Notes

Dear World's Coolest Grandmother,

Thank you for the all the dried fruits you sent when I asked for them. It really adds something to my limited crummy Army diet. I am enjoying them very much.

Love,
Abby

****************************
Note to Self -

Even though the prunes (now called dried plums) are very yummy, eating half a large bag of them is a Very Bad Idea. Don't do that anymore.

Oh boy [hack hack]...it's 2009

[blinks away dust]

Yipee.

Here's hoping y'all are enjoying a day on the couch, recovering from much fun and watching football. Of course, I understand that Bad Dog readers are much too wise to get wild and crazy on New Year's Eve...but if you did, I hope you had one for those of us who were wishing we could!

Weirdest Catch Yet

I woke this morning as my roommate came trooping back in from a trip to the porta-jon.

I don't want to make you sad, she said. But you caught something in a trap. Not a mouse. And it was the trap up on sandbags, so it's on your chair.

MMph? I pulled my head from beneath my pillow. Did I catch a cat?

Nope. Bird, she replied.

I got up, put on a jacket, went outside.



Yep. That's a bird. In a mousetrap. You don't see that every day.

Ho Ho Ho

Merry Christmas from Abby, the whole Bad Dog pack, the World's Grumpiest CA Team, and our merry band of flies!

I was up late trying to move my soldier around, and then again up early to get him on a convoy. I went back to sleep after we loaded him up. And woke to a pounding on the door.

I stumbled out of the rack, opened the door, and...

Oh Come, all ye Faithful...joyful and triumphant...

The Boss, knowing my inclination to ignore all holidays that occur while I'm deployed, and my resulting intolerance for Christmas music, had rounded up a band of carolers (complete with Santa hats). Well aware that a long night probably meant I was still racked out, he'd decided that the best alarm clock is...singing TOC rats.

Lunch/dinner/midday meal was very nice (ham! We got ham!), and there was fruit. There was something that looked suspiciously like Army-issued eggnog in paper cups, but that did not seem like a wise choice.

In short, a pretty good Christmas in Iraq.

Here's hoping you all enjoy a wonderful day with your families and friends/

Administrative madness

Is trying to push a soldier out on emergency leave on Christmas Eve.

We live with a battalion from the 4th Infantry Division. We support them, and they have operational control over us. Administrative control (promotions, leave, awards, UCMJ actions) is retained by the CA chain.

So, we can see how, when a distraught family member initiates a Red Cross message and sends it to the soldier's mailing address instead of command address, there can be confusion.

Now, just to make things more interesting, the battalion we work for has been chopped from 4th ID to another Division (25th). But elements of 4th ID are in Iraq. So the Red Cross message got...sidetracked.

But...you know what? Nothing on God's green earth will get soldiers moving like a Red Cross message. You can call the biggest asshole in the US Army and say, "I have a soldier with a Red Cross message," and he's suddenly helpful. The lazy sprecialist napping in a corner will wake up, get on the phone and start moving heaven and earth. The lost lieutenant gets a clue.

I used every one of those folks, and few more. Got the message, got my guy a ride. We'll get him where he needs to be, as fast as is humanly possible. It's nice to see this machine work once in a while, even if it's in the service of sad news.

[grumble grumble]

I finally dragged myself out of my nice cozy rack around...oh, well, suffice it to say it wasn't early. Not even remotely.

With nothing on the horizon until a 1300 "chat," I made coffee and stood on my porch, surveying my (limited) domain.

Things appeared...hazy. I climbed up on a pile of sandbags and looked across the helopad. Quite hazy.

Things developed. The weather progressed from slightly hazy to downright dusty. It's nasty - the dust doesn't seem that bad outside until you look down and realize there's a thick coat on everything. You go indoors to escape it, and realize it's working its way around the door, in through the air conditioner, around the taped windows.

Dust sucks less here than it did living in tents, but it still suck.

To top it off, it's thinking about raining. A few drops, now and again. Yeah - rain in the dust. Mud-rain.

Love this country.

Best Army Idea - Ever

And I'm not even being sarcastic.



That, ladies and gentlemen, is SFC Boe. She is a therapy dog.

Not just any therapy, either. Combat Stress Control therapy.

Iraq can make you crazy in a zillion different ways, whether you be the guy who gets griped at about PowerPoint slides or the guy kicking down doors or the gal flying medevac birds or the kid processing 10,000 leave forms. There's plety of stress and plenty of crazy to go around.

However, somebody got smart, and now there's something nice here that soldiers can pet, maybe talk to, maybe cuddle a little, and feel normal with.

That's good. Three cheers for SFC Boe the therapy dog, and two tails wagging for the Army for finally getting something right.

A note - yes, she was being handled by a CSC captain. Somebody please, please tell me how you get that job? I even have my own black lab who would be great at being a combat stress therapist.

You miss some things

when you're hanging out here. News, for one.

Oh, I was aware that someone had thrown some shoes at President Bush.

But I wasn't really aware that it was any kind of big deal. Until I was sitting, with one other soldier, in a meeting. And suddenly noticed something other than the normal traffic sounds. Something more like...several hundred people shouting in the street outside the building (they were, incidentally, the Free The Shoe Hurler faction).

Hey, New Sergeant, I suggested as quietly as I could. Why don't you stick your head out in the hall, make contact with one of our security dudes and make sure we're cool?

Did I mention this was New Sergeant's first mission?

The shouting continued. She came back in and gave a thumbs up.

All the same, we tied the meeting up and moved out, since being one of two in a building secured by four dudes is not my favorite place to be when there are large concentrations of people worked up about anything. I am getting downright cautious in my old age.

Ramblings

We’ve reached kind of a confusing point in our involvement here. And by our I mean not only the Civil Affairs effort, but the Army in general. The Status of Forces Agreement is scheduled to go into effect 1 January. More changes will follow.

All of this basically boils down to the fact that the Iraqis are taking over running their own show in this area. Which is good. They’re pretty close to being ready, and there’s no way to find the flaws and limits of their systems without taking the training wheels off and giving it a spin.

So we find ourselves wondering…what do we do now? This has been a little confusing for us as CA since we arrived for this tour. Last time I was here, we were still at a point where the regular Army maneuver units (the infantry and armor guys who own battlespace) were killing people and breaking stuff. They were kept reasonably busy with that, and so there was a lot of room and need for people who specialize in the civil populace. We were busy, and it was the rare maneuver officer or soldier who had the time, experience or interest to get deeply involved with the “non-lethal” side of the fight.

Now, however, we’ve been in Iraq for closing in on six years. Most of the captains and majors are on their second, third or fourth tours here. They are fully engaged in the non-lethal fight (which is good, since we’re pretty much set with the large-scale killing of people and breaking of stuff). They understand the basics of relating to the local civilian populace, and of working with local leadership.

Which is, of course, a large part of what we (we as in CA) are out here to do. The days are behind us when we did humanitarian aid – we’re not dropping water and food, or bringing in medical aid. We’re not moving populations out of the path of advancing armor columns, and we’re not developing and maintaining protected target lists.

So we’re left with monitoring the tail end of the ICERP programs and engaging the persons designated as Spheres of Influence. Except that the projects only need so much monitoring, and really, all anyone has left to do at this point is engage the Spheres of Influence. Of whom there are only so many.

And, really, if the Iraqis are running Iraq, and we’re no longer empowered to go threaten people to make things happen (“start talking to the Ministry of Power representative about this issue or we’ll shoot you”), and we don’t have any money to run around handing out (“you need a road paved and can’t make your government do it? We’ll pay for it if you agree to tell people not to blow us up!”)…we’re slowly running out of things to engage people about.

There is an Iraqi way of doing things. Quite often, it is not the way we Americans would choose to do things. There is an Iraqi pace for getting things done. That pace often seems unacceptable to American military personnel. But the fact remains that the Iraqis are going to be here in three, eight, 25 years. And, as the plan currently stands, we are not.

So we’re slowly trying to figure out how to back off and let go. We have checklists for grading their local government meetings. But if they’re holding meetings, and nobody is getting shot…then who cares if they distribute minutes from the last meeting days in advance or if they print them and hand them out the day of? Or hang them on the wall? It’s a block on our checklists, but that’s really about all it is.
Since 2003, the US Army has been the Solution Fairy. Need water? We’ll get you water. Need medical attention? We gotcha. Sheik from the next tribe over picking on you? We’ll have him in to the FOB to talk about working and playing well with others.

That’s behind us now. And that’s hard for Americans, particularly Americans in uniform. Soldiers see problems and immediately look for solutions. But our solutions aren’t worth a whole lot at this point. We need the Iraqi solutions, and quite often they’re not the ones we’d have chosen.

Sometimes, the writing on the wall isn’t as nice as we’d like it to be. We’re surrounded by barely-above-subsistence-level farmers in the desert. There are lots of nice theories and bits of technology out there that would enable them to produce more, but it doesn’t seem to be a high priority for their higher levels of government, and not a lot of the farmers themselves are particularly interested either. So we have to let our American fixation with progress go by the wayside. The people don’t want to change everything about their lives and their world to become Iowa. They would like for the US government (or any government) to come by and hand them large stacks of cash. Absent that, they’d really rather just sit around and be barely-above-subsistence-level farmers in a country with a sufficient social safety net that they won’t starve in bad years.

And, at the end of the day, that’s probably about all they’re going to get. Not everybody gets to live in Iowa. Not everybody wants to. And even if you’d like to live in Iowa, you won’t get to if you don’t pack up and move your ass to Iowa. Metaphorically, of course.

It’s a hard thing to realize. Americans, at least most Americans in uniform, really dig America. We think America is super, and that everyone else in the world should be exactly like us. Then they’d be super, too. And doesn’t everybody want to be super?

Apparently not. And, as we’ve learned, it ain’t easy to become awesome. We didn’t start out half as screwed-up as Iraq, and we didn’t decide to stop being jerks about letting black folks vote until 1965 – 177 years after we ratified our Constitution.

The American drive to make this place as much like the US as we can isn’t, I don’t think, a reflection of hatred for other, different cultures. We’ve probably all read or seen interviews with Soldiers where they’ve talked about Iraqi children, how those children made them miss their own, how they came home and hugged their children and thanked God they were born in a land of endless, boundless opportunity. Well, the American soldier is softhearted, and the urge to make this country like our own comes partly from affection. You see an Iraqi kid, and he’s not starving, not sick, just hanging out in the road begging for a soccer ball, looking at a lifetime of chasing sheep around or standing at a checkpoint on a road, or guarding an oil tower. Or she’s looking at a life under a headscarf, lucky to finish sixth grade if she’s a farm girl.

And you wish everybody on earth could have been born in Afton, Wyoming or Middleville, Michigan or Tyler, Texas. You wish every town ran like Stillwater, Minnesota, with somebody happy to make a living driving a garbage truck. You wish there were systems to encourage entrepreneurs, so that one of these small cities would be the home of the Iraqi equivalent of Steelcase.

American soldiers look at Iraq and see a nation that we wish could have all the benefits and freedoms we’re accustomed to. We’re fast approaching the point, however, where we need to back off and let the people of Iraq take their nation as far as they can in the direction they want to take it.

And so we sit on the FOB, slowing down our missions, waiting on guidance from Higher about what life after the SOFA is going to look like. We know there’s more mentoring of governments and processes, and we know there are NGOs to pull into towns and situations. But we also know the end is getting closer, and that the vast majority of what the US military can and will do for Iraq has been done.

Chasing Soldiers

Time doesn't stop once you get to Iraq, and so one of the things we (and by we, I mean I) have to keep track of is my Soldiers' career progression.

As deployed Reservists, administratively controlled by our parent company (which now reports to a totally different CA battalion than the one that owns us stateside) but operationally controlled by an active-duty armor battalion, this boils down to a tremendous amount of chasing paper and generating paper and trying to transmit paper.

We're trying to get my senior buck sergeant promoted. This means we need to get a "packet" to the CA brigade conducting the "board" (packet screening and selection) somewhere else here in Iraq. My sergeant needed a current Army Physical Fitness Test.

Here's how that works.
1 - I take a thumbdrive and go to an unsecured computer so I can download DA 705 (PT card) and FM 21-20 (Army Physical Fitness handbook).
2 - I then take that thumbdrive to one of the two people on the FOB who have a printer that's connected to a computer one can plug a thumbdrive into. I print the objects.

(this is whole entire additional nightmare. Thumbdrives, which are pretty much what the modern deployed Army runs on, are now pretty much forbidden)

the order to stop using flash media was issued by U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for operating and defending the .mil and .smil domains.

That memo, directed at Washington, D.C., Air Force offices and dated Nov. 17, ordered “immediate suspension” of the use of such devices on all NIPR and SIPR networks.

You have no idea what a pain that makes everything.

3 - We measure a two-mile run course, the sergeant runs the PT test. We fill out the card.
4 - I find the only scanner on the FOB, scan the PT card, put it on my thumb drive, email it to Higher (company HQ).
5 - Higher emails it to Texas so my sergeant's 2a can be updated.
6 - Texas emails the updated 2a back so it can be printed out, put in the packet, and sent to the board.

And active Army guys (who appear, in person, before these "boards") say Reservist promotions are simpler.

All the running around notwithstanding, my sergeant looks good for the January board, if everyone else holds up their ends and his papers get updated. If not, he's a shoo-in for February.

In the best news of all, my high-speed corporal is no more. His packet made the cut last month and we promoted him to sergeant him this morning. He's a very happy camper right now.

I suppose, as a good NCO, I should ensure we get him in front of a retention NCO before the promotion afterglow fades. As I recall, we've got a couple of weeks.

Ugh.

I shall simply say that it has cooled off even more. We fixed our heater, so now we have a nice warm CHU. It's a happy thing, to walk in from the cold, dark, trash-smelling night (we burn our trash here - it's really tiresome) to a bright, warm CHU.

The only thing better than a bright, warm CHU on a cold, trash-smelling night is a bright, warm CHU full of flies.

I walked back in last night and, no-shit-there-I-was, killed more than twenty flies. Just stood there and whacked and whacked and whacked. When I was finished, I had to swab our table with anti-filth wipes and cart the little carcasses out. And still, still, there was a cloud of flies.

Rather than pull my sheet up over my head to keep them off my face until I could fall asleep, I instead sprinkled bits of broken cookies across my roomie's side so they'd choose to hang out with her instead. Ok, I didn't really do that. But I wanted to.

Ick.

I hate flies.

Blinding flash of the obvious

At least it wasn't US tax dollars spent to figure this one out - Dogs Get Jealous!

Researchers in Austria, after what seems like a rough stretch of playing with dogs and giving them treats, have come to a startling conclusion.

Scientists noted that dogs hate to see their owners being affectionate to other dogs...

And, in other earth-shattering news, dogs prefer steak to lettuce.

Why I'm not allowed to go anywhere fun

It's Eid right now (the week of feasting after Ramadan), so there's not much going on in the Civil Affairs world. We could go out and annoy the locals during their holiday, but decided that would be unsmart. Instead, we packed up our MRAP and headed out on a two-day vacation to Camp Comfy - where our company headquarters is located.

We were packing up yesterday before we hit the road. The Boss lives over near me, and the boys were pulling the truck around, so my front porch was a staging point. The Boss and I were having smokes and discussing my recent mouse-killing spree.

Yes, sir. Look in that box right there. There's like six in there.

I waved toward the trash box into which I'd deposited the night's mice.

The Boss looked. Pondered a second.

What are you going to do with those?

I explained that the box was destined for the trash. Unless, sir, I added, you know anyone who needs six dead mice. Like a gift.

Our eyes locked. He grinned. I grinned. A gift of dead mice? And we were going to Higher?

Hey, roommate! I shouted. Do we have any Ziploc bags?

She popped out the door with a sealing plastic bag and a matching evil grin. Taking the mousies to the first sergeant? You guys are bad!

I used my mouse tweezers and stuffed the little corpses in the bag. Sealed it up and put it in the front of the truck.

We arrived at Higher, and I went off to have the normal NCOIC chat with the first sergeant. We covered all the necessary business first, of course.

Hey, first sergeant. Last time we talked you asked about our health and welfare and, in line with that, I brought you something...

You can learn a lot about a person by the way they respond when you hand them a baggie full of dead rodents. Without any warning.

The first sergeant, for instance, is not a big fan of rodents. And he has a bit of a gag reflex when he realizes what's in the bag he's holding up to his face.

The company commander will try to refer a team leader and team sergeant to Combat Stress Control when he realizes how much the dead mice amuse us. (We couldn't stop giggling. My stomach hurt from laughing so hard)

Our private from a nearby patrol base (we're all taking vacations this week) will ask if he can have the dead mice, since he sees opportunities to torment his team leader.

The infantry platoon leader who rides in our truck and sees the mice will accuse of being "sick, sick people." Coming from an infantryman, this might be a cause for concern.

And, at the end of the day, the company commander will seize one's mice. Because Higher exists to kill fun.

Small victories

It's been dull here.

Until this afternoon. After returning from another trip to look at Things That Weren't There, the boss and I were sitting out on the porch. I was having a cup of coffee and a cigarette, he was enjoying a phenomenally stinky cigar.

"You've got a mouse," he said, gesturing at a crack in the boards by our door.

I whipped out a trap, grabbed my trusty chocolate Rice Krispie Treat, set it up, and...SNAP! Less than ten minutes, and it became Abby 12, Mousies 1.

And folks, that wasn't the end. I got three more. I'm at 15.

I occasionally wonder if we're accomplishing anything worthwhile out here. At least, if nothing else, I am putting a hurting on the north-central Iraq mouse population.

I wonder if there's a medal for that?

There's a lesson

in here somewhere...

'Cause I'm kinda accident-prone, and I do have a fair number of firearms around the house, yet I've never managed to shoot anyone (or get shot) while having sex.

Timothy Havens, 38, told Springfield police he was reaching for something on the nightstand when the pistol went off, hitting his estranged wife Carolyn in the upper chest.

I'm just thinking that perhaps this may not have been an issue so much of poor firearms handling skills as a reminder that one should not have sex with one's estranged spouse.

This is not a job...

it's an adventure.

Or something.

So it rained here. Which brought fog, which brought everything to a screeching halt. Eventually, of course, the fog lifted and we had to start doing stuff again. Being CA types, we've found ourselves tasked with assisting a guy who has the super-fun assignment of finding all the water purification projects the US funded in the first five years here, and checking on their status.

(Well, I can tell you their status. 90% of them are broken. Because Iraqis don't do maintainance. And their budget process somehow doesn't allow for hiring people to keep things running. It's a bit of a problem here)

But apparently, there needs to be more verification than simply my grumbling. So we took off with a list of grids to find us some water purification facilities. In MRAPs. On clay. When it had just rained.



It is MUCH more fun to get an MRAP unstuck when you're riding in the PSYOPS truck. Because those trucks have speakers, and you can play Brad Paisley's Mud on The Tires. And the guys pulling the MRAP out really seem to see the humor in that.

Today when we went out, we were bound and determined to avoid the whole giant-heavy-vehicle-stuck-in-the-mud thing, so we drove way out until we were a little over a kilometer from the water project grid.

And we started trudging.



The trucks are out there. Waaay out there.

It's not a long walk that sucks (I am, after all, in the Army - walking is not a big problem for me). It's not the stupid heavy outfit we have to wear (although a little walking in that goes a long way). But please take note of the terrain. Yeah - the ground is entirely covered in baseball-sized rocks.

Those of you who've met me in real life know how coordinated I am. You can just imagine how much fun that walk was.

And no - we never did find a water purification facility. Would you have put one out there?

You've heard the term....

now see the pictures!

It's as old as the military - in some polite circles, you hear the term goatrope. In some, goatscrew. And, more traditionally in salty company, it's a goatfuck.



No - it wasn't what it looked like. The sheep was NOT violated. At least not in that sense.



Suffice it to day there was a special occasion, and a man who thought that a sheep would make an appropriate gift.

I tell you, this is the strangest place on earth.

Happy Thanksgiving

Here's to all of you and yours! Enjoy your dinners (I certainly enjoyed mine after I finished serving) and your families.

Although I miss my given family, I'm thankful for the soldiers I'm with this year. If it weren't for the quality of the people I get to work with, I wouldn't do this.

Another day...

another Big Adventure.

I did something today that although I've never done before, just about every woman in Civil Affairs does at one point or another - I attended a Women's Council meeting. With another female NCO in tow, and an interpreter (male) who'd been cautioned that he was severely outnumbered and should behave accordingly, I made my way into a room full of the Women In Black.

It was something else. On one level, meeting with the women was great. Unlike those in attendance at a lot of our other meetings, the women had no sense of entitlement. They did not sit and explain why Coalition Forces should give them stuff and money. I don't think much of anyone has ever appeared like a Fairy Godmother and given rural Iraqi women (all of them mothers, most of them widows) a damn thing.

The things they asked us to look into were smart - can we get some sort of vocational training? How can we get a loan that complies with Islamic law that would allow us to open a beauty shop? Why can't we have better OB/GYN coverage in the district?

I have read, and it has been true in my (limited) experience, that engaging women and boosting their standard of living and productivity is a very good way to raise the quality of life for an entire community.

But, it is difficult, when we are in the phase of this conflict where we are turning control of funds and programs back to Iraqis, to belive that these women and their needs will become a priority. They make up more than half the country's population, they have paid their fair share of the country's debts in suffering and misery, but they are a too-easily-overlooked population.

Fortunately, "Women's Issues" were one of designated "priorities" from Higher. So perhaps, with some diligence, there's a slice of the pie out there for them.

My grandmother was in Columbia with the Peace Corps when I was born. She told me there was a little girl born there on the same day I was born in Michigan. Nearly every year on my birthday, she mentions that baby girl and reflects that, even then, she had considered the Columbian infant, thought of her new granddaughter, and realized how fortunate I was to have been born in the United States.

I realize that, too. Being born an American doesn't make me a better person than anyone else in the world. But I do realize that it makes me a very fortunate person. And as I see more people and places, I realize that being born in the US makes me an incredibly fortunate woman.

The future of Iraq

is in excellent hands. Those would be, of course, my hands.



Yeah. That's Your Author, with a cigarette in one hand and an Iraqi child in the other. And, yes, if you look closely, that Iraqi child is carrying a gun. Yes, it's a real gun, a .25 of some sort. And no - it wasn't loaded.

I swear, sometimes this is the weirdest place on earth. I am certain that the fact they arm children for special occasions (this picture was taken at a grand opening for a training program) means something, but I can't figure out what it is.