. However, I don't think he'll be answering to any more whistles. The truck blew right next to him then he tucked tail and ran. Aside from the fact that innocent animals (almost) dying is not cool, it was pretty damn funny. My buddy, Yanko, got it all on tape, but I don't have the software to get the footage off his camera, so I took some screen shots of the display screen. The quality sucks, but it's enough to get the point. I also got some footage on my little camera, but you can't see anything. It's funny, if for no other reason, to just hear the guys talking about the dog. The .avi is about 3.8 megs. My hosting company may have a heart attack when they see my bandwidth usage for the month, but here's the link to that movie: http://www.justanothersoldier.com/dog_truck01.avi

Then on the way back while we're driving through a little neighborhood, I notice all these bricks and rubble strewn across the road. I thought to myself, Hmm, what's all this shit? I look out the front of the Humvee (I was in the back seat, so my sector of fire was out the window) and thought, Is something missing? Holy shit! That one mosque is gone!

This small village had a mosque that was now no more. We stopped and got out to investigate. It was handy that we had EOD with us because they were able to poke around the rubble and determine that the explosion came from the inside (as opposed to an air strike or an exterior detonation). The locals who came out told us that someone was seen planting the bomb that destroyed the place. It must have been a good amount of explosives, because this place was leveled. As you may well know, I'm no fan of religion, but it still made me really sad to see this. The mosque was Shiite. What's strange too is that this area is considered to be less-than-friendly to us, so for it to be a retaliatory strike against the local people for being sympathetic to the coalition doesn't make any sense. The mosque and the village are within the boundaries of a different unit's area of operations, so we reported it up and headed home. We may never know what the story was. What can I say? The Iraqis are as busy being assholes to each other as they are to us.

Here are the photos: http://www.justanothersoldier.com/blog040624.htm

Blood and Soap

My gloves smell of blood and soap. I washed them yesterday after everything that happened, but instead of just the sweet musky smell of blood-- that smell that is both subtly repugnant but strangely appealing, appealing because your viscera knows its own, but repellant because it seems too personal, like the smell of someone else's sweat or breath-- they also have the cheap smell of scented antibacterial soap, a smutty fakery like the aborted attempt of scented tampons to obfuscate the stench of menstrual gore.


Today, a good part of my company was involved in a mission to nab a fairly high profile guy in a somewhat spectacular manner from the town where we work. But the only thing that is going to be spectacular about what I tell you is the supremely vague aforementioned abstraction because homeboy was not where we thought he was going to be and to tell you anything more would be bad OPSEC, even by my warped standards for it. I was on the secondary snatch team, the guys that would physically intercept the target individual should he have chosen a less-expected egress route from the target location. But once we realized that there would be no fandango, we just sorta milled around the dance floor like a bunch of high school A/V club kids. So I had a lot of time today to obsessive-compulsively sniff my gloves repeatedly, seeing as how there was no other stimuli to focus on in the madness-inducing heat.

As things become more busy as the transfer of authority approaches, missions that are normally performed by certain companies get passed around to cover the ebb and flow of requisite manpower. Yesterday, myself and about fifteen other guys were picking up some slack for another company by checking up on a couple "named areas of interest". Essentially this means going to an area where bad guys have been roosting and nosing around looking for anything less than kosher.

The area was somewhat new to us, something always exciting, being somewhere for the first time. The terrain was dry, hard dirt cut deeply and randomly in places from water. In the abrupt ravines and gullies, tall dense grass grew in stark juxtaposition. After the initial clearing, we poked around in all the abandoned buildings and abandoned fighting positions. After an ample amount of dicking around, my lieutenant asked me, "Sergeant, do you have any HE?" (This means, Do you have any high explosive rounds for your M203 grenade launcher?) What? Phft. I was like, "Hellz ya I do, sir. Shit!"

"See that steel and stuff over there?"

"Roger, sir."

"I think it's attacking us."

"Roger that, sir!"

By this time everyone who had a 203 was already instinctively loading rounds. When it comes time to lay down HE, the Force kicks in and you have one in the tube before the Obi Wan in your head can even clear his throat.

I fired first. Pop! The target was probably about 150 meters away. I overshot horribly-- I don't have a sight for my 203, so I was using the Force to aim which happen to fail me miserably on this occasion. BOOM! The 'splosion was cool as shit. None of the other 203-gunners did much better, but all said, it was good training to fire a few live grenades, not to mention a lot of fun. Note to self: bug the supply Sergeant for some fucking quadrant sights for the 203.

It just occurred to me that you might be thinking that this is going to be a story about soldiers indiscriminately firing a few grenades for no good reason and accidentally hitting some innocent civilians. Well, this is not one of those stories. We were careful and fired into an area that we had just cleared thoroughly of puppies, three-year-old girls, and baby seals. I've already written about soldiers killing civilians and I never wish to do it again.

We mounted up and moved out. It would be a bit of a drive to the next place, so we were expecting a smooth ride through an area that is basically unpopulated.

But before we got far, we saw an Iraqi guy awkwardly running toward the road, waving his arms frantically. We were in the middle of nowhere. It looked as though he had come from an area that was nothing but a lot of big gullies.

Without knowing a single detail, anyone coming upon a scene like this would know that something was rotten in Scotland. This guy was obviously hurt and somewhere there would be other people hurt. I was in the trail vehicle of four. The guy was picked up and we drove off the road in the direction from where he came. The terrain here was hilly and mostly non-navigable making it tactically very challenging. There were innumerable places for enemy to engage us from. We apprehensively rolled down into one of the gullies. The defilade increased as the gully deepened, but not in a way that was good for us. We were basically entering a textbook ambush location. Everyone dismounted from the vehicles except for drivers and turret gunners. The natural focus was to get to whoever was hurt so a lot of the guys started running down the incline. We walked by a blood-soaked rag. It looked like a young boy's underwear. We couldn't see anyone yet, but my heart started to race. I started to worry about how bad the injuries would be.

I guess I tend to be a bit of a nerd about situations like this. Anytime something draws everyone's attention, I start looking for something else. I worked at John F. Kennedy Airport for a while with the National Guard. I was one of those dicks who just stood there with an M16. I watched everything that went on at Terminal Four's security checkpoint, eight hours a day for eight months. (Which happens to be the terminal for the Middle East flights. After September 11th, all eyes were on the airborne Arabs and therefore my terminal. But oddly, the Arabs were the well-behaved ones. It was the Jews flying on El Al who were the pains in the ass. I could write an entire book titled, "The Hasidim - The Rudest Fucking People to Ever Walk the Earth".) You want to know how to get something through a checkpoint? Have a girl with big tits put a bag through a scanner that has a set of kitchen knives in it-- a gift for grandma. She needs to be wearing something tight and revealing. She needs to be a garrulous coquette. All eyes will be on her cleavage-- every Port Authority cop, every soldier, and most the passengers. With a minimal amount of social engineering of the screener you have while this tritely constructed fiasco is going on, you could pass off a hand grenade as a PalmPilot. I've never gotten vindication on this sort of thing, there's never been a threat presented on any occasion in my life where I've found it looking past the diversion, but I'll never stop doing this. I climbed to the top of the gully and out of the potential kill zone. Besides, it was just sound tactics.

This is not the part where I tell you something totally unexpected happened. Life can be extraordinarily unoriginal. This is the past were I tell you, We were right. There were two Iraqi men on the ground where the gully turned to the right and opened to a wider area. We ran up, quickly assessed them, and found that they both had gunshot wounds to the upper thigh

One of the two, a young man, probably in his twenties, died before we could begin treatment. "Sergeant, this one's out." The blood on the ground under his pelvis was in a large pool soaked into the ground. It was bright red. Just like we've trained, a few guys pushed out a security perimeter while we worked. The question that would perplex me for the rest of the time that we were there was, Where was the gun or guns that shot these guys and who shot them?

Stan (my squad leader) and I stood over the other man, a pot-bellied gentleman who I would guess was in his fifties. Someone grabbed the combat lifesaver bags out of the Humvees. His pant leg was cut off. There was an entry wound on the front of his left thigh. It was a good sized hole, big enough to fit my thumb. The wound was dark red and bloody, but not bleeding profusely. We cut more of his pant leg off to try and find the exit wound. On his inner thigh closer to his groin there was a hole about twice the size as the first wound. The hole was jagged and welled with dark blood. I opened a field dressing and got ready to apply it by grabbing his leg. The wound looked soft and fresh and wet, like a bloody macabre vagina. As I lifted his leg, the hole opened slightly, and I thought of sashimi. I was worried that I was hurting him. I applied the field dressing to the wound, repeating the same action I had dozens of times in training. Stan did the same for the other wound.

There was minimal bleeding at this point, but we had to put a little effort into keeping the guy awake. I put my hand on his chest, looked him in the eye and told him that he was going to be okay. I felt like an idiot, assuring him in English, but I figured he'd get the point. Why the hell else would a man put his hand over the heart of another man? As we finished up the dressings, a couple of other guys started the IV for him. Giving IVs is not something I know how to do (something I mean to rectify now), so I let them have at.

I went back over to the guy who was out. He was just laying there, ignored. I wanted to do something, but I couldn't even decide if I should elevate his feet or his head. I kept thinking that no matter what I elevate, it's just going to make him bleed out faster. I contemplated giving him CPR, but with out treating the wound first, I had no inclination to kiss a dead guy and break his sternum with compressions that will only make him bleed out more. But jesus, what was the point? He was already dead, his pants were soaked in blood as was the ground around him.

His eyes were half open. Being a product of American pop culture, I knew that the thing you were supposed to do now was shut his eye lids, one of those archetypically lurid things that everyone wishes they could do just once in their life but know they never will, like leaving a small stack of warn cash on a whore's nightstand. I put my hand over his face and tried to shut his eyelids. They didn't really move, or they just moved back to the half-shut and dead-looking position. I tried harder. Still not budging. Now I was just feeling stupid, it's not like making him look more like he was asleep instead of dead was going to be giving him any comfort and frankly I didn't care how he looked, I just wanted to give him some dignity in death. So we grabbed a poncho out of one of the Humvees. I arranged his arms and legs and we put the poncho over him, tucking it under him. Is it weird that the first time I've 'tucked someone in', it's a dead guy?

The guys were having a little trouble with the IV on the old guy. His veins were basically non-existent and I could see, judging from the new blood on his arm, that there were already a few failed attempts. Were the situation not so serious, I would have given them shit about this. But I knew they had it in hand, they just needed to give it another try, so I walked over to the first guy.

This guy had been shot in the calf. His wound had been dressed and we had him drinking water. The temperature in the sun was at least 135. I asked him if he was doing alright. Again, stupid that it's in English, but I felt that this was one of those times that people understand what you mean regardless of language. He Arabic'd that he was fine, but he was pleading with me to do something for his friend. I stupidly told him that we were. I didn't know what to say. His eyes welled with tears and he wiped them away with the same hand that held the bottle of water.

We called in a MEDEVAC, but we were denied. I am not the lieutenant, so I don't know what the conversation was like, but I imagine the message was basically that we don't provide valuable air assets to local nationals who get hurt. On a human rights level, I find it reprehensible that we had that dumb 1st ID motherfucker who shot himself between the toes air-lifted out, but a critically injured Iraqi didn't warrant a bird. However, on a tactical level, I understand that we can't be tying up vital resources on every Iraqi that decides to get hurt-- something that happens too often to be giving Blackhawks up for.

We put the old guy on a poleless litter and onto the hood of a Humvee. We put the calf-guy in one too. Again, he asked me (I'm assuming from his gesticulating) to please help his friend. I repeatedly assured him that would put him on the other Humvee. Which was true. But he wasn't going to want to watch that. The Humvees rolled back up the gully.

No one seemed to really want to deal with the dead guy. This sorta bothered me, but I'm not gonna harp on guys about it. No one wanted to get blood on themselves. This is what happens when you have a platoon of soldiers who are all either cops or were raised in the city-- they're all convinced that getting blood on you is the fastest way to catch all manner of untreatable disease. Which is damn skippy in New York City, but in Iraq the AIDS rate is like zero-point-zero. I said, Okay guys, let's get this guy on the hood. No one seemed too eager. I didn't need help yet, so I went to the dead guy and rolled him over so the poncho was under him rather than over him. When I rolled him, it felt like a body, it moved like a body, had the heft of a body, but it was strange to think that this body was no longer a person. That it had been a person just a few short minutes ago, but now it was a mass of meat that I was going to throw on the hood of my Humvee like a deer. I tried to think of it as only a body, but I couldn't help but think that he was a man and I wanted to respect him as a man. So I chose to not be offended by him or his body or any of its functions. Only this was the first time I would endure the bodily function of being bled-out dead. After a little coaxing, I managed to get three guys to grab the ends of the poncho. I tried giving very explicit instructions on how I wanted to get the guy on the hood, but the guys weren't too stoked on the idea of getting really physical with the guy. Touching a poncho is one thing, but touching bloody dead body is another. We finally got him on the hood, but almost lost him. I was not going to drop this guy on the ground. I yelled at them to stop being squeamish and to just fucking push. I decided that him not falling was more important than his comfort, so once I got him on the front of the hood, I just rolled him up it until he was right in front of the windshield. It wasn't very graceful, the whole procedure, to say the least. But he didn't fall. I stayed on the hood with him, along with Justin, our radio guy, for the ride up to the road.

I was looking at his face and noticed two deep cuts in his brow. They were not bloody. I wondered how he got these wounds and if maybe they played a role in his death, then I realized that since they weren't bleeding it must have happened post mortem… shit... and that I probably did it getting him onto the hood. I felt bad that I inflicted on him a wound that would have caused him to be scarred for life normally, but right now it didn't really matter because his lifespan was a number less than zero. I guess at worst I slightly fucked up the open casket thing for his mom. I don't know how to express that I'm genuinely sorry without sounding like an asshole.

We had to wait longer than I care to mention, but our CASEVAC escort finally made it to our location with the field ambulance to evacuate the wounded. Out of the sight of the others, we transferred the dead guy to a body bag. We then loaded the body onto the back of an ICDC truck, a compact white Toyota with a machine gun shoddily mounted over the cab, a stand-in hearse that just seemed cheap and undignified, but oh well. At least we had a body bag. This is not an item you really want to make a priority to remember when you load up the vehicles. But lugging a body around in a poncho that's on the verge of bursting apart, lifeless limbs dangling out the sides, is not a cool way to roll.

The wounded were escorted to our base to be treated and the dead guy was dropped off at the ICDC station. We opened the body bag to search for ID. The bag was full of blood now and his white shirt was almost completely a saturated hue of red. Stan did the searching, a guy who I love for not being one to ever back down from the most repulsive of tasks. He found none, so we took a few pictures of his face in hopes of being able to ID him later. The two places I had scored his head were now a blackish red. Damn.

The first thing we wondered once we got the chance to was, Why were these men shot? Who would do something like this? Did these men refuse to cooperate with the local Al Sadr guys or something, so they were shot? Then we thought maybe it was an Arab thing, a score that needed to be settled, a family or clan issue-- none of our business! Then we wondered if maybe the men were child molesters and the father and brothers of their victims did this. This gave us temporary solace. After all, we did see what looked like a young boy's bloodied underwear-- the symbolism was all there. But the answer, we would later find out, was pretty much our first guess, the most obvious, the least original.

When we got back to our bunker, my hands and arms still smelled of this guy's blood. And his sweat. I took a thorough shower. I felt guilty washing his smell off me.


This afternoon, once we returned from the unsuccessful snatch mission, we got some follow-up information on the three men. They were local contractors who were painters for the major base up the street from us. While leaving the base, they were car-jacked by people who were none too pleased with them working for the coalition. They were then driven to a remote gully far from any base, an excellent location to kill someone. It's near a major road, and therefore an escape route, but completely out of sight. The last thing one of these men did was take that long walk down the gulley. Then each of them was shot and left for dead. They could have been shot in the head and killed on the spot, but they weren't. They were all shot in the legs, forcing them have to fight to live. And to suffer. And if they survived, to remember.

------

I've been thinking about this a lot and I realized that I've been so overly concerned about the dead guy, the guy that I couldn't save, that I didn't save, that I hadn't realized until now that I saved someone's life, or rather that I helped save someone's life, that we saved someone's life. I've never saved someone's life before.








Anthony was probably the top-performer of the day. He got the IV working when we were having trouble with it (he ended up putting it in the guy's hand) and he stayed on top of things throughout the entire process.

A Very Special Message

A few days ago we held a ceremony at our forward operations base to award a Purple Heart to a soldier in one of our companies who had been wounded. A few soldiers from each platoon were sent to the ceremony to stand in formation while the award was presented. Somehow I was chosen to represent my platoon along with a few other guys, a duty I frankly could have done without. Not that I don't want to show my respect to the guy that was getting the award, it's just that it kinda sucks to stand at attention in ungodly Iraqi heat in full battle rattle then have to listen to our battalion commander speak.

I was driving my company commander to the ceremony (we were late) and out of the blue he asks me, "So how's the writing coming". He asked me this once before when I ran into him in our shower trailer a month or so ago. As you probably know, back in February he demanded I "dismantle" my blog when he discovered it on the internet. It was a bit of a fiasco. It's because of this adjudication that you are reading this in email format and not on the web. In an effort to honor his demands and to satisfy my own impetus, I quietly email you my subversive spleening, away from the omniscience of Google.

I have a penchant for openness and honesty, so I immediately responded with, "It's going well." I paused for a moment then added, "Actually sir, I haven't written in a while because there hasn't been that much to write about lately." "That'll change soon", he said matter-of-factly. We have a lot of missions planned over the next few weeks to-- how shall I put it-- to "celebrate" the turnover of power on the 30th. It's been mostly quiet around here other than the damn lucky shot of a rocket that killed two soldiers and wounded dozens of others at a nearby base.

By the way, the ceremony was good. This is soldierspeak for it was short. The guy got his award for getting wounded, a distinction for an award that has always seemed a little odd to me. When I was a kid my dad once gave me a prize for having the most number of bones in the piece of fish my mother served us for dinner that night. The bullet is still lodged in this soldier's shoulder. Apparently it entered the Humvee through an open window on the passenger side, shot the night vision goggles off the helmet of a soldier in the back seat, ricocheted off the vehicle's radio, then struck him in the shoulder. The battalion commander didn't mention any of this aside from the night vision goggles part, something he seemed to find hilarious and macho. I got the rest of this information from Ray on the drive back to our bunkers. (For those not familiar with Ray, I'll try to give you some more stories on him again soon, he's the craziest person I know and all Ray stories are guaranteed to satisfy.) At the end of the ceremony everyone sang the Army song and the First Infantry Division song. Oh my god what an abortion that was. "Blah blah blah and the Army keeps blah blah along!" "Blah blah blah blah The Big Red One! Blah blah blah blah!" It was embarrassing. Not one person in my company knew one word of either song. The chaplain, however, sang with gusto.

We're attached to the 1st ID, and hell, we're even wearing their patch on our right shoulders now to signify that we've been to combat with the Big Red One, or "BRO" as we like to call them, a unit patch I've never worn a day in my life. The 1st ID is cool and they have an incredible history (but what active duty unit doesn't have an incredible history) and I'm proud to wear the patch, but some guys think it would be more correct to wear our own unit patch as our combat patch-- the patch of the 27th Infantry Brigade. But here's the thing: With all the restructuring and shit that the National Guard is going through, there is no 27th Brigade anymore, or at least not for us. Why wear a patch to a unit that doesn't really exist to us anymore? All the guys who got left back home from our unit have now been absorbed into the 42nd Infantry Division (another unit with an incredible history). A lot of guys are not excited about this because the unit patch for the 42nd is a rainbow. The very same patch the guy in the Village People had on his uniform incidentally, only he wore his improperly. A rainbow was used for the patch since the entire unit was originally an all-Irish militia once upon a time, and later the patch became half a rainbow to signify how half the soldiers got wiped out in a single battle. The 42nd has fought in every major conflict since the revolution. Their history is awesome. But this is all lost on today's soldiers. Guys will literally leave the Army because of a patch. "I'm not gonna wear that fag patch!" was a common response to the news that we'd be folding into the 42nd. There was a time when our New York National Guard unit wore the patch of the 10th Mountain Division-- a cool patch with crossed swords and the word "Mountain" across the top. The irony is that the 10th Mountain is located at Fort Drum, New York, nowhere near a single fucking mountain. Anyway, retention rates were astronomical and unit strengths were well over one-hundred percent back then.

The thing where active duty units have cool patches and National Guard units have lame patches is a whole other discussion.

What I want to talk about for a minute is the 27th Brigade patch. The brigade isn't that old. It was named after an officer named O'Ryan. You'll have to forgive me, I am the world's worst guy when it comes to history, I don't remember details worth a shit. Anyway, it's named after this guy O'Ryan. I know this doesn't make any sense, lemme explain. So one of the patch planner guys I think said, "Okay, they want us to make a patch for the Brigade and it has to be in honor of O'Ryan. Hmm... Hey, we're from New York and we're all Yankee fans, let's just wear their symbol!" I'm sure this got presented to the patch-approver guys who said, "Um, that's the stupidest fucking idea anyone has every come to us with. We're not going to let you wear a baseball team patch. Try again you assholes." So the patch-planner guys went back to the bar for another think-n-drink session. After a few months of brainstorming they came up with a patch that was the Yankees symbol with some stars. An extra line was put in the NY of the Yankees symbol to make it NYD meant to mean "New York Division". For those of you who listened to punk in the '80s, it looks reminiscent of the Dead Kennedys symbol. And some stars were added to symbolize the constellation Orion. Nevermind the fact that O'Ryan, an Irish-American soldier, and Orion, a Greek mythological hunter, don't have shit in common other than the fact that their names are homophones.

Unquestionably the coolest unit patch in the Army is the Special Forces patch-- it's in the shape of an arrowhead to symbolize the Native Americans and their guerilla fighting style, there are lighting bolts to symbolize swiftness and power, and a sword to symbolize whatever swords symbolize (who really cares what swords symbolize, swords are cool!). Now that's a patch! For most my career I was in the 19th Special Force Group in Utah. This is the patch I moved to New York wearing. Then I had to start wear this kludge of a patch. And just as I was warming up to it, I learn about the whole O'Ryan-Orion non-connection thing which totally ruined it all for me. And now I am wearing the Orion patch in combat. Whatever. It's a dicked-up patch, but it's my patch.

When my battalion moved into our forward operations base here in Iraq, our battalion commander decided to change the name of the base from "Lion", the name that it had for a year, to "Orion". So it got changed. But here's the thing: no one was sure how to spell "Orion". Throughout the tactical operations center, every possible spelling could be found somewhere, including on official documents. So this sorta forced the issue to clear up what exactly the spelling was. It was recently decided (after a few months of apparent waffling) that the official spelling would be "O'Ryan". Um, isn't our brigade named "Orion" like the stars on our patch? And isn't our battalion callsign "Hunter" in honor of Orion the hunter, a moniker our BC adores to no end? (Is Orion really the hunter? I thought the constellation of the guy with the bow was the hunter, actually. Oh well.) And if anyone dies from our FOB, it will undoubtedly be renamed again and knowing our luck the new name will be something like "Rodion Romanivich Raskalnikov".

I want to shift gears now.

My platoon went into town with our company commander recently to perform a number of short tasks. I suppose I lack the ability to take anything seriously because everything we do just seems so... well... funny. It's not to say that what we do isn't important, we do many good and sometimes necessary and important things, it's just sometimes when you stop and think about it and look at all the photographs, like I do everytime I write, I notice how humorous everything is. I started my day by going through the remains of an air defense artillery site we bombed, sifting through piles of unexploded ordnance, picking up explosive fuses to prevent someone from coming along and picking them up-- they're explosive you know!

If you haven't noticed already, anytime I don't really have anything to write about I choose something random and specific and expound on it. Then I just present you a bunch of photos with wiseass comments. Today is one of those days.

I suppose I should mention the Time article. (I wish I could be mentioning a Times article instead.) Since you are terribly sophisticated and would never normally read Time unless someone happened to leave a copy in the restore, let me be the first to tell you that they mentioned us. It was an article on blogs (dated June 21) and Just Another Soldier was the only one mentioned as a military blog. This is kind funny seeing as how technically there is no longer a blog for Just Another Soldier and how there are dozens of other milblogs. It was mentioned that I had wandered through one of Saddam's empty palaces. Um, I didn't do that, I wandered through Uday's non-empty palace. Close enough for mass media I suppose. But hey, who I am to bite the hand that feeds me, right? I seriously don't know why they mentioned us. I'm a horrible representation of milbloggers. But hey, who cares! We have fun here! If you want news about Iraq, congratulations, you've come to the wrong fucking place! If you are distrustful of the media and want to know exactly what's going on in Iraq, you'll have to pray for divine enlightenment, because only god knows what the hell is going on over here! But I can't really help you with that either because I don't believe in god, I think the phrase "There are no atheists in foxholes" is semantic proof that "god" is essentially a construct borne of necessity, and I regularly ridicule Christian doctrine. This is only natural because I am a recovering Mormon.

However, if you want to know how it feels to be a soldier in Iraq, to hear something honest and raw-- that I can help you with. There is so much to discuss! Urban warfare tactics! Killing civilians!!! MASTURBATION!!!

But hey, I'm a madman, a clown prince, a heretic. I am most likely out of my mind. I mean, seriously, what kind of an asshole joins the infantry? So rather than endure any more of the indigestible garbage I write, how 'bout we just look at some photos. The camera makes no moral judgments, right? Click the link for the photos.

http://www.justanothersoldier.com/blog040617.htm