DAY 35 / JAN 02

DAY 35 / JAN 02, 2006

            I had to wake up early this morning because of a meeting at 0830.   I did make the most of it, however.  I woke up at 0700, took a shower, and was out the door by 0745.  I walked down to our NETOPs with my computer and hopped on the internet.   I was finally able to chat with my wife on-line.  The network hasn't closed that port yet, so I'm use it as long as possible, but I suspect it will be closed very soon.

            While I was on the phone with my wife, there was a big explosion that sounded like it was near the gate.   I waited and waited for the "incoming" announcement, but it never came.  As it turns out, there was a SVBIED (Suicide Vehicle Borne IED), at a traffic circle in the town.   It hit a bus of Iraqi Police and killed some of them and injured others.  Note:  You may think I'm violating some OPSEC rules by posting this already, but I didn't get any of my information from within the FOB, everything here was taken from a CNN story I watched in the DFAC.

            If you look at the ongoing insurgent activity throughout Iraq, you will see that the trend is for IEDs and attacks to be targeted against Iraqi Police and Iraqi Soldiers.   The enemy has seen that we (American Forces) are heavily armed and armored and that for the amount of explosives it takes to destroy one of our up-armored trucks they could blow up four or five of the less armored Iraqi Police or Army vehicles.   This is both good news and bad news.  The good news is that we are safer, the bad news is that we need the Iraqi Police and Army to grow so that we can leave sooner.   As soon as the Iraqi government determines that their forces are sufficient to put down the remaining insurgency, they will ask us to leave, and I am confident that we will.

            The rest of the day was the usual networking, getting things here or there, updating this or that, etc.   I also had to go to a meeting for someone else, but they were busy, so I guess I can do that once in a while – luckily, it wasn't a long meeting and I really didn't have to say much.

            I did have one incident though.  For this story, I have to go back to our last NTC rotation.

            After the NTC exercise was over, we had to move everything back home – of course.   In order to do that, we had to get it on trains at Yermo.  We drove all the vehicles down there and then waited to put them on.  When we got there, NOTHING had been done to prepare for getting anything on the trains.   After waiting for HOURS with zero progress we took matters into our own hands and started to get the ball rolling.  We found the fork lift to move the spanners, we set them up on the trains – all the prep work that should have been done the day before, we did.   Finally, we came to an impass and I went to the guy in charge, a Major, to get it fixed.  When I went to him and explained the day to him, he didn't seem to really care, and was actually defensive, thinking that I blamed him (which I did – but didn't tell him) for the fiasco.   When I countered his excuses, he just cut me off with a snide remark and walked out of the room.  We finished the loading up of the vehicles without his help – even though it was his job.

            Cut back to present day.  I need to get a structure built.   First I go to the Mayor's Cell who tells me to go see the engineers.  I go to the engineers who tell me I need to go through my battalion.   I go through the battalion that tells me I need to go through Brigade.  Once I get to Brigade, guess who's in charge of what I need?  That same dumbass Major who I pissed off at NTC.  Great.  Now, I have to jump through umpteen million hoops just to get a simple wooden structure built.   I have to get a diagram, an ariel picture, a justification for why I need something so big and on and on and on.  I hate that guy.   The real question is, is he just naturally an asshole, or is he just pissed off at me still?  Does he even remember me from NTC?  I know I remembered him.

            I don't know, but I think we might have just been mortared again.   Or else there was some outgoing fire.  Either way, I put my Kevlar on.  Well, after a few minutes, no call has come saying we were mortared, so maybe we weren't, maybe it was outgoing after all – I just never can tell.