6 April 2004
What do you do when you're driving back from a mission and you see trucks driving down the road full of bombs? You pull them over and ask them what in the name of fuck they think they're doing. We made these guys drive to our base and spend the night. Once we were convinced that the bombs they had were in fact inert, we let them go. The whole thing was slightly unnerving.
11 April 2004
There were several occasions during April where we escorted EOD so they could destroy suspected IEDs. The process is pretty simple. You put a few bricks of C4 on the IED and remotely detonate it. To safely get the C4 to the site, the EOD guys use robots like this one. The control device for these robots are really cool in a geeky kind of way. The future of warfare is owned by the geeks, mark my words.
28 April 2004
In preparation for scores of anticipated refugees that would flee Fallujah had the mother of all battles occurred there (it didn't), our battalion recon'd an old bunker complex not far from Fallujah as a place to temporarily accommodate them. The bunkers and buildings at this complex were REALLY spread out, more so even than the old ammo bunkers where we live. Gas masks and gas mask filter canisters were found littered everywhere. Rumor has it that the people who live in the area won't graze their animals on the complex because when they have in the past, entire herds have gotten mysteriously ill. The buildings we cleared were very strange. Incredibly high ceilings with tiled walls; and they reeked the way I would imagine old slaughters houses reek. Outside there were what looked like enormous pump tanks that had been ripped out of the buildings. Kirk said, "Thank god I already have kids, cuz you guys are fucked! When we get back and you guys have kids, they're gonna be ALL fucked up. Ha ha!"
While we were there, a 1st ID guy shot himself in the foot. This was the first time I'd seen a wounded soldier firsthand. It was a little disturbing to see one of my own on the ground, bleeding. Then I got over it. We waited about 30 seconds before we started making fun of the guy. Matt treated him. He had shot himself perfectly between his fourth and fifth toes, a very lucky shot. A Medevac chopper was already enroute and there was no use in canceling it, so toeblaster got a free ride. Like any soldier, I am constantly checking to be sure my weapon is on safe. And on top of that, you should never have your finger on the trigger unless you are ready to let loose hell on bad guys. How this guy, a full-time soldier unlike us National Guard shitbags, managed to do this is embarrassing. He was a private. I felt so bad standing there, looking at him, trying to decide whether or not I should take a picture. I didn't feel bad because he had been shot or because I was contemplating doing something in bad taste like take a photograph, I felt bad because this guy's pain was going to last a lifetime, being a soldier who shot himself in the foot. He wasn't even doing anything at the time. He wasn't getting on or off a vehicle, he wasn't running to an objective or clearing a building. He was just standing there and BLAM, all pretense of professionalism right out the window.
Oh yeah, and another thing. This is the same complex where that Hamill guy was being held prisoner. He escaped a few days later. How cool would it have been if we found him? It kills me that we could have, we just didn't go to the building he was in.
2 May 2004
A lot of the raids we've done recently we've conducted during the day. This particular raid netted three of four men we were looking for. The funniest part of the raid was where one of the guys happened to be in the outhouse when we first got there. He hid out there successfully for about twenty minute before we found him.
Anthony was the only one watching the women and children that had been corralled into a large room, so I decided to help him out. This guy had four wives, two of which were pretty old, two of which were pretty young and really attractive. The old wives were weeping, the young wives were pissed, and the kids were excited to see soldiers. It was a little comical to burst into rooms to see the young boys with their hands in the air, grinning from ear to ear. I had written on my arm the phrase "Et med ded", which is supposed to mean "lay down". It didn't work. Everyone in Iraq just squats.
Raids are so strange. The first few I did, as I would perform a search of a room, I'd try to put things back in place when I was done. Then I realized how much of a waste of time this was. I just wanted to ease my guilt for invading someone's home. After missing a weapon once that someone else found because I was being too "nice", I decided to check my politeness at the door and search for the weapons that these guys are trying to kill us with like I'm fucking supposed to. I still feel bad, I just make a bigger mess now. If this lady is sad now knowing that we're taking away her husband and sons, she's gonna be livid when she sees that her home looks like it got hit by a tornado. They hide the weapons pretty well, so we really have to tear things apart to find theme. This house had a lot.
5 May 2004
This is Chris with Melissa, perched atop the Humvee known as Malibu Barbie, providing overwatch for the morning's raid.
6 May 2004
For a grunt, the sound of close air support is very comforting, here in the form of an Apache Longbow keeping an eye on things as we set up our perimeter for the morning's operation.
This is what used to be a Baath party office building located on Highway 1, not far from our base. It got hammered, as you can see, during the invasion, and continued to be used by assholes to fire on convoys due to its close proximity to the highway. A lot of units had made it standard procedure to fire it up whenever they passed it, but this drew the ire of the people who live behind it since that's where half the rounds would land as they sailed through the open floors. On this day it was decided it would be flattened. It was my platoon's duty to secure the site while the engineers did their thing, emplacing all the explosives. Once they were done and the notorious "Baath House" was felled, all that remained was the elevator shaft, much to the chagrin of the engineers.
Next to the Baath House was a complex of military buildings, also razed during the invasion. It was here that the engineers parked the flatbed tractor trailers that carried their massive bulldozers and where my security post for the morning was. A few of the buildings still stand, this one sans roof, and make good places for bored soldiers to take pictures of themselves. This is me and Wazina with an awesome stencil of Saddam behind us.
7 May 2004
Socky is now a paratrooper. Today he earned his Airborne wings with three day jumps and two night jumps.
Since contractor Hamill was held captive in the bunker complex on the outskirts of our area of operations that we now refer to as the chemical plant, I suspect our battalion commander wanted to see what else was there. Recent intel intimated that chemical weapons had just been discovered there by a local. My conspiracy theory was that we had been sitting on some chemical weapons for months and an opportune political moment was being waited on for some New York boys to "find" them. Most my platoon donned their protective masks and spent the day clearing bunker after bunker, finding nothing.
Since the area where they were working is a ways from our base, a retransmission site had to be set up about midway so communications could be maintained with our tactical operations center. My duty for the mission was to guard the retrans site, along with about a squad's worth of men, located at the top of a large underground bunker. Being that we were sitting on a bunker that was not secured in any way and left open for anyone to hole-up in who might happen upon it, we decided it best to clear it. All I can say is holy shit. This thing was enormous. It was probably the most exciting and spooky thing I've ever had to clear. Completely without light, we had to navigate through the structure entirely by flashlight. Long corridors, hundreds of rooms, massive iron doors like the kind on bank vaults. If I had to venture a guess, it was a research center of some kind. There were rooms that most likely used to house servers that were long removed by the invading force. Conduit trenches ran from room to room under removable concrete tiles, most likely used for network cables. There were a lot of small rooms that looked like they could have been offices, and a lot of medium sized rooms that looked like they used to contain a lot of equipment, and there were a few larger rooms, full of petroleum-like sludge and water in the compartmental areas in the floor, perhaps lubricant, possibly the location of since-removed industrial equipment and machines. The main entrance into the office complex, deep within the heart of the bunker, an architectural security feature probably borrowed from the Egyptian pyramids, is where the massive metal doors were, with an intermediate vestibule area with a small round portal one could look into or fire into should the person entering be deemed enemy, an idea borrowed from Medieval castle architecture. This structure was the kind of thing that David Macaulay would do a book on. Or better yet, something designed by John Romero. I felt like I was playing Doom. I am not joking when I say that all the hours I spent pissing my life away playing Quake were actually not wasted at all. The techniques used to safely and systematically go from room to room in any first-person shooter translate over to real life in situations like this. The next time your mom lectures you about the time you waste playing Half-Life and that there is no benefit whatsoever in it, tell her that if things keep going the way they have been, you'll most likely serve time in the Army sooner or later and being familiar with basic room-clearing concepts could save your life. But then she could just as easily explain how algebra skills are necessary to accurately call in indirect fire missions and that you should finish your homework.
In the photo above, Kirk stands before one of the dark entrances to the underground complex.
Our exit from this twisted level of Doom.
Atop the bunker, lazily keeping watch. We could see for miles with nothing in sight. We prayed that someone would try to attack us because it would have been an excellent excuse to effectively use pretty much every weapon system we had with us.
The view from binoculars.
We spotted someone on the horizon. Didn't look like enemy. Wait, it's a bunch of kids. One of them is carrying something. They're coming toward us I think. Let's see what they want.
I don't know where these barefooted kids could have come from, there weren't any houses for at least a couple miles. Unbelievably, they had carried a complete tea set to greet their temporary neighbors. A pot of tea, two saucers, two small shotglass-sized glasses, two small stirring spoons, and a pot of sugar, all served on a large metal platter. The tea was hot and fresh. They also brought several loaves of unleavened bread. We all squatted down, broke bread, and had a perfect middle eastern moment. This is one of the coolest things I've seen-- it was sublime. Of course the whole ploy was to see what they could weasel from the soldiers, but we were happy to oblige. We dumped onto them as many MREs, bottles of water and bags of candy that they could carry. They were tempted to leave the tea set. Then one of the girls carried it back on her head.
12 May 2004
Today's mission was to escort payroll money from our base to the town bank so people like the ICDC guys in this photo and the police could get paid. Iraqis have no concept of waiting in line, so the whole process was a melee. After we were done paying them, we fired a bunch of them. All this madness took the better half of the day.
While the payroll thing was going on inside, outside as we pulled security, kids mobbed us annoyingly. They try to sell us high quality knives and sunglasses that have fallen off Halliburton trucks or were stolen from other soldiers. I bought two DVDs with the name "Ballone" handwritten on them in black pen. Then they bug us to give them stuff. Their English is getting better too. "Mister, Mister, gimme gimme." I got fed up with it and was telling one kid, "All you kids know how to say, is 'gimme this, gimme that.'" to which he replied, "Gimme shit. You my bitch." I was nonplussed. Another kid pointed at my chest, saying "what's this?". Thinking he was asking me about my ammunition, I looked down and he flipped my nose. So I tried out some of my grappling moves we learned at Fort Drum on him. This didn't phase them so I just kicked a few kids in the shins and threw rocks at another. Any ideas I ever had of coming back to Iraq to help with education were killed on the spot. What these kids need is a good spanking and to go to bed with no dinner. Wait, they already get that every day. What the hell am I doing messing with kids? I thought the infantry was all about running around in the woods, trying to kill enemy soldiers, not being made the bitch of a band of unbathed sandal-wearing eight-year-olds. When I was discussing this with one of the guys in my platoon later that night, he said, "That was your first time in town? Ha ha! I don't mess around with the kids anymore. When we go into town, we take sling shots and paint balls. Fuck those kids. This one kid I hit was wearing a man-dress and was pissed, he thought I ruined it. He was yelling, 'Fuck you! You my bitch! Suck my cock!', but once we showed him it was paint that easily washed off, he was all, 'You my friend!'. Fucking kids."
What do you do when you're driving back from a mission and you see trucks driving down the road full of bombs? You pull them over and ask them what in the name of fuck they think they're doing. We made these guys drive to our base and spend the night. Once we were convinced that the bombs they had were in fact inert, we let them go. The whole thing was slightly unnerving.
11 April 2004
There were several occasions during April where we escorted EOD so they could destroy suspected IEDs. The process is pretty simple. You put a few bricks of C4 on the IED and remotely detonate it. To safely get the C4 to the site, the EOD guys use robots like this one. The control device for these robots are really cool in a geeky kind of way. The future of warfare is owned by the geeks, mark my words.
28 April 2004
In preparation for scores of anticipated refugees that would flee Fallujah had the mother of all battles occurred there (it didn't), our battalion recon'd an old bunker complex not far from Fallujah as a place to temporarily accommodate them. The bunkers and buildings at this complex were REALLY spread out, more so even than the old ammo bunkers where we live. Gas masks and gas mask filter canisters were found littered everywhere. Rumor has it that the people who live in the area won't graze their animals on the complex because when they have in the past, entire herds have gotten mysteriously ill. The buildings we cleared were very strange. Incredibly high ceilings with tiled walls; and they reeked the way I would imagine old slaughters houses reek. Outside there were what looked like enormous pump tanks that had been ripped out of the buildings. Kirk said, "Thank god I already have kids, cuz you guys are fucked! When we get back and you guys have kids, they're gonna be ALL fucked up. Ha ha!"
While we were there, a 1st ID guy shot himself in the foot. This was the first time I'd seen a wounded soldier firsthand. It was a little disturbing to see one of my own on the ground, bleeding. Then I got over it. We waited about 30 seconds before we started making fun of the guy. Matt treated him. He had shot himself perfectly between his fourth and fifth toes, a very lucky shot. A Medevac chopper was already enroute and there was no use in canceling it, so toeblaster got a free ride. Like any soldier, I am constantly checking to be sure my weapon is on safe. And on top of that, you should never have your finger on the trigger unless you are ready to let loose hell on bad guys. How this guy, a full-time soldier unlike us National Guard shitbags, managed to do this is embarrassing. He was a private. I felt so bad standing there, looking at him, trying to decide whether or not I should take a picture. I didn't feel bad because he had been shot or because I was contemplating doing something in bad taste like take a photograph, I felt bad because this guy's pain was going to last a lifetime, being a soldier who shot himself in the foot. He wasn't even doing anything at the time. He wasn't getting on or off a vehicle, he wasn't running to an objective or clearing a building. He was just standing there and BLAM, all pretense of professionalism right out the window.
Oh yeah, and another thing. This is the same complex where that Hamill guy was being held prisoner. He escaped a few days later. How cool would it have been if we found him? It kills me that we could have, we just didn't go to the building he was in.
2 May 2004
A lot of the raids we've done recently we've conducted during the day. This particular raid netted three of four men we were looking for. The funniest part of the raid was where one of the guys happened to be in the outhouse when we first got there. He hid out there successfully for about twenty minute before we found him.
Anthony was the only one watching the women and children that had been corralled into a large room, so I decided to help him out. This guy had four wives, two of which were pretty old, two of which were pretty young and really attractive. The old wives were weeping, the young wives were pissed, and the kids were excited to see soldiers. It was a little comical to burst into rooms to see the young boys with their hands in the air, grinning from ear to ear. I had written on my arm the phrase "Et med ded", which is supposed to mean "lay down". It didn't work. Everyone in Iraq just squats.
Raids are so strange. The first few I did, as I would perform a search of a room, I'd try to put things back in place when I was done. Then I realized how much of a waste of time this was. I just wanted to ease my guilt for invading someone's home. After missing a weapon once that someone else found because I was being too "nice", I decided to check my politeness at the door and search for the weapons that these guys are trying to kill us with like I'm fucking supposed to. I still feel bad, I just make a bigger mess now. If this lady is sad now knowing that we're taking away her husband and sons, she's gonna be livid when she sees that her home looks like it got hit by a tornado. They hide the weapons pretty well, so we really have to tear things apart to find theme. This house had a lot.
5 May 2004
This is Chris with Melissa, perched atop the Humvee known as Malibu Barbie, providing overwatch for the morning's raid.
6 May 2004
For a grunt, the sound of close air support is very comforting, here in the form of an Apache Longbow keeping an eye on things as we set up our perimeter for the morning's operation.
This is what used to be a Baath party office building located on Highway 1, not far from our base. It got hammered, as you can see, during the invasion, and continued to be used by assholes to fire on convoys due to its close proximity to the highway. A lot of units had made it standard procedure to fire it up whenever they passed it, but this drew the ire of the people who live behind it since that's where half the rounds would land as they sailed through the open floors. On this day it was decided it would be flattened. It was my platoon's duty to secure the site while the engineers did their thing, emplacing all the explosives. Once they were done and the notorious "Baath House" was felled, all that remained was the elevator shaft, much to the chagrin of the engineers.
Next to the Baath House was a complex of military buildings, also razed during the invasion. It was here that the engineers parked the flatbed tractor trailers that carried their massive bulldozers and where my security post for the morning was. A few of the buildings still stand, this one sans roof, and make good places for bored soldiers to take pictures of themselves. This is me and Wazina with an awesome stencil of Saddam behind us.
7 May 2004
Socky is now a paratrooper. Today he earned his Airborne wings with three day jumps and two night jumps.
Since contractor Hamill was held captive in the bunker complex on the outskirts of our area of operations that we now refer to as the chemical plant, I suspect our battalion commander wanted to see what else was there. Recent intel intimated that chemical weapons had just been discovered there by a local. My conspiracy theory was that we had been sitting on some chemical weapons for months and an opportune political moment was being waited on for some New York boys to "find" them. Most my platoon donned their protective masks and spent the day clearing bunker after bunker, finding nothing.
Since the area where they were working is a ways from our base, a retransmission site had to be set up about midway so communications could be maintained with our tactical operations center. My duty for the mission was to guard the retrans site, along with about a squad's worth of men, located at the top of a large underground bunker. Being that we were sitting on a bunker that was not secured in any way and left open for anyone to hole-up in who might happen upon it, we decided it best to clear it. All I can say is holy shit. This thing was enormous. It was probably the most exciting and spooky thing I've ever had to clear. Completely without light, we had to navigate through the structure entirely by flashlight. Long corridors, hundreds of rooms, massive iron doors like the kind on bank vaults. If I had to venture a guess, it was a research center of some kind. There were rooms that most likely used to house servers that were long removed by the invading force. Conduit trenches ran from room to room under removable concrete tiles, most likely used for network cables. There were a lot of small rooms that looked like they could have been offices, and a lot of medium sized rooms that looked like they used to contain a lot of equipment, and there were a few larger rooms, full of petroleum-like sludge and water in the compartmental areas in the floor, perhaps lubricant, possibly the location of since-removed industrial equipment and machines. The main entrance into the office complex, deep within the heart of the bunker, an architectural security feature probably borrowed from the Egyptian pyramids, is where the massive metal doors were, with an intermediate vestibule area with a small round portal one could look into or fire into should the person entering be deemed enemy, an idea borrowed from Medieval castle architecture. This structure was the kind of thing that David Macaulay would do a book on. Or better yet, something designed by John Romero. I felt like I was playing Doom. I am not joking when I say that all the hours I spent pissing my life away playing Quake were actually not wasted at all. The techniques used to safely and systematically go from room to room in any first-person shooter translate over to real life in situations like this. The next time your mom lectures you about the time you waste playing Half-Life and that there is no benefit whatsoever in it, tell her that if things keep going the way they have been, you'll most likely serve time in the Army sooner or later and being familiar with basic room-clearing concepts could save your life. But then she could just as easily explain how algebra skills are necessary to accurately call in indirect fire missions and that you should finish your homework.
In the photo above, Kirk stands before one of the dark entrances to the underground complex.
Our exit from this twisted level of Doom.
Atop the bunker, lazily keeping watch. We could see for miles with nothing in sight. We prayed that someone would try to attack us because it would have been an excellent excuse to effectively use pretty much every weapon system we had with us.
The view from binoculars.
We spotted someone on the horizon. Didn't look like enemy. Wait, it's a bunch of kids. One of them is carrying something. They're coming toward us I think. Let's see what they want.
I don't know where these barefooted kids could have come from, there weren't any houses for at least a couple miles. Unbelievably, they had carried a complete tea set to greet their temporary neighbors. A pot of tea, two saucers, two small shotglass-sized glasses, two small stirring spoons, and a pot of sugar, all served on a large metal platter. The tea was hot and fresh. They also brought several loaves of unleavened bread. We all squatted down, broke bread, and had a perfect middle eastern moment. This is one of the coolest things I've seen-- it was sublime. Of course the whole ploy was to see what they could weasel from the soldiers, but we were happy to oblige. We dumped onto them as many MREs, bottles of water and bags of candy that they could carry. They were tempted to leave the tea set. Then one of the girls carried it back on her head.
12 May 2004
Today's mission was to escort payroll money from our base to the town bank so people like the ICDC guys in this photo and the police could get paid. Iraqis have no concept of waiting in line, so the whole process was a melee. After we were done paying them, we fired a bunch of them. All this madness took the better half of the day.
While the payroll thing was going on inside, outside as we pulled security, kids mobbed us annoyingly. They try to sell us high quality knives and sunglasses that have fallen off Halliburton trucks or were stolen from other soldiers. I bought two DVDs with the name "Ballone" handwritten on them in black pen. Then they bug us to give them stuff. Their English is getting better too. "Mister, Mister, gimme gimme." I got fed up with it and was telling one kid, "All you kids know how to say, is 'gimme this, gimme that.'" to which he replied, "Gimme shit. You my bitch." I was nonplussed. Another kid pointed at my chest, saying "what's this?". Thinking he was asking me about my ammunition, I looked down and he flipped my nose. So I tried out some of my grappling moves we learned at Fort Drum on him. This didn't phase them so I just kicked a few kids in the shins and threw rocks at another. Any ideas I ever had of coming back to Iraq to help with education were killed on the spot. What these kids need is a good spanking and to go to bed with no dinner. Wait, they already get that every day. What the hell am I doing messing with kids? I thought the infantry was all about running around in the woods, trying to kill enemy soldiers, not being made the bitch of a band of unbathed sandal-wearing eight-year-olds. When I was discussing this with one of the guys in my platoon later that night, he said, "That was your first time in town? Ha ha! I don't mess around with the kids anymore. When we go into town, we take sling shots and paint balls. Fuck those kids. This one kid I hit was wearing a man-dress and was pissed, he thought I ruined it. He was yelling, 'Fuck you! You my bitch! Suck my cock!', but once we showed him it was paint that easily washed off, he was all, 'You my friend!'. Fucking kids."