The Saga VIII
Apr. 10th, 2003 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumAt long last I can send this. I suppose it's a case of turnabout and you
can all get the news a few weeks behind the events (the most up to date paper we have seen is a five day old edition of Stars and Stripes, after that the average is about a month old).
09 APR
Somewhere in Iraq:
After four days without a shower, one's hair starts to feel clean again. The
dust has so stripped it of oils that it no longer sticks to the hand when one
rubs it. We've been here for a couple of days, and it took a couple of days to
get here.
Those were interesting days, and not all that much fun. We were part of a huge
convoy, no less than 80 vehicles, perhaps as many as 100. I can only say I
never want to do that again. To travel a few hundred miles took 36 hours. Admittedly we slept for some of those (and that was the most restful bed I've had since I got to Ft. Bragg. The cover of a Humvee's cab is like a hammock. Wider than a cot, and better support as well).
Mostly the trip was dull. After all that fretting the crew did a lot of
sleeping. I was in the amusing position of 1: trusting that people in other
vehicles were awake, and 2: when I saw something I was concerned with, waking
someone to pay attention.
Crossing The Berm was interesting. We did it late in the afternoon, the sun in
front of us and a pall of dust in the sky (the road was awash in drifting
eddies of sand, I can see where the legends of the Iffrit come from, the streams of it seemed almost alive). M1 tanks were silhouetted against the ridge of dirt, their blunt snouts aimed at Iraq.
On the other side, a completely different world. Where Kuwait was empty, this was not. There was greenery, there were walls, and animals; and people. Happy
smiling faces, hands raised to us, young girls and young men blowing us kisses.
Children laughing and raising fingers in a Churchillian gesture of victory. A
boy in a dirty t-shirt which read, "California" across his belly.
Men looking at us, some smiling, some just staring. A tomato field being
harvested, while a little boy, bare-assed and uncaring, squats to relieve himself, his shirt-tail flapping in the breeze. All about were boxlike structure of mud-brick; three and-a-half walls and no roof.
And the begging. Pleas for water and food (which we could not spare). Floppy
eared, shaggy-sided sheep, with the spring lambs tottering along behind
them. A cow (so small I thought it one of this year's calves, until I saw her swollen udder).
It was gripping, stunning, throat-choking, moving beyond words. It was the
arrival of the conquering hero. One could not see this display and not be
moved.
The most striking thing was the sense of place. Kuwait, just the other side of
the border, was empty, a barren desolation. Not only did no one live there, to
the passing eye it looks as though nothing could live there. But here, a mere
mile away the landscape looked severe, and the living harsh, but one felt that
it might be worth living in.
And the more I drove, the more I felt it. There were irrigation ditches,
fields (fenced with some sort of reed, to keep the wandering asses from eating the plants) there were birds (waders, long-beaked and predatory, as well as swifts and sparrows) plants, houses. We saw two sets of camels; one with a woman tending them, one which I think was the property of a group of Bedouin(they had a campsite, not a village). Both sets had babies.
And the land smelt moist. Like spring in the desert. I have lived in places
which looked worse, and needed the ingenuity of man to make year round
survival possible, this was not a place like those.
Here, on the other hand, there is nothing like that. As we moved more west the
terrain changed, the vegetation become more sparse, until it faded to
insignificance. I think the camp we are in used to be some sort of quarry. I
think it was a brickyard. Certainly the soil is a very clayey stuff. It would
make fine bricks of the sort those boxes were made (the boxes were
interesting, some of the bricks had to be local, since the windows were cut in non-square shapes, they looked as though they had been set in place, and the window then cut right out of the wet mud).
Where the soil has not been churned to dust by our vehicles and bulldozers
it is a hummocked oddity. The soil itself is close packed and striated, with
limestones. Clay and chert and some flinty stuff, mixed it with bits of what
might be marble. But where it has been knocked about it is like flour. Deep
flour. Stepping on a slope can get one's foot buried to the calf; dry quicksand.
And last night we had wind. Not a steady wind, but a blustery wind. The kind
that shakes leaves from autumn trees. Here what it does is raise dust.
The sun did not rise, light merely replaced the dark. About 0900 there was a
white dot, but the dust rose and swallowed it again, in murky swathes,
until it was gone. At its brightest today (ca. 1600) there was a bright indirect glow, enough to cast a shadow.
Where our last place was less than most of us had ever known (who had
never done a long camping trip in Joshua Tree, or the bottom of the Grand Canyon) this place is worse than any I ever hope to know again. I have a rosy tan, I think that layer of dust may be enough to make up for my not always wearing sunblock.
Anyone who has hair is starting to look like a redhead. Our clothes (after
four or five days) are dirty. Baby wipes on the skin, and vigorous beating of
clothing prevents us from degenerating from merely dirty to actually filthy.
I could be happy. Some sense of contact with home and it would be all
right. Not great but enough for me (a fairly sanguine sort) to be more than just content. We have a kitchen (the first meal was served the night we arrived), latrines (just finished, and the ordure needs to be burnt, but it beats a straddle trench, or cat-holes). The risk of rats is kept at bay by virtue of the burn-pits we put our trash in.
But for those who do not like the desert (this makes the sixth time I have
lived in one for more than a month) it is compared to an Outer Circle of Hell.
We are not abandoned of hope (we after all are alive, and Americans; a most
persistently optimistic lot), but the griping is stellar.
Our greatest hope is that we shan't be here long, that soon we will move to someplace better (the corollary, that we may end up someplace worse is pondered, and summarily put out of mind. Best not to entertain evil thoughts). Our best, and brightest, hope is for the end of the shooting, for some tenuous peace.
Oddly enough we seem to feel more secure here, where there are more people who
want to take pot-shots at us then there ever were in Kuwait.
And we have work. We are talking to some of the prisoners you are all hearing
about. That is strange, because I, who have been training people to do
this for years, am not chosen to do that. I have a role in the support structure. Someone has to do that, and I am good at it. I make sure they are up to date on what we think is going on out in the battle area. I even like the work, but it seems odd, a let-down of sorts. It seems everyone else will get to see how it really works, and I won't.
Going out to the compound is also strange. We don't take weapons with us. The
MPs provide our protection, and it makes abuses of Geneva harder to make. So
when we go out there we are unarmed, in a combat zone. Not so much as a Swiss
Army knife. I feel naked, vulnerable, in a way I didn't for the long drive up
here.
The rules are different now. We are at Weapon Status Amber, which means we
have a loaded magazine in the well, and a full-load of magazines. Back home merely owning that much ammunition would brand me as a fanatic. I can see the
headlines, "Man arrested, had assault rifle, 100s of rounds of
ammunition,", here my 210 rounds seems barely adequate
Add up the firepower of my Company, roughly 21,000 rds of M-16 ammo, some frag
grenades, anti-tank rockets, 40mm grenade launchers, half a dozen Squad
Automatic Weapons (a small caliber machine gun) and a .50 cal machine gun, and
we'd out gun the most hard-core militias (e.g. the Mountain Men in Montana).
Here, we are a soft-target, the sort of unit Infantry would love to attack.
The Rules of Engagement are pretty simple. If I feel myself, or another
American/Coalition soldier to be threatened, or if I feel an Iraqi civilian is
threatened, or I see a uniformed member of Iraqi forces, I can shoot.
No need for warnings, no second guessing. See 'em. shoot 'em.
Here, now that the sun is down (1900 hours) the camp has the look of a frat
party gone wild. The burn pits are high, with bright orange light, flaring up
when more mo-gas is added to the barrels. An eerie glow against the berms, and
no stars At least one group of MPs is sitting by a personal fire, the light
cozy, and garish; all at once, against the pock marks of bullets and cannon on
the yellow bricks of the wall.. The air is moist (certainly moister than
it was in Kuwait. I can't say if it is truly humid, or just so much more than I have gotten used to (or that I am sticky with old sweat) but I feel as though I am swimming in the air.
But the atmosphere is quiet. MPs going about the details of life, haircuts
(clippers, run from a generator), ponchos being spread to keep the sun off the
face in the morning, guards changing over, and all the other things that
have to be done to keep some semblance of normalcy.
It could be worse.
can all get the news a few weeks behind the events (the most up to date paper we have seen is a five day old edition of Stars and Stripes, after that the average is about a month old).
09 APR
Somewhere in Iraq:
After four days without a shower, one's hair starts to feel clean again. The
dust has so stripped it of oils that it no longer sticks to the hand when one
rubs it. We've been here for a couple of days, and it took a couple of days to
get here.
Those were interesting days, and not all that much fun. We were part of a huge
convoy, no less than 80 vehicles, perhaps as many as 100. I can only say I
never want to do that again. To travel a few hundred miles took 36 hours. Admittedly we slept for some of those (and that was the most restful bed I've had since I got to Ft. Bragg. The cover of a Humvee's cab is like a hammock. Wider than a cot, and better support as well).
Mostly the trip was dull. After all that fretting the crew did a lot of
sleeping. I was in the amusing position of 1: trusting that people in other
vehicles were awake, and 2: when I saw something I was concerned with, waking
someone to pay attention.
Crossing The Berm was interesting. We did it late in the afternoon, the sun in
front of us and a pall of dust in the sky (the road was awash in drifting
eddies of sand, I can see where the legends of the Iffrit come from, the streams of it seemed almost alive). M1 tanks were silhouetted against the ridge of dirt, their blunt snouts aimed at Iraq.
On the other side, a completely different world. Where Kuwait was empty, this was not. There was greenery, there were walls, and animals; and people. Happy
smiling faces, hands raised to us, young girls and young men blowing us kisses.
Children laughing and raising fingers in a Churchillian gesture of victory. A
boy in a dirty t-shirt which read, "California" across his belly.
Men looking at us, some smiling, some just staring. A tomato field being
harvested, while a little boy, bare-assed and uncaring, squats to relieve himself, his shirt-tail flapping in the breeze. All about were boxlike structure of mud-brick; three and-a-half walls and no roof.
And the begging. Pleas for water and food (which we could not spare). Floppy
eared, shaggy-sided sheep, with the spring lambs tottering along behind
them. A cow (so small I thought it one of this year's calves, until I saw her swollen udder).
It was gripping, stunning, throat-choking, moving beyond words. It was the
arrival of the conquering hero. One could not see this display and not be
moved.
The most striking thing was the sense of place. Kuwait, just the other side of
the border, was empty, a barren desolation. Not only did no one live there, to
the passing eye it looks as though nothing could live there. But here, a mere
mile away the landscape looked severe, and the living harsh, but one felt that
it might be worth living in.
And the more I drove, the more I felt it. There were irrigation ditches,
fields (fenced with some sort of reed, to keep the wandering asses from eating the plants) there were birds (waders, long-beaked and predatory, as well as swifts and sparrows) plants, houses. We saw two sets of camels; one with a woman tending them, one which I think was the property of a group of Bedouin(they had a campsite, not a village). Both sets had babies.
And the land smelt moist. Like spring in the desert. I have lived in places
which looked worse, and needed the ingenuity of man to make year round
survival possible, this was not a place like those.
Here, on the other hand, there is nothing like that. As we moved more west the
terrain changed, the vegetation become more sparse, until it faded to
insignificance. I think the camp we are in used to be some sort of quarry. I
think it was a brickyard. Certainly the soil is a very clayey stuff. It would
make fine bricks of the sort those boxes were made (the boxes were
interesting, some of the bricks had to be local, since the windows were cut in non-square shapes, they looked as though they had been set in place, and the window then cut right out of the wet mud).
Where the soil has not been churned to dust by our vehicles and bulldozers
it is a hummocked oddity. The soil itself is close packed and striated, with
limestones. Clay and chert and some flinty stuff, mixed it with bits of what
might be marble. But where it has been knocked about it is like flour. Deep
flour. Stepping on a slope can get one's foot buried to the calf; dry quicksand.
And last night we had wind. Not a steady wind, but a blustery wind. The kind
that shakes leaves from autumn trees. Here what it does is raise dust.
The sun did not rise, light merely replaced the dark. About 0900 there was a
white dot, but the dust rose and swallowed it again, in murky swathes,
until it was gone. At its brightest today (ca. 1600) there was a bright indirect glow, enough to cast a shadow.
Where our last place was less than most of us had ever known (who had
never done a long camping trip in Joshua Tree, or the bottom of the Grand Canyon) this place is worse than any I ever hope to know again. I have a rosy tan, I think that layer of dust may be enough to make up for my not always wearing sunblock.
Anyone who has hair is starting to look like a redhead. Our clothes (after
four or five days) are dirty. Baby wipes on the skin, and vigorous beating of
clothing prevents us from degenerating from merely dirty to actually filthy.
I could be happy. Some sense of contact with home and it would be all
right. Not great but enough for me (a fairly sanguine sort) to be more than just content. We have a kitchen (the first meal was served the night we arrived), latrines (just finished, and the ordure needs to be burnt, but it beats a straddle trench, or cat-holes). The risk of rats is kept at bay by virtue of the burn-pits we put our trash in.
But for those who do not like the desert (this makes the sixth time I have
lived in one for more than a month) it is compared to an Outer Circle of Hell.
We are not abandoned of hope (we after all are alive, and Americans; a most
persistently optimistic lot), but the griping is stellar.
Our greatest hope is that we shan't be here long, that soon we will move to someplace better (the corollary, that we may end up someplace worse is pondered, and summarily put out of mind. Best not to entertain evil thoughts). Our best, and brightest, hope is for the end of the shooting, for some tenuous peace.
Oddly enough we seem to feel more secure here, where there are more people who
want to take pot-shots at us then there ever were in Kuwait.
And we have work. We are talking to some of the prisoners you are all hearing
about. That is strange, because I, who have been training people to do
this for years, am not chosen to do that. I have a role in the support structure. Someone has to do that, and I am good at it. I make sure they are up to date on what we think is going on out in the battle area. I even like the work, but it seems odd, a let-down of sorts. It seems everyone else will get to see how it really works, and I won't.
Going out to the compound is also strange. We don't take weapons with us. The
MPs provide our protection, and it makes abuses of Geneva harder to make. So
when we go out there we are unarmed, in a combat zone. Not so much as a Swiss
Army knife. I feel naked, vulnerable, in a way I didn't for the long drive up
here.
The rules are different now. We are at Weapon Status Amber, which means we
have a loaded magazine in the well, and a full-load of magazines. Back home merely owning that much ammunition would brand me as a fanatic. I can see the
headlines, "Man arrested, had assault rifle, 100s of rounds of
ammunition,", here my 210 rounds seems barely adequate
Add up the firepower of my Company, roughly 21,000 rds of M-16 ammo, some frag
grenades, anti-tank rockets, 40mm grenade launchers, half a dozen Squad
Automatic Weapons (a small caliber machine gun) and a .50 cal machine gun, and
we'd out gun the most hard-core militias (e.g. the Mountain Men in Montana).
Here, we are a soft-target, the sort of unit Infantry would love to attack.
The Rules of Engagement are pretty simple. If I feel myself, or another
American/Coalition soldier to be threatened, or if I feel an Iraqi civilian is
threatened, or I see a uniformed member of Iraqi forces, I can shoot.
No need for warnings, no second guessing. See 'em. shoot 'em.
Here, now that the sun is down (1900 hours) the camp has the look of a frat
party gone wild. The burn pits are high, with bright orange light, flaring up
when more mo-gas is added to the barrels. An eerie glow against the berms, and
no stars At least one group of MPs is sitting by a personal fire, the light
cozy, and garish; all at once, against the pock marks of bullets and cannon on
the yellow bricks of the wall.. The air is moist (certainly moister than
it was in Kuwait. I can't say if it is truly humid, or just so much more than I have gotten used to (or that I am sticky with old sweat) but I feel as though I am swimming in the air.
But the atmosphere is quiet. MPs going about the details of life, haircuts
(clippers, run from a generator), ponchos being spread to keep the sun off the
face in the morning, guards changing over, and all the other things that
have to be done to keep some semblance of normalcy.
It could be worse.
