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.

Blast from the past

Sometimes we run across an update on someone we once knew - say, someone in our high school graduating class - and think, Wow - that's pretty impressive.

And sometimes we run across a tidbit on someone we once knew - again, say someone in our high school class - and think, Creepy.

I don't even remember this chick's pre-married name, but I do remember I probably would not have pegged her as one of those grown women who has inappropriate relationships with young men.

...a former counselor for KidsFirst program at St. John's Home for abused and neglected children, has been accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in her care.

Huh.

Heads Up for my Dog People

Squeaky has some info up regarding disturbing reports of some trouble that may be associated with Beneful dog foods. Suggest you go and read if you're feeding Beneful.

twiddling thumbs, time NOW

After a brief, two-hour frenzy of paperwork in which I built packets for sole sourcing construction of five six-room schools, we again found ourselves staring at the calendar.

Two more paychecks, pointed out SSG C.

The rest of us nodded numbly. That's still plenty of staring at the calendar.

Sadness!

That's what we call the meal experience here, as in Who wants to go to sadness?

We eat UGR-A (Unitized Group Ration - A) meals. By following the link and checking out the Table 1 and table 2 options at the bottom of the page, you can see exactly what the options are.

Tonight was Table 1, option 6 - LUNCH/DINNER MENU 6 - SHRIMP SCAMPI/ CHICKEN AND BROCCOLI PENNE. That's not a bad one at all, really.



With my left hand, I'm engaging in the during-meal sport we refer to as "fly pong," wherein I attempt to eat while chasing the flies off of my food and onto the meal of the guy across from me.

Good times, I tell you.

You will note that I also have a most excellent salad on my tray. This concept - fresh vegetables (and, sometimes, even fruit) - was one that came with the manuever unit we're supporting now. Their predecessors didn't seem to realize such things were available. Scury- brought to you by the unit that also hasn't figured out how to make food warm.

But this group is much better. In fact, when they realized that soldiers were rejecting their salad offerings because there were flies crawling all over the food, they came up with a solution.



Mighty hard to walk around on my lettuce when there are hurricane force winds blowing across it, isn't it, Mr. Disgusting Fly?

Of course, this makes scooping up shreds of lettuce with a spoon kinda exciting, but that's OK.

So, in summary, the food could be worse. You get some of the meal packets more often than others (I could go the rest of my life without ever eating slices of beef drenched in BBQ sauce dumped over rice), and rotating through a given set of "menus" gets...tiresome, but at least it's not MREs.

[head, wall, repeat]

My most "substantial" body of work experience lies in the public affairs/outreach realm, with a heavy emphasis on natural resources and military issues.

I've been working through the godawful process of setting up resumes on the "special resume website" that it seems each and every agency in the government has (oh, there's a USAJOBs resume, but the Army, Navy and USDA all have a different one of their own).

I was reviewing my info on one of those sites this evening when I spotted a typo...

Folks, what one word do you think, given the information in the first sentence, could I have typo'd/misspelled and had missed by automated spell-checkers and multiple proofreaders?



Yeah. You guessed it.



Fortunately, I haven't sent out too many application in which my work experience included, in a bit of delicious irony, a line that reads:
• Provided final editorial oversight for all printed products designed for pubic distribution

[sigh] I can only hope to have caused some amusement for some office drone out there somewhere tasked with reading through it.

Random Day

Having failed at sleeping through an entire day here (although we're up roughly one eight-hour nap after each three-hour period of verticality), we futzed around and tried to stay busy.

First, there was the Chair of Death. Buying "local" is encouraged here - anything to stimulate the Iraqi economy. Sometimes, though, it would be nice if we could have gotten some office chairs from, I dunno...another economy that could use some stimulation. See, the local stuff kinda...sucks.



So we tried to fix it. This is the test of the first iteration of repairs.



Back to the drawing board... After about four tries we got it stabilized enough to stop whoever was sitting in front of the secure computer from occasionally being launched backward onto the floor. That pretty much qualified as a "win." So we went shopping!

This is not as exciting as it might seem. We have a "unit-run" PX, which means that every so often, somebody drags a conex up to the Big Base, puts some stuff in it, and brings it back. Normally it gets raided for the good stuff (chips and Ramen noodles) within 24 hours, but it's always got the really important stuff.



There's some word on the street that the Powers That Be have nefarious plans to enact a military-wide smoking ban in the middle-future. I will, of course, not say rude things about any plans coming down from On High. I will merely point out that back when we used to actually win wars, the Powers That Be actually put cigarettes in our ration packs.

Having done field chair repairs and having successfully procured smokes and chips, we felt like winners. I felt like such a winner that I rewarded myself.



That is a peanut butter and thimbleberry jelly sammich. I do not know what a thimbleberry is, but it makes a fabulous jam.

I just don't get it

I just walked into our "office trailer," to find SSG C watching the Michael Jackson memorial on CNN International.

No - we did not participate in the "join hands to pray for Michael" part.

Is it over now?

When posting is light...

When I decided to keep blogging during this deployment, I had to make a decision that ran counter to my every inclination. I was, I decided, going to have to be nice.

Now, you may have noticed I'm not always very nice, but trust me - I'm genetically inclined to be a total ranting bitch on wheels. I am of the school that tells children: If you can't say something nice, come sit by me.

But I didn't know what sort of...tactical situation this trip would present, and so I planned for the worst-case scenario. That one would, of course, involve people dying. And, given my ability to jam my feet in my mouth, I figured that if I went off on a good long rant about how much of an absolute shithead moron Captain So-And-So was, he would be immediately killed the next day.

Then, the way I figured it, his grief-stricken family members would eventually be directed to a post on the internet about him, written only days before he died, in which some random chick devoted paragraphs and paragraphs to describing him as dumber than dogshit. This would, of course, probably make his Mom sad. And really, if there's one thing I never want to feel responsible for, it's making someone's Mom sad.

So sometimes, when there's not a lot of posting, it's because I can't sit down at the computer and generate anything but a seething vat of rage and vitriol. As a deployment winds down, it gets worse. Everyone would rather be somewhere else, all grand ideas have been given up on, and frankly, we grow sick of the people we've been tolerating for months.

So - in summary - everyone in the Army in Iraq who is not on my Civil Affairs Team is an idiot. All of them suffer from cranial-rectal inversion, which might be solved if they extracted their heads far enough for good advice to reach their ears.

But, rather than write mean, bitter posts that would make me feel bad if someone's Mom read them, I will simply take a deep breath and sometimes, rather than write something rude, occasionally leave you with no Bad Dog howling. I think it's best this way.

From Here to Y'all

I cleaned that table two nights ago after we ate on it. The dust has been...very special. It allows us to analyze foot traffic patterns in the gravel.



Hope you all are watching fireworks and cooking out today!

Oh yee of little faith...

My mother, of all people, asked in the comments from the last post...

DID YOU GET MEAT???

We are elite warriors, and, for us, failure is not an option. We brave porta-jons on a daily basis, we face without flinching the dreaded Iraqi City Council Meetings. We grill in the face of sand flies and wear unauthorized hats behind the backs of sergeants major. We carry Beanie Babies into crowds of Iraqi children and come out unscathed.

Chuck Norris can leap six-room schools in a single bound, but we can fund construction of several such schools in one afternoon of paperwork.

We are, in short, really really bad mofo's.

We got meat.



That's 26 steaks of various cuts, and the trusty box of old burgers we keep around for snacking.

We also keep backup meat in the Bossman's freezer, but this is the freezer we filled on our most recent trip.

Some days...

It sounded like a good idea when the opportunity came up yesterday. We were low on meat, I wanted some new white socks, the boys needed snacks and magazines featuring scantily clad wimminz...there was a convoy headed up to Big Base for the afternoon. We'd load up our trusty Maxpro Plus MRAP and tag along. It'd be a hoot. And, as always when we roll our vehicle, good training.

I rolled out of bed in a decent mood, and headed outdoors. The dust was a little thick, but I was Abby the Optimist today - well, the guy in the gun won't roast, I though.

We picked up some mail, then SSG C and SGT B went down to move the truck over to the line, Bossman and I finished up some coffee and prepared to get a little paperwork we were taking. Just before we headed off, SSG C came over with a question - did we know, he asked, if this particular truck had a set of slave cables?

(those are basically a giant jumper cable for military vehicles, which tend to have a special port designed for "slaving")

It started yesterday! I pointed out, which forced SSG C to point out that although yes, he had started the truck yesterday, it apparently had decided to take today off.

(and no - we didn't get a set of slave cables when we signed out the MaxPro)

We found a set and jumped the truck. The boys drove it around to the line, and the Boss and I grabbed our paperwork. Along the way, they grabbed ice for our cooler and returned the cables.

We met them at the staging area (we were still early - our truck has been, on occasion, prone to commo disasters - we budget extra time).

My pants gave out!, announced SGT B, hopping down and indicating the signature ACU failure - a spectacularly blown-out crotch. It was, we noted, a blue underpants day.

I hopped in the back to put the water and Gatorade in the cooler with the ice while the guys handled their gunner and driver chores. Except the cooler...I'd never seen a catastropic cooler failure before - cracked plastic and a separated insulating layer. The lid wouldn't fit. And when it's over 100 in the dust at 0900, a non-sealing cooler is a non-starter.

It was not, the Bossman noted, starting out as a particularly super day.

The blue cooler (which we loved - it was the perfect size) ended up in the Dumpster, and I trudged off to fetch Second Best Cooler (it's red and just smaller enough to suck). We got that loaded, the commo checked, the gun up, my high-speed warfighting Tom Tom system up and running. We hit the test-fire pit and rolled out the gate.

Hey, C, I asked, you smell something?

Smells like brakes, the Bossman volunteered from the back.

Burning brakes, said SSG C, piloting out the entry maze.

The radio chatter turned to the weird burning brake smell, and we made a quick stop outside the gate to check the emergency brake on a trailer in the convoy. It was semi-engaged, so it was blamed for the smell. We had no idiot lights or odd gauges, and Old Faithful was handling in her normal, godawful manner. We continued on.

We reached Big Base, established a linkup time in six hours, and and parked near Finance so the boss could go in and grab some cash. I crawled out of the front to stow my body armor in the passenger compartment. SGT B pulled down the gun and SSG climbed out of the driver's seat to stretch.

Only there was this smell...

SSG C and I circled the vehicle. His background is in the motor pool, so when we noted a good, solid, Class III leak around the inner edge of the inner rear tire on the driver's side, he was about to expertly diagnose it as probably the problem.

Fortunately, we were parked right across from the Maintenance section for the battalion we support. Cooking with gas, hey? Well, not so much. See, they don't keep parts on hand for the Maxpro varients of MRAP...

[insert sound of head hitting wall here]

But maybe they had what we needed. Of course, it being Sunday on Big Base, the maintence crew didn't actually show up till 1300...

We went to lunch, sent the Bossman to do officer things at Higher, and linked up with the truck bubbas at 1300.

Nope, said the staff sergeant in charge of the section. They didn't have any hub seals (aha! Now I knew what we needed!) for a Maxpro, but there was an outfit a couple streets over that worked on Maxpros...

(figuring out which little garage does what to which vehicles and for whom could be a full-time job. It's not mine, so this part is always frustrating as Hell)

Fortunately, while we were at lunch, the whole wheel/brake/hub/axle area had cooled just enough to unseize (a lovely development as soon as we had parked the truck). So we could move it to the Possible Maybe Guys Who Could Fix It.

I walked into their bay, which was full of civilians, and started telling my sob story:

Hi, my name is Abby and I'm with the CA team supporting the Cav guys down at FOB McSleepy. We seem to have developed a hub leak on the way up here, and the Forward Support Company people here don't have what they need to fix it. They said you all might be able to help. Did I mention our SP to get back is in 3.5 hours? And we really really hate our Higher and didn't pack our toothbrushes, so I'd pretty much sell my soul to you if you can fix my truck.

And you know what? God love those guys at ManTech, because they did.

We pulled down the wire mitigation system, I shuffled some paper, we debated a grumpy staff sergeant from a nearby maintenance section from which the ManTech guys actually liberated our part...we watched gallons of water (to cool) and degreaser (to, I suppose, degrease) go into the afflicted area of Old Not-Quite-Faithful. At a couple of points, there were six guys cranking on our truck to get us out the door in time to get home. They seemed mildly amazing our rear axle hadn't burst into flame or something similarly horrible on our trip up there.

In between the debates and forms, we had time to get each of us past the real PX and to reassure our fearless leader that he would not, in fact, be trapped at Higher for the night.

We rolled out of their compound at 1615, picked up the Bossman, fueled up (no way we were rolling out with the needle anywhere to the left of "F" with the day we were having), made our linkup, and got back to our dusty little home.

Soaked in sweat and thankfully ditching our body armor, we stood next to the parked truck (who has a followup visit with our local maintenance guys tomorrow).

Next time, the Bossman ventured, when the truck is dead in the morning and there's a pants failure and a cooler breaks, all before we even saddle up...

Right, we agreed. The next time that happens, it's a sign we all just need to go back to bed.

Bingo, he said.

(note - I wanted to link to the ManTech folks because they went a lot farther than they needed to with a lot less paperwork to help us out. Maybe I heard the name badly, because the only ManTech I could find with a link to the defense industry didn't sound like the same folks. Pity, 'cause this was a great group of guys)

Just FYI

In case my US readers thought they were the only ones...we have satellite feed TV here sourced from somewhere in the middle east. We get CNN International, the BBC and Al Jazeera (in English).

When the Michael Jackson Grief Festival got to be too much on CNN, we switched to the BBC. When it overwhelmed us there, too, we went to Al Jazeera.

The good news is, it's not just the US that's overwhelmed with this godawful contrived celebrity media seizure that's become the norm whenever anyone who's ever made the cover of the National Enquirer gets athlete's foot.

The horrifying news is that it's everyone in the world who gets their news in English.

The worst job in the Army

belonged to the platoon medic for the guys we were out with the other day. We had to sit in a small meeting room (cushions on a concrete floor, etc etc), drinking even-less-trustworthy-than-usual tea and talking about water projects. We had to continue said discussion even when the power went out and the flies tripled in number.

But unlike the medic, we did not have to examine the muktar (town headman) as he lay sprawled out on the floor, wincing.

Unlike the medic, we did not have to have the level of highly personal physical contact that allowed him to declare "torsed testicle, he needs to see a doctor."

We don't smell very good, and we have access to sufficient water for a daily scrub. I don't envy the man whose job took him into a crotch without that resource.