Chow

The food here at the lake is pretty good, but, like the chow hall, not real varied. We had the same breakfast both days, so, OK, but lunch and dinner were the same as well. 4 meals, same chow. Chicken, rice, more chicken, some beef (I think, possibly mutton) cucumbers and tomatoes (breakfast included), and Iraqi bread. The bread is excellent. Kind of an elongated diamond, 8 inches long by 6 inches wide, and about and inch thick. Good with every meal, and for snacks.

Really good Chai tea (according to the tea lovers), but the coffee is "Nicecafe" instant, and yes, I spelled that correctly.

Tomorrow night is Kurdish night, food and entertainment. That will be interesting.

Alone in a group

We have a small internet cafe here at the lakeside. Ever spend any time in an internet cafe? This room holds 9 terminals, about 3 feet apart from the next. People just sit here and stare at the screen. Nobody talks. Occasionally someone will laugh, or sigh. The only sound is keys being clacked furiously. No hunt and peck typers in this group.

Defying gravity

We flew on CH-47 Chinook helicopters to a mountain resort for a 4-day R&R pass. A fixed wing plane glides through the air, relying on the real though invisible mass of the air to provide list. You've put your hand out the car window while driving, and have felt your hand pushed up or down. Fixed wing planes work with the air.

A rotary wing aircraft, a helicopter, fights the air at every step, and the inevitable victor always has to be gravity and physics. Helicopters can fly, but only by clashing with nature.

Especially the huge Chinooks. On a Blackhawk I always get the feeling like our forward momentum helps us stay in the air, even if that feeling is misleading. Seems like that if the rotors stopped turning, we'd maintain forward progress for a while. Not so with a Chinook.

I understand that the rotary wing (the spinning blade) generates lift only during part of the circle it makes. It's not like a fan blade, because the helicopter is moving forward and thus the wing is pushing against air only when it is against the wind, not when it is with it. (My limited understanding). So, flying along in the Chinook, we had a very bouncy ride. As the rotary wing spun forward, the helicopter lifted a bit, as it spun back, it dropped. Up down up down. I was watching my back pack, and it was bouncing on the floor, like it was riding on the back of a pickup hurtling down a washerboard dirt road. I got the sense with every wing beat that gravity was asserting its claim on the aircraft.

Lifting off, jet fuel, turbine engine and rotary wings briefly won the war. Landing, gravity was winning, though in a controlled fashion. Flying along, the fight was pretty much a tie.

Travel

I will be traveling to northern Iraq, in the mountains, for a few days, and will be back at the end of the week. I'll be chaperoning a bunch of soldiers on R&R pass to a lakeside resort.

I understand we will be traveling by Chinook helicopter, which are the big ones with two lift blades. I've never flown on one of those before, so that should be interesting.

I think I'll have internet access ($3.00 per hour!) so I should be able to post to the blog. If I don't post for a few days, I will resume by the weekend.

Yummy

Our surgeon warned us the other day that gastrointestinal illness is going around. He referred to it is fecal-oral in origin. It is widespread, though not very many folks have come down with it. He suspects it is primarily personal hygiene rather than some contamination.

He did note that our showers and sinks use non-potable water, so we should be careful taking showers and when rinshing our toothbruses in that water.

Helpless, helpless, helpless

Uncle Eldon, my favorite uncle, was killed in a car wreck yesterday. He was 74 and very active, and much loved by his family and friends. His loss seems so sudden and overwhelming. It is hard to be here where I can’t be with my family to grieve. That is a bad feeling, and so is the sense of helplessness I’m feeling. Not much I can do from here but send an email and order some flowers. A fairly pitiful gesture, given the devastating loss my Aunt and cousins have suffered.

I have heard many other soldiers go through similar situations. I overheard one divorced female soldier tearfully saying that she had left her children with her mother, but the father has visitation. Her children had started to report to grandma behavior by dad that bordered on abuse. The soldier feared that the father was going to snatch the children and move to another state. The soldier could not leave for home to take care of this. She was helpless.

Another soldier’s love went awry, and his fiancé told him on Christmas Eve that it was over between them. She was living in his house, wouldn’t pay rent, wouldn’t move out, wouldn’t give access to his family to get his stuff. He was helpless to take care of it.

I know of two soldiers whose wives became depressed and suicidal after their husband left. The soldiers can take two weeks of leave, but that won’t fix suicidal depression. The husband has to just try to give comfort and reassurance over the phone, and hope for the best.

The price soldiers pay to serve often is not visible.

Some jobs are worse than others

A KBR plumber, standing in front of the female shower unit, stared disgustedly at me this morning as I stumbled through the deep gravel on the way to my office. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the object of his attention, but I went over to him anyway. I heard water dripping as I neared him. A female captain exited the shower building and said “Okay” and he said “Thanks.”

“Having a tough morning” I asked. “Is there any way you can get these folks to stop using the showers with no drains?” he replied with a scowl and a shake of his head. A number of our showers have no connection between the shower drain pan and the pipe to the gray water holding tank. The water just runs out on the ground underneath the building. When he works on the showers, he has to lay in the mud and hair and soap bits drained from the shower, and he was grumpy about it.

You’d think the shower user would notice that the shower pan just drains onto the ground. From the outside, most shower buildings have mud patches, indicating leaking water. Some of the patches are big, the size of a Lincoln Town Car, and have been there so long they’ve turned green. You can’t miss them. From the inside, the light shines up through the drain hole and you can see the dirt below. The plumber told me that he has put duct tape across shower stalls, but it gets ripped off and the shower used anyway. I told him to see the Mayor, who could put out the word.

Later, after breakfast, I saw the plumber lying on a piece of cardboard under another shower building. Water was soaking through the cardboard, but he was wrenching away, tightening some new plastic pipe. I stopped, bent over and peered at him under the building, and asked him “How do you think those pipes get broken? It’s not like folks crawl around under the building.” He described in surprising detail the plastic attachments of the pipe to the drain pan, and concluded “They just kick out the flange with their heels or something while they’re in the shower.” “Why would they do that?” I wondered. He told me, matter of factly, as if it were obvious “They’re just kids. They ain’t growed up yet.”

Even villians like a villa

I got a chance to visit another FOB, on which sits one of Chemical Ali’s homes, or more descriptively, villas. This villa was one of several in the area belonging to the former thug. It sat on top of a small hill, more a rise than a hill, kind of a high point in the undulating terrain. Still, it presented a nice view of the surrounding countryside.

The villa was composed of two 2-story structures, flat-topped and painted a sandy orange. The hillside up to the houses had an orange grove on one side and an olive grove on another. A three-tiered fountain, dry now, was surrounded by what must have been a formal garden. Each tier of the fountain was shaped like a water pitcher, so that water must have poured out of the pitcher, down its side, and into the pitcher below.

Just outside the villa a large and deep swimming pool, probably 12 feet at its deepest and dry now, served to hold soldiers’ drying laundry, strung across the pool on a rope. The desert camouflage flapped in the breeze over the blue tile.

Inside the main structure the soldiers were playing ping pong and watching TV Looking up at the ceiling, I saw the usual rebar hook protruding. Almost every Iraqi building I’ve been has such a hook hanging down from the ceiling. Just a 10 inch length of rebar sticking through the ceiling, and bent into a hook. In this case there were several hooks, and they held a large metal +. The rumor is that this was part of a device used for torture, to string people up from. Since it would have been in, essentially, the front room, it's hard to imagine torture happening there. Who knows?

Newsletter

The link below will take you to a unit newsletter (The Snakebite) published on the Web, and approved by the authorities for publication. You can find photos of soldiers and activities on the site.

Some of the articles in the newsletter are pretty windy, but there is some interesting info there.

http://www.idarng.com/idarng.asp

Fighting the last war

We stopped to see a military building left over from Saddam’s regime. The building had two stories, awas about a quarter mile long on each side, and inside was a large unroofed parade field. The corners were circular rather than squared off or rounded off. The corners had small windows, actually firing ports, and inside it was simply a hall way wide enough for soldiers to standand shoot. Looks like the building was intended to serve as a fortress.

The building was one of three we saw in a long valley; "a vast agricultural plain" as it was described to us. A high ridgeline overlooked the valley, and peaks on the ridgeline were topped with bunkers. As far as I could see in either direction, bunkers stood out against the blue sky. Apparently the buildings were headquarters for a couple of battalions or regiments, and the bunkers formed a type of Maginot or Seigfried line. The valley served as an open field of fire for invading Turks, or Americans for that matter, to cross, and Saddam had set it up to protect the oilfields on the other side of the ridge.

The buildings we saw were topless, thanks to the US Air Force, but the ground floor was pretty much intact. Except for having been looted of every single thing you can imagine; widow frames, doors, wiring, plumbing, everything but the walls and the paint on the walls was gone. Everything except a couple of rooms of filthy uniforms and boots strewn among the rubble.

It didn’t look like we attacked the bunkers on the Saddam Line, but they are so exposed that the Air Force could take them out easily if necessary. The bunkers look pretty cool, marching along the skyline into the vast hazy distance, but wouldn’t be very useful against US armed forces. Bunkers are good only for line of sight engagements, and Army artillery could rubble them from over the horizon. And then bounce the rubble, if they chose to.

Pleasant Valley Sunday

We went out into the Kurdish countryside on Friday, which is the equivalent of Sunday in the States. It was a beautiful sunny day, temperature in the 70s. The area has rolling hills and is very green, and has a great deal of agricultural activity.

We saw many families picnicking in fields, near streams, and even just along the road. The families were dressed up and on an outing. The females wore bright clothing, reds and greens; I saw a long orange dress with a silver vest. We stood near a police checkpoint (check-nothing point) and saw the Kurds up close. The bright female clothing was worn mostly by children and young women, but the older women occasionally wore a bright scarf over their head or around their neck. Most of the colorful clothing had sequins, often of the same color, but often silver. I saw one young woman who had a pink cloud of silk around her neck.

Facade

I had an opportunity to go into one of Saddam's many palaces, this one in Tikrit. It is being used by the Army as a headquarters building. Looks very impressive from the outside, and the inside has many details, marble, tile, and expensive appointments.

Upon a closer look, the workmanship ship is shoddy. Tile is not aligned, mortar is sloppy, marble is roughly cut and poorly installed, the crystal chandeliers are made of plastic, and the electrics are abysmal. Like so much of what I see here, it is, I guess not surprisingly, third world.

I had thought the American workers were always in a hurry, and cut corners, and did shoddy work. That may be sometimes, but compared to here the work I see in America is outstanding.

They just don't seem to have a desire to construct things nicely, at least, as I perceive them. They're OK with cheesy work. Perhaps it's the "God Willing" attitude. If God meant it to be better, it would be better. It's cheesy, so God meant it to be cheesy, so who am I to complain. Or, maybe they're just used to cheesy and don't expect anything better. This is a poor country, and I guess they're not used to affording nice stuff. But, when they can afford it, like Saddam, it just looks nice.

I was told that part of the problem with the Palaces is that Saddam was impatient. Make me a palace by next week, or something unreasonable like that. So, upon pain of death, the workers would throw the thing up to meet the deadline, and of course, didn't have the time to do nice work. I have seen some nice work, just not much of it.

Kurds

I went on a little road trip into northern Iraq, an area heavily populated by Kurds. Not really everybody, but “everybody” smiled and waved at us, and lots of the kids blew us kisses. They like us, they really like us.

We stopped at a girl's elementary school that was just being finished. The workers were there waterproofing the cement floor. A few class rooms, a large open room, and bathrooms were being readied. The building was white with pink trim. This building has been built with American taxpayer money, handed out through our unit. The only school in town.

The school is built in an area that 18 months ago was unoccupied. There are large areas in Iraq that Saddam pushed people out of, particularly in the Kurdish area. He wanted to dilute Kurdish influence, and he wanted a buffer around his oil fields, so he depopulated them. There are villages springing up all over the place, and the school is being built in a new village. Although there are lots of homes rising, only a few are complete. Imagine going to some place way out in the countryside and just erecting homes. No businesses. I wonder what the folks will do for jobs.

We stood and watched a police checkpoint today. About 4-5 Iraqi cops manned a check point, though why they did, and why it’s called that, is beyond me. They didn’t check anything while we were there. They just waved people through. Half the time they weren't even looking at the traffic. One of them came over and tried to cadge some 9mm bullets from me.

In the half hour or so I watched, maybe a hundred cars passed through, most stuffed with families all dressed up for a Sunday outing. Not a single car was driven by a female. At least, no females were sitting behind the steering wheel. Some may have been driving from the back seat. During that half hour we also saw no accidents. Coincidence? Of course. We didn’t see any unicorns either, but I don’t think female drivers cause unicorns.

Old World Craftsmanship

The floor in our chow hall is being redone with new vinyl. The old vinyl was pretty worn in spots, and was peeling up in places. They can only do so much in a day, and it’s taking a week or so to do the entire, pretty large, floor.

The floor is being installed by a gang of Iraqis, diligently watched over by an armed soldier. I guess the Iraqis know what they’re doing, but, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Every vinyl installation I’ve seen has made at least an effort to match the seams and pattern, until now. They glue the floor, lay down a sheet about 12 feet wide and 20 or 30 feet long, roll it flat, and then lay the next strip, overlapping about 6 inches.

They leave the unglued flap for a couple of days, during which time we haveto reoccupy that part of the floor because there isn’t enough room otherwise. So, under the flap it gets real dirty. They go back and trim off the flap, but dirt is glued onto the vinyl near the seam, where glue leaks through.

The pattern is 6 inch blue squares, and again, no effort the match the pattern. I was looking at a spot today that was finished, but for about 20 feet a half inch of wood showed where the seam gapped apart. Still, job over. Sign the paycheck. More on Old World Craftsmanship later.

The workers do a section at a time. They have to move everything off the target area: tables, chairs, drink coolers, table and trays of food, salad, desserts, salads, ice machine, ice cream machine, whatever is on that part of the floor. For the last week, each time I went to get a bottle of water or a box of milk, I had to look around for the right cooler. Then I tried to find the salad bar, and get a cup of ice, and whatever, as is everyone else.

Every day it is different, and sometimes it changes between meals. The whole week all these soldiers and airmen have been stumbling around holding trays, searching for the bread or butter or something to drink, criss-crossing back and forth like a bunch of overheated molecules. I’ve come close to spilling my tray – which is slick as Teflon to begin with – several times.

Hard (Good?) luck story

A civilian came to my office today asking for help. He is about 60, a US citizen, but was born in Kurdish Iraq. He is working as an interpreter for the Air Force.

He told me that he lived in Kirkuk until 1990, when Saddam “told me and my son he was going to send us to die.” I’m not sure what that meant. Perhaps Kurdish oppression, perhaps he was told he had to join the military. Rather than die, he and two sons, aged 11 and 18, fled the country to Turkey. They had to swim a river to get out, even though the 11 year old couldn’t swim. As he related this story, his eyes watered up and a single tear slid down his cheek. “Very difficult” he said.

He made it to Minot North Dakota, of all places, where he earned a Bachelors and then a Masters Degree in mathematics. He was eventually able to get his wife and all four sons to America. His wife now has diabetes, but two of his sons have graduated college.

He kept referring to America almost as an entity. He said that when he got to Turkey, he was threatened with deportation back to Iraq, but he told them, “No. America says this is not the way. Father Bush says he will support us.” He had a very high opinion of America and American soldiers. He said he’d had a bullet shot through his pants, just missing his leg. He’s been here two years.

He is not allowed outside the FOB to go visit his family, which is still in the Kirkuk area, because of the security situation. He believes it has become more stable and secure since the election. He is hopeful to get to see his family soon.

Good thing I enjoy my own company

I have spent the last few days investigating various improprieties and writing up the required reports. Soldiers do get in trouble, and it seems that the National Guard soldiers easily get caught in the new standards of active duty.

For example, on active duty there are strict prohibitions against adultery and against different ranks having relationships, especially between officers and enlisted soldiers. In the Guard, however, these rules are relaxed. A male might know a female from work, or school, or wherever, and that contact may lead to romance. Once drill weekend rolls around, if one of them is an officer and the other isn’t the relationship could get them into trouble. So, there’s an exception for such situations for Guardsmen. Unfortunately, we are all on active duty now but some soldiers haven’t figured that out yet.

Often I have to look into whether leadership has followed the proper process when it disciplines soldiers. Again, on active duty we have many more disciplinary powers than in the Guard. Both management and labor need to adjust, and that adjustment period can lead to mistakes. Leaders particularly don’t like me poking into their business. The single most uttered phrase when I show up at a leader’s door is “uh oh”. I also hear “Now what?” frequently. I eat most of my meals alone.

Martha Stewart on the FOB

We have about a zillion sand bags stacked around our FOB. They are used primarily for shielding from rocket or mortar attack, and are stacked along side buildings and bunkers, but they are also used to fill potholes and hold down wires, camouflage netting and signs. Most bags are green and made from some plastic fiber, but others are made from cloth. The cloth ones tend to fade badly in the sunlight and then start to disintegrate, eventually ending up as just a pile of dirt imbedded with a few cloth remnants.

I suppose soldiers put up most of the sandbags I see here, but now there is an Iraqi sand bag detail. Young men, guarded by a soldier, who fill sandbags all day long. I’m not sure what they’re doing with all the newly filled sandbags; I don’t see new sandbags being emplaced anywhere.

Now that it is spring, our sandbags have begun to sprout, mostly grass, which grows out between the fibers. The bags, especially the plastic ones, retain moisture, so are good planters. I saw a soldier with a hand trowel and a package of watermelon seeds, planting the seeds in the top sandbags of a stack outside his CHU. He cut a small flap in the bag and inserted the seeds. "75 days from planting to harvest" he said with a satisfied smile.

False dawn

I've written how dark it is here, due to the lack of lighting, which is so knuckleheads can't target our living area. "Blacker than the inside of a cow." Not long ago I went outside around 2 AM to use the facilities, an ordeal in itself. To use the bathroom, we have to get dressed and put on a helmet (in case of a head banging incident in the sh*tter, I suppose), trudge about a football field across the deep loose gravel, and use the bathroom. Then back. Imagine if every time you wanted to use the restroom, you had to put on a helmet. You'll never look at a bathroom the same again. Fugitives from the headbanger ward.

During the last full moon, I got up for the ordeal, stepped outside, looked around, and thought someone had placed a spot light on the hill behind my CHU. Turns out it was the moon. Bright full moon, made brighter by the lack of lighting. The flame from the cracking plant was subdued that evening, because it normally competes with the moon for attention.

Tonight I went outside, headed home, and saw a couple of flares burning in the sky. Bright orange stars, slowly drifting in the wind. These were dropped by a jet flying overhead, and were illuminating our FOB for some reason. I had a book in my hand, and could read the text, though barely. The illum was at least as bright as the full moon. Both cast a shadow; a moon shadow, or an illum shadow.

Don't Touch That Dial or I'll Shoot

In our area, we get the Armed Forces Network, which has both TV and radio broadcasting. It shows the same TV shows, but it has not normal commercials. We see the TV broadcasts in the chow hall. It does run commercials, but typically it will feature "Sergeant Melissa" or someone, in uniform, and giving a command message. Safety is a big topic, as is operational security.

They try to make the commercials more than just a talking head, and sometimes the results are unintentionally funny. I recently heard a radio commercial extolling the virtues of oral hygiene. The speaker was a male, speaking in a girlish voice, and he called himself the "tooth fairy."

The radio disk jockeys seem to be given wide latitude in what they choose to play, so we don’t just hear the top 40 all the time. We get blocks of a genre that last for a couple of hours. For example, there is a hip hop/rap block, a country block, etc. I recently heard "The Ballad of the Uneasy Rider" by Charlie Daniels, which was released around 1973. I was riding the bus once and heard a song with a refrain that I am sometime tempted to adopt as my motto; "Blow It Out Ya Ass."

The tagline for the radio show is "Armed Forces Network – The Most Heavily Armed Staff in Broadcasting."

Life is good

Some big shots from the Dept of the Army flew in today, and I was essentially the emcee. I picked them up at the flight deck, took them to their appointment, and to chow, and back to the airport.

I took them on a windshield tour of the FOB. Part of our FOB, most of it, is surrounded by some type of barrior. Much of it is a concrete barrier (T barrier; shaped like an upside down T), around 15 feet tall. It is formed in 6 foot interlocking sections, which are emplaced with a brobdingnagian forklift. These barriers are all over, surrounding our housing areas, the PX and Gym, and other places soldiers gather. In addition to the T barriers, much of the FOB has a high dirt berm. In most places fencing or barbed wire augments the berms or T barriers.

There is a long stretch which just has a chain link fince, topped by concertina wire, a form of barbed wire. We drove that fence line today, and saw sheep herds and Iraqi shepards. In one area, some Iraqis are living in homes that appear to be ruins to me. The homes are interspersed by large rubblepiles. Pieces of concrete a foot across are piled loosly about 6 feet high. It looks like these used to be buildings, but I supposed we bombed them into rubble in the 1st gulf war. Some of the remaining buildings are inhabited, even though the walls are pitted by shrapnel and the windows are blank holes. We saw kids playing, colorful clothing hanging on lines, some thrashed cars, and people moving around the rubble piles. Very much a post apocalypse picture of people clinging to the remains of civilization. And above it, off in the distance, the flames from a petroleum cracking plant birthing plumes of black smoke.

Rocketman

Rocketman has been getting frisky again lately, after a period of quiet. He fired a couple of rockets at or into our FOB (Forward Operating Base) last week, and another one last night. I never heard any damage report for the two last week. I don't think the one last night exploded.

I was sitting in an up-armored hummer last night, getting ready to go pick up some plywood. I had flipped on the start switch and was waiting for the "Wait" light to go out, so the glow plug or whatever it is could heat up so the damn diesel engine would start. While waiting, I heard a funny whistling, sizzling sound buzz overhead.

I thought it might be a rocket, so I sat there for a bit. I didn't hear an explosion, so I started the engine and prepared to move out. Just then I heard Big Voice anouncing "Alarm....Red...". Dang. Leadership recently cautioned us to stop nanchalanting rocket attacks and seek shelter, so I didn't feel good about driving off. I shut off the engine and sat there a bit, figuring I was as safe in an up-armored hummer as in a bunker. After a while Big Voice announced "Alarm....Black...", so we could move around guilt free. By then I had decided to bag my plywood trip for the night, so I went to work on building room divider.

Road trip

On the way to and from Sulaimaniyah last week, we passed several streams around which folks had gathered and seemed to be having a picnic. At one I saw a long line dance. At a couple of others, a car was pulled into the middle of the stream and was being washed.

The highway had no markings or road signs. No dashed center line, no road edge marker, no speed limits, just a strip of asphalt. It was a two lane highway, I guess, as cars would so side by side. Since there was no road edge, it made the whole strip open for traffic. Two cars could fit side by side okay.

In the hummers, we drive down the middle, in order to be as far as possible from IEDs. However, we'd pull over to let someone pass, which happened a lot. Our machine gunner, who faced the rear, would hollar down through the hatch "red car" or "white truck" or "several cars", and the driver would veer to the side.

Going up the hills, not particularly steep ones, the hummer would slow due the weight of the add on armor. I'm told they weigh around 9,000 pounds. They get around 6 miles to the gallon of diesel.

Crack

I convoyed to another FOB the other day to visit soldiers. While I was there, their artillery started launching bullets, one or two every few minutes. Not a serious, rubble-bouncing sustained assault that the artillery is capable of, but more of a desultory spitting of a round downrange.

Inside the CONEX containers they were using as a headquarters, the sound was a very loud "WHAM", which rattled things inside. I walked outside after a little while, and the sound became a sharp CRACK. It had been raining that day, though not at the moment, so we had a low cloud cover. A few after seconds the launch we could hear the CRACK echo off the clouds sounding a bit like thunder. In addition to illuminating the night, and blowing things to smithereens, the
artillery has many uses. One is terrain denial; we land rounds there, and the bad guys don't go there. I suspect we were doing something along those lines. Our artillery is too destructive, and we are too tightly restricted, to just unleash the cannons. In fact, the word is that the only thing killed so far by our artillery was a goat. The artillery Commander hotly denies this, but that
doesn't stop soldiers from calling him "Goat Killer".

Magazines

I built a magazine rack for the internet cafe. People bring in magazines to read while they wait for a terminal and leave them laying around, so the rack was to take care of that. It immediately filled up with magazines, and with 2 shelves of books. I'm thinking of adding more book shelves.

The rack has an amazing variety of magazines. Oprah, Harpers Bizaare, Lucky, Sky & Telescope, Hair Styles, Car magazines, People, etc. I see no Guns and Ammo, or Hunting or Outdoor life, or magazines of that sort. A few car mags, but not so many. What I do see a lot of is Maxim, FHM, Stuff, Black Male, and the like. Soft core porn, some people would call it. Those magazines seem to arrive, disappear, and return. I guess we've got sort of a lending library going here.

The most interesting thing to me is that I see the female soldiers reading the men's magazines. They seem to be interested in what they're seeing, and they certainly don't appear offended, nor has anyone said anything. I suppose the ones who don't want to see it, just don't look at it, kind of like the men's magazines for sale in the PX.

What a concept; if you don't want to look at it, don't look at it, but leave it alone in case others want to look at it.

Skeeta-tent

Mosquitoes (yep, it's spelled with a "e", Dan) in Iraq are known to carry malaria, and it has now become mosquitoe season here. I understand at some point we have to start taking malaria pills. I suspect they might have some unpleasant side effect, as I recall marines not taking theirs for some reason.

Sand fleas here carry Leishmaniasis, which results in nasty open sores. We're supposed to treat our uniforms with pesticide from time to time. I wonder what's worse; sweating in a pesticide soaked uniform, or getting the disease. Not that I worry about the Gulf War Syndrome or anything, but last I heard no one had figured out the cause. I do know that they have suspended the anthrax shots, after we had 3 of the 4 required.

Tonight we were issued the U.S Army Skeet-Tent, 1 each. Came with four 3-foot poles. I guess you mount it over your bed. So far I've had only the occasional skeeter in my room, so I plan to try to tough it out before I set up the tent. I don't know if the tent works against sand fleas.

Sulaimaniyah

I was able to drive up to Sulaimaniyah province (state) recently, which is a Kurdish area. It is mountainous, and there is still snow on some of the peaks. The area resembles Northern Utah.
The Kurds are Shiite Muslims, but they are not Arabs. Because they constitute a large minority, and because they voted pretty heavily in the elections, the Kurd will have a large share of the elected offices in the upcoming government. This is tricky politics, because the Kurds and Arabs don’t get along all that swimmingly.

The northern area of Iraq has a great deal of oil wealth, which everyone wants. The Kurds are spread out in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, and each county resists the idea of the Kurds breaking off to form a separate Kurdistan. Having oil wealth would help that separation.

The Kurds seem to have figured out that they can get power politically under the new circumstances. Kurds appear to be moving into the Kurdish area. I saw lots of new construction between Kirkuk and As-Sulaimaniyeah, mostly homes, but also what appeared to be commercial structures.

The homes are not large, but seem to be of a common size, so I suppose they are essentially Iraqi middle class. The home start with cinderblock walls, upon which is layered, uh, mud. They can end up looking okay, depending on whether any decorative molding is added, or paint, or whatever. The yards are typically dirt, and usually have animals running around.
The key point is that I saw lots of construction, hundreds and hundreds of homes. I can’t imagine where these folks are moving from. Maybe they’re just able to move out of a relative’s home now that Saddam isn’t repressing them.