Plans

Because at this point we're co-dependent and confused with all this time on our hands, my entire team is meeting up tomorrow for a meat-and-beer festival.

And beforehand?  At least three quarters of us are going to the funshow.

Look out, North Texas - we could have flashbacks at any point and start asking about the state of your local water distribution!

Winning (slowly)

I found and procured a trailer - found one used and saved a little money that way.  The masking tape is defeating me soundly, and the pile of stuff has grown to point of fitting-all-that-in-there-is-going-to-be-an-adventure.

The party never ends, folks.

It can happen

You know all those people who say it's impossible to have too many guns, or too much ammo? 

Take it from someone who's building a giant pile of all her earthly possessions out in the garage - there is such a thing as "enough."  And I think I may be there.  I really don't even have that many firearms and my ammo stash is decidedly amatuer - I have no idea how the folks with big collections ever move.

Alright - I'm off to discover either another random duffle bag full of greenish crap or another random box of 7.62x39...

Ahhh...

waking up in a real bed, putting on real, normal people clothes and taking a shower without wearing shoes to do it.

It's a good feeling.

Super Fabulous

In a note for my military folks, the USO at the Phildelphia airport is one of the nicest I've ever been to. It's a reasonably new facility, with bunkrooms (with sheets, blankets and pillows), a room with fabulously comfy chairs and a bigscreen TV for movies, a couple of video game stations (with the some large, gorgeous flatscreen TV), and working computers with an excellent internet connection.

If you find yourself killing six hours here (or, like a few of our guys, a night), it's just what the doctor ordered. It's in Terminal A - just follow the signs.

I've always been a fan of the USO, but this one rated a special mention. There was a very nice big German Shepherd here earlier, but he seemed to belong to an Air Force guy. A permanent USO Dog is probably about the only thing this place is lacking.

And yes - me chilling at the airport means I'm very, very close to being liberated.

Things Abby actually DOES miss about Iraq

OK – there’s really only one.  FREE WATER.  There’s a lot of bottled water in Iraq.  And when I say “a lot,” I mean…well, a bunch.  And you drink it all the time.  And wherever you go, there’s a package/cooler/pallet of water and you’re allowed to take as much as you want.  If it’s in a cooler, it’s polite to replace what you take.

 

There are no giant piles of free bottled water around this base.  Which is kinda cruel, as the entire section of the base devoted to demobilization is populated by wilted-looking soldiers in grungy uniforms grumbling about paying $1.25 for a water from a machine.

Home (not even a little) free

The only thing better than stepping off the the plane in the USA is stepping of the plane in the USA after a 14-hour flight and immediately being bussed to a briefing wherein you are told you are still not allowed to have a beer, wear civilian clothes, leave post or drive a car and will suffer great and terrible punishments if you do.

Fort Dix - the only thing that can be said for this place is it's not Iraq.

I must simply state

That the most awesome plane ride in the world is the one that takes
you OUT of Iraq. We're not back on American soil yet, but I've now
checked off the second tour where I got out of that country with all
MY fingers and toes, and all my Joes are healthy and riding the plane
home with me.

Ladies and gentlemen, THAT is a win.

PSA for my Iraq readers

We sent Bossman back to the States very recently to set the conditions for our return. As he was stranded at another major base on his way out, he heard that Navy Customs in Kuwait was taking all auto-opening knives, even those we'd been issued on previous tours (as opposed to any we may have purchased at AAFES locations this tour).

Rumor has it, this can be memoed away. However...none of our people know the specifics of such a memo. Company level, battalion level, brigade...it's a mystery. As we all know, standing in the Customs warehouse and being told you should have gotten a memo from the first O6 in your chain of command is not exactly useful.

Being a clever man (as well as one who'd picked up several auto-opening knives while here, at least one of which was horrifyingly expensive), the Bossman beat feet to the FedEx terminal and launched all but one of his home.

Although it was an issued knife, Navy Customs took that from him as he passed through Kuwait.

But I got an email from the Boss today - his knives made it home.

Several of us took ours over and boxed them up. Three pocket knives, Iraq to Texas...$63. Steep, but compared to the replacement cost... It's food for thought if you happen to be at (or can get to) on of the bases with FedEx services.

I apologize for the lack of complete list of such facilities here in Iraq, but the although DHL has a comprehensive list, FedEx doesn't. I think it's a pretty safe bet that where there's one, there's the other. Food for thought if you've got several folks with such knives and no time to figure out the memo mystery.

Peer pressure

There are certain things that, when surrounded by a group of guys, one should never point out on Ebay.

For instance, certain pieces of whimsical interior decor.



You're single now, they said. You can hang whatever you want on your walls. And that squirrel is cool as shit.

[sigh]

The things I do to boost the morale of the troops. I now own that stuffed squirrel. Don't despair, though - I left some equally fabulous ones still out there.

Top Ten Things That Abby Won’t Miss About Iraq

10 – Chicken. With rice.

9 – Wearing long pants, boots, a t-shirt and a jacket. In the Middle East. In the summer. If you’re going outside the wire, you can exchange the t-shirt and jacket for a long-sleeve fire-retardant shirt , body armor and gloves.

8 – Fleas.

7 – Clear eye protection. We may all be volunteers, but none of us wanted to grow up and look like seventh-grade shop students whenever the sun goes down.

6 – Endless NCO meetings devoted to deciphering the latest memo from yet another sergeant major with nothing better to do than send out strongly worded but vague policy statements on the wear of the fleece cap.

5 – The 200 yard trudge through the dark to the shower trailer. Hell, the shower trailer. I never took any pictures because they would have made you vomit. And the female shower trailer was the good one.

4 – Weird demands from company headquarters to complete online certifications on systems we couldn’t access. Increasingly hostile messages from company ignoring all appeals for some sort of guidance on access issues.

3 – Observing the effects of Army chow on everyone else’s gastrointestinal systems every time you visit the green closet.

2 – Microgrants. God, I hate microgrants. You would hate them, too, if you were familiar with them.

1 – Holidays with fake, contrived cheer. I’m a zillion miles away from home, sitting in the dirt for reasons that occasionally escape me. Rather than the chaplain’s brief and the UGR-A processed turkey dinner, how about a fifth of whiskey and some privacy?

Top Ten Most Painful Parts of the Redeployment Process

10 – DD 93 – the Record of Emergency data. Updated it yesterday? We don’t care – you can’t leave unless you update it here, too.

9 – Somebody told you to ship your MOLLE gear to home station? All of it? See, that’s a problem. You can either produce the flashbang grenade pouch, or we can charge you $75 for it. One or the other, but you can’t leave until you clear RFI.

8 – Flight? What flight? Who told you your unit had a flight?

7 – We know you’re only going to be at this camp for nine hours, but you need to sign for billeting and drag all your possessions to tents spread out all across Hell’s Half Acre. No, you can’t leave all your stuff and post a guard.

6 – You’re not allowed to have a beer when the plane stops in Europe, because you’re still subject to General Order 1B and you might offend Muslims.

5 – You're not authorized to drink during stateside demobilization either, because even though you’re not subject to General Order 1B anymore and you won’t offend Muslims, First Army exists to make Reservists want to desert.

4 – Halfway around the world with the world's worst travel agency. Show up for your flight six hours early at every stage and provide your own baggage handlers. Units are strongly encouraged to maximize aircraft capacity by loading the aircraft with four soldiers for every three seats.

3 – Flights home? See, it’s a Friday afternoon and the ticketing office closes early on Fridays…

2 – You can leave theater with two duffel bags, a carryon and a laptop. You can leave demob with one duffel bag and one carryon. You’re only turning in body armor.

1 – Your NCOER is signed, you’ve received your end-of-tour award, and people keep talking to you like you’re supposed to care.

Something Different

We're going to do something a little different for a bit here - I've decided to throw up some (mostly) tongue-in-cheek end-of-tour Top Ten lists. I've got a couple ready to go, and a few more in the thinking stage.

So...without further ado, I give you....

Top Ten Things Abby Will Miss About Iraq

10 – Show up to work, do nothing for a couple hours, nap and go to the gym or go drive around and get shot at. Who cares, it all pays the same!
9 – Free ammo!
8 – No need to put any thought into wardrobe planning
7 – Cool boxes of stuff from people you know (and some you don’t) show up randomly in the mail.
6 – All the free Gatorade you can drink (as long as it’s the purple kind)
5 – Covering a plastic table with foil and eating steaks off it with knives during team cookouts.
4 – Spent all day reading and smoking cigarettes? No need to feel guilty because there was nothing better you could have been doing!
3 – Finding a Rice Krispie Treat in the back of a drawer is all it takes to make a day go from sucky to super.
2 – Spending all day, every day, with three guys with whom you’ve developed enough of a comfort level that any of you will say anything. Anything.
1 – The awareness of seeing the reality on the ground, and developing an understanding beyond what’s available in soundbites.

If any of my readers might like to share their ideas about what one might miss about Iraq, please feel free to do so. We are trying to keep this light, though!

Pictures!

Just a little random imagery from around the company compound as we wind down and kill time. There was a big, impressive moon last night.



The creepy tree is almost a member of our unit, we're so used to it. It's not until you take a picture that you realize it really is...disturbing.

Today we did some laundry and sat around.



Yeah. I can actually do the "hadji squat." It's kinda horrifying when I catch myself doing it.



Note the creative use of the red bucket once I finished washing my socks in it. Ice is plentiful here at the Big Base, so we may as well enjoy.

Speaking of enjoying, here's a picture of the World's Happiest Team Sergeant as we were preparing to pull out of FOB McLazy.



I cannot confirm, but there have been reports of an MRAP leaving FOB McLazy with eight extended middle fingers...

Little Happy Things

I was standing in the shower trailer this morning. I stripped of my t-shirt and underthings and started to put them to the side like I always do. Then I paused, thought about it, counted days in my head. And I took the pile and threw it away.

A good trip

We did a fast turnaround at the Big Base. And although it's nice to come back with some meat and some snack, there's one thing that's it's even nicer to bring back: replacements.

I will, however, point out that last night's convoy coming back down here was like having my eyes burned out by capuchin monkeys with smoldering sticks. The straight-line distance is 47km (29 miles), so we figure it's about 35 miles by road.

It took 3.5 hours last night.

Never an awesome moment here...

It was 8 million degrees, sunny and there was a mild breeze. Incidentally, the breeze here is not a cooling factor - there's no wind chill of course, there's just wind sucking the moisture out of your body even faster.

Anyway - another godawful afternoon, but perfect for one thing: handswashing some clothes and hanging them out to dry.

So I did three sports bras, eight socks and three t-shirts and hung them out on the line on my porch. I went inside to collect up some trash, drank a bottle of water, and then opened the door to go outside...and it was rapidly turning orange.

I pulled my clothes down before they attracted more than a thin coating of dust, draped them over various and sundry objects indoors, and spent the next hour muttering obscenities about this country.

Worth reading

I know that all of us troops, and all of the folks who like troops, are supposed to disapprove of John Murtha and automatically categorize anything he says about our involvement in Iraq as utter defeatist tripe.

But, as the southern people say, even a blind hog roots up an acorn from time to time. Murtha is calling for closer scrutiny of how the Commander's Emergency Response Program has been used.

"A fundamental review of CERP, its purpose, use and scope, is overdue," Murtha wrote in the July 15 letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Murtha said he was disturbed by reports from Iraq suggesting commanders were in a "rush to spend" hundreds of millions of dollars by the end of the fiscal year.

War is not cheap. There's a reason it's known as a drain on "blood and treasure." But the CERP program is directed by a document we call "Money as a Weapons System," and flinging large piles of US taxpayers dollars at every problem, potential problem or confusing situation is every bit as silly as trying to resolve every kinetic problem with 155mm HE rounds.

In fact, it might be sillier, because I can't think of a single situation in which "success" was measured strictly in number of 155 rounds expended. And given the very real challenge of finding metrics to define success in a fluid counterinsurgency fight, the temptation to measure progress in terms of dollars spent or projects started can be mighty.

U.S. military officials say CERP has been invaluable in helping commanders get things done quickly, with little red tape. In recent years, they have used it to put insurgents on payroll, award micro-grants to business owners, compensate families of civilians killed in combat, and build schools and clinics.

Please understand that "very little red tape" is a relative statement. Our supported organization does pretty well with the CERP nomination and approval process, and it's a multi-step undertaking that even in the simplest circumstance (microgrants, if you're interested) moves in terms of weeks (and often, months), not days (qualifier: I have not handled a condolence payment on this tour, and I can't recall the timeframes when we did them last time around).

CERP has been valuable for building schools and clinics (and water treatment facilites and wells and roads and bridges and culverts and powerlines and hoophouses and corn silos). But have all of those been occupied, staffed and managed? Honestly, I don't know. I haven't been to all of them.

I do know that sometimes it's a challenge to get unit commanders to ask some of those harder questions when there's a pot of money that needs to be used by the end of the fiscal year/deployment/quarter and which battalion spends more of it is one of the few ways to measure who's done "more" during a given period of time.

If money is to be used a weapons system, it's imperative that we study its employment with the same diligence we apply to the use of armor in an urban fight, the employment of helicopter gunships in support of amphibious operations or the utility of gun trucks in base defense. It would be a valuable exercise, if for no other reason than that our experiences with money on the battlefield in Iraq may, if analyzed dispassionately and rigorously, enable us to leverage it to preserve the lives of our warriors in Afghanistan and future conflicts.

Ugh...progress

One of the things we do differently under the Status of Forces Agreement, which was reaffirmed by the June 30 security "transition," is try to stay off the roads during peak times. That's a concept that primarily effects "support and sustainment" movements.

Alas, those movements (resupply convoys and the like) are one of the best ways for a small group of people in one truck to move back and forth between the Big Base and FOB McSleepy.

All of this means that going from Point A to Point B can lead to "getting home" at 0115 after a slow-motion convoy. At least, when we travel at night, there's really not much need for IV fluids.

The party never ends

We've been up at Big Base for a few days now, doing more preparing-to-leave stuff. There's also been some drama, since there was a very ugly collison of bad days between our admin workhorse and an overly sensitive senior NCO.

Drama is, of course, annoying. We've been doing our best to ignore that, knock out the tasks we came up here to deal with, and keep our heads down. We've been filling time by eating good chow, enjoying the wireless internet and, of course, giving each other IVs.

After the drive up here, our gunner was feeling a little pink and dizzy, so I took that as an opportunity to remember how to stick:



Always good to know one hasn't lost one's touch. I was, of course, quite pround of myself.



And yes, anytime you think you're having a bad hair day, try wearing a padded helmet in the heat with a headset squished around the base for a few hours. It's a damn sexy look.

The next day we gave the Bossman a couple of bags (I provided support and snarky commentary for that evolution). He enjoyed it so much that we wrangled a box of fluids and associated supplies out of the medic to take back with us. We kind of have to watch him, since although he walks around with a bottle of water, I'm not sure he ever actually drinks it.