Living in Iraq
I was recently asked in an e-mail, “What is it like in Iraq?” It’s a common question that I’ve tried to answer probably a hundred times over to various people. It’s a tough question when I think about it, and I would doubt if I could ever give a conclusive answer to anyone who asked me that. You may have never wondered this yourself, but if you’re interested, this is how I would put it:
The best way to explain it would be to imagine a group of your friends living in an area roughly the size of two Utah State campuses. All around the entire perimeter is a high dirt berm topped off with strands of razor wire and observations posts all around. Those observation posts are manned 24 hours a day with rocket launchers and heavy machine guns pointed outward.
For a place to sleep, you clear out an old two-story building, which has been condemned for 10 years, and build yourself some little shelves to store your equipment and uniforms. There is no plumbing in the building, so you are going to need to plan ahead when you need to use the bathroom or shower. When it does come time to shower, walk outside and head out across an area about the width of the Quad where the shower trailers have been set up. In order to preserve the limited water supply, you will only be able to take a three-minute shower. If you want you can go ahead and take longer, but you might be screwing the next guy out of his shower.
When it comes time to eat, there is a facility run by food service contractors, and they serve a pretty decent meal. You’ll have to walk about half a kilometer to get there, though. As you and your friends are headed that way, you hear a loud siren start blaring, followed by a recorded voice saying, “Incoming! Incoming!”
It’s the early warning radar system telling you to hit the deck and prepare for incoming rockets or mortar fire. You all run for the nearest cover you can find, but before you get there, the rocket hits about 300 meters away. That’s the usual, insurgents can’t aim worth a crap. Sometimes they get lucky, though.
As you continue on your journey, everyone points fingers and laughs at your friend that fell on his face during the short rocket frenzy.
After chow time, you’ve got a mission to head out on a combat patrol. The distance to your destination is about like driving to Brigham City. You mount machine guns on your SUVs, check your communication gear, load up with ammo and emergency medical kits and head on down the road. A couple miles down as you pass by some guard rails, the vehicle in front of you suddenly disappears as the roadside erupts into a cloud of debris, shrapnel and black smoke.
Some disgruntled citizens have planted a roadside bomb to try and take out some of these unwanted American invaders. Part of your mission is to clear this route of any roadside bombs, and sometimes this is how it gets done.
Luckily, the armor held up to the blast and your friends are just shaken up, but the vehicle is destroyed. You search the area looking for the “trigger man” but he is long gone, probably in a car that passed you moments before the blast. So you secure the area and wait up to two hours for the recovery team to come get the vehicle. In 110+ degree weather, two hours can sometimes feel more like two days.
After the vehicle is recovered, you continue on to your destination, which is a hill overlooking a village. It would be a lot like sitting in your car and watching over a town about the size of Hyrum. You sit there all day and all night watching for suspicious activity along the roads. Your job is to secure this area for convoys that travel to and from the base bringing supplies and soldiers in and out. As morning comes, you load up and head back to the base to sleep and get ready to do it again the following day.
This is basically what it’s like, physically, to live in Iraq. It is not exactly fun, but it will give you a whole new level of appreciation for what you have in life. When I fly into the great state of Utah in two months, I would doubt if there will be anything more beautiful to be seen in the entire world.
Soldier’s Notebook appears every Friday. Send comments to jaredj@cc.usu.edu.