I’ve been here for only 5 days, 3 days total in Camp Arifjan, and I hate this place already. I hate everything about it, the humidity and the heat just about says it all. On top of that we got leadership that is not worth jack shit. Yesterday they held a meeting for 2 hours. Today, they managed to hold it in 100 minutes. I have no idea what they have so much to talk about. So we all waited yesterday to shower/eat/sleep because we were told to wait for our lower enlisted meeting with our platoon sergeant. Didn’t happen. Today, they briefed us on what’s going to happen tomorrow for 2 minutes. I really don’t know who’s doing the real work. I was standing on the finance office working my ass off today. I mean I work as well as I could for as long as I could, and all headquarters does is linger around and watch us work. Even CPT Guardiano and SFC Tayo gets into it and helps out whenever necessary, and they seem to know when. But then 1SG would have to say in the meeting how he believes the postal operations should be run. They’re not here to tell us every little thing to do, have every control over our lives. Every opinion here is that the HQ doesn’t belong here. Then he says that we’re doing PT every morning except Sundays. What… the… hell? in this heat? With the workload that we have? Whatever. Doesn’t matter. It can bring me down as much as it can, but if I have a heat stroke, it’s only my ticket home.
You hear a lot of stories here. Most of the stories are told by the MPs and the transportation guys. I met one MP named O’Brien, like Late Night Conan O’Brien. The guy introduced himself the very first minute I stepped into the warehouses because he saw my guitar. He said he hasn’t touched a guitar since he’s been here, and that he’s been dying to play one. A 19 year old MP. He told me about the couple guys he killed. One of them was a man who unloaded his AK 47 at him without aiming. And while OBrien heard him reload, he popped up from the wall he was hiding from and shot him in the neck. The other was a woman. Up north of Baghdad in a name of a city I can’t remember, shit still hits the fan every night when the lights are out and the moon still lights the sky. An 18 year old girl was running up to their position, throwing grenades at them. It doesn’t seem like any of them actually went off. But they warned her to stop, fired a warning shot, and then had to kill her. All in all the MPs had 18 holes in her, and they were shocked at how beautiful this girl was. Perhaps it’s just us that believed that the regime was as bad as it cracked it up to be. But then again, you always hear the stories of soldiers being kissed by civilians, asking them to marry their sister or daughter, the foods and drinks they offer and the celebrations they hold on the streets. But that’s over now. Television ended when the best of that happened. Now life goes on, and like any other civil war, there will be hostility in the cities.
He was patrolling Baghdad International Airport one day. There was a tunnel made up of cement down there, void of light and life. It went on for miles like that, and as he turned his flashlights around at one point, there were handprints made up of blood all over the walls, just like in the blair witch project. They patrolled that room and moved on to the next, the same. No one knows what happened in there, but I think most of us can speculate…
Transportation companies seem to have the worst of it. They always tell me about how they’re getting RPGed. Trucks getting their tires blown off, the backs of whatever they were carrying destroyed to pieces. They hear sporadic gunfires once they enter the cities.
One time a group of four active duty transportation soldiers were sitting outside the billeting during the night. Sometimes we do that just to get some descent air and because it’s also colder outside than it is inside during the night. They were smoking and I was on my way to some decent time alone. I got to talking to them, though, and as they shared a story of their miseries, I was kind of able to share their pain, too. Getting shot at just transporting stuff back and forth from Baghdad countless times. People popping out of nowhere and trying to grab some things out of the convoy while it’s stopped but never firing a shot. Or the Stadium in Baghdad they were patrolling that came under heavy fire. The stories they tell. How Baghdad doesn’t quite look like it does on TV. And how there are more cities than Baghdad and all of them are hostile. They were in the same company as the girl was, PFC Jessica Lynch or whatever her name was, the female POW. They say that the report we don’t hear about say she was raped 20 different times…
Sometimes the lower enlisted are the only ones willing to admit things that higher up can’t. The same group of people know that we didn’t have enough people to start the war. Where did the 100 hour warning come from? And why did they bypass some of the smaller cities? Now everyone they missed along the way are coming back from the shadows