40. Question and Answer

Written: Wednesday, May 14th, 2003

Emily’s 9th Birthday. Sure wish I were home with her right now.

Wrote family letter. Received more mail.

How is the weather?
It is hot. Hot all day long and hot at night. The other night we were flying and it was 38 degrees Celsius—100 degrees farenheit. That was at 10:00pm local time. I can’t believe how hot it is. Well, I can believe it, but I don’t want to. During the day it is absolutely unbearable. The tents are hot and there is little to no air flowing through them. It is sunny and it feels like the sun is right on your back. When I wake up in the morning It is usually because I am sweating and can barely breath…so I will get up and walk outside of the tent looking for a break, but then wind hits you and it feels like you are standing under a “World-Sized” hair dryer and you are being chased around with it because there is just no escape! Needless to say, we are all getting suntans.

How do you live?
We live on an Iraqi Airbase called Balad. It is 30 miles north of Baghdad. There are 2 runways on this base and they are 11,500 feet long—as a comparison, Detroit Metro’s runway is 12,001 feet long. Hopefully that gives you a good estimation of large this airfield is. We live in a conglomeration of 7 tents of various sizes. We have 3 that sleep 9 people and 3 that sleep 2 – 4 people. Then we have one more then that is used as our Operations tent. Our tents are connected via walkways that were liberated (stolen) from the aircraft junkyard here. Well, we didn’t steal them, no one else was using them anymore. We arranged various pieces of cargo aircraft flooring into a useable walkway that helps to keep the sand down. Today, we got an industrial strength air conditioning unit to use to cool our tents. Right now, it is only set up to cool the Operations tent but people are at work trying to find the parts we need to get air to our sleeping tents…hopefully that will happen soon because it is getting unbearable to sleep because of the heat.

How do you get clean?
The short answer is, WE DON’T. We still shower out of a camping shower. It is a 5 gallon bag that has a shower head on it. You fill the bag, leave it in the sun then hang it inside your shower stall. Our shower stalls were constructed from some of the same material that used on the walkways. They are really nice and although they are outside, they are not bad at all. They have doors that open and close and someone acquired a shower caddy. When we first moved into Iraq, we lived in An Najaf and there was no airfield, just a nasty dirty, sandy farm field. It was sandy all the time and there was no way to get clean, but we tried. We had one of those camp showers hanging between two trailers (think small U-Haul, car driven, trailers) suspended from a pole. The nozzle of the shower rested at 3 feet off the ground so you almost had to sit down to use it. To top it off, the wind and sand blew around so much that the poncho walls we had around it would whip you as your showered…so we used it about every 7 to 10 days and just all got used to stinking. We all stunk pretty bad but no one noticed unless you were clean then you could smell how horrible everyone else was! Our showers here in Balad are better, but we still stink and shower less often (weekly for me still) than we change our clothes…which I suppose brings me to another point: Laundry.

How do you clean your clothes?
Since we arrived in Kuwait and Iraq, we have been washing our clothes by hand. We have a small bucket and we pour water in it then drop some soap in it then dump our clothes in it and squish them around to “wash” them. Then we ring them out, change the blackened water then rinse them out, wring them out then hang them up to dry. It doesn’t really work, but it gets some of the dirt out of your clothes and that helps. Once the clothes get worn out (holes in them) we throw them in the garbage hole and it gets burned.

Where do you put your trash?
We put all trash in a large hole outside of our living area and it gets burned. Everything we have that we no longer need gets burned. If we fill the hole with ashes, we cover it over and dig a new one. Neither of our holes have ever filled up until we left—our garbage hole is about 10 feet deep and it 10x10 around. The ashes are pretty minimal once it is burned.

Bathrooms?
Yeah, right…ok what we have is this—a plywood box that looks somewhat like a throne. We have a toilette seat nailed to it (please don’t complain when we come home and don’t lift the seat) and a 55 gallon drum (cut in half) underneath it to catch the “waste.” At the end of the day, two lucky soldiers get to drag the drum out, put fuel in it, stir with a large stick then set it ablaze. They then periodically stir it throughout the burning process to make sure it all gets burned off. It takes about 2 hours to burn the drum. To pee, we have a tube buried in the ground at waist level. Pretty simple.

What do you do in your off time?
Our off time is spent walking around talking to people. We drive around the airfield and see what we can “liberate” to make our lives easier. We acquire things like wood, desks, tables and so on. I have an X-Box that I was able to buy on one of my trips to Kuwait so now we play X-Box and watch DVD’s on it. That helps to pass the time. Our off time is ours. We just do menial tasks like burn the trash, the poop-barrell, we clean our clothes, and do normal house keeping tasks…I guess that brings us to eating.

What do you eat?
We eat all of the great stuff that you all send in your care packages. Favorites: microwave popcorn, chef-boy-ardee meals, heck, ANYTHING microwaveable is great. We also have the wonderful Meals Ready to Eat—MRE’s. They are not bad, but like anything, after eating it for a while—they suck. We also have a Mobile Kitchen Trailer (MKT) that our cooks use to prepare some very rudimentary meals that are just the same as MRE’s except they are on a mass meal scale—they are called Tray rations (T-rats) and they each feed 10 people or so. They are not too bad, but for the past 2 weeks we have almost continually had Beef stew…for every meal.

Do you get shot at? In most cases, if we are getting shot at, we don’t see it. When we first got into Iraq on March 23rd, we could see a ton of ammunition firing—from small arms fire (AK-47’s) to large missiles being shot. All of it looks differently when it shoots out and you can hear it being shot off…also, in the first days, we had some explosions very close by and I know I already wrote about the SCUD missile that was intercepted directly over our heads while we slept. That was around 27 March and it definitely woke us up to hear the loud explosion as it happened. During the day we really can’t see what, if anything, is being shot at us. I will tell you this: I have flown at night under Night Vision Goggles (NVG’s) 2 nights now and each time we flew, we saw tracers flying up from all the towns. On a typical night we can see many tracers, large flashes from explosions, and flares going up over the cities. Last night I flew and as we came across the Tigris River we saw a string of tracers fly up from the nearby city. The tracers were about 500 meters away and were flying in the same direction as we were…I have to say this: I have not felt threatened by any of these shots…yet. I believe that these shots are just people in the cities shooting in celebration…that may be a bit naive but no matter what, I have not been threatened by it.

Is what we see on T.V. actually what is happening?
From everything I have seen or heard, it is much different from what we have experienced. I believe that as things move up to the top of the chain, it is filtered down for what specifically needs to be addressed, so what may be really bad for us may not make it up to the top…As you may have read in a previous letter, we flew into Iraq on the night of the 11th Regiment (AH-64 Apaches) that was severely shot up—that day, we arrived with no gas here, we over ran our supply lines and had no security other than ourselves…we all know that we are lucky that no one came at us…and I can thank the huge dust storm that we had over the next few days…for keeping us somewhat concealed from the enemy forces in the near area. My basic point here is that although a lot of confusion will happen on the battlefield, the end result IS that we have won the war and we did effectively do what we came here to do. We all have lessons that we learned—from every level, bottom to top—and we can only hope that we will learn from those mistakes and not let them happen again.

Do you have phone and internet access?
NO. We do not have any access to the internet UNLESS we are lucky enough to get a trip to Kuwait. I was fortunate enough to get such a trip so I was able to use the phone and the internet at will. However, here, in Iraq, we do not enjoy the same privileges that the rear areas enjoy. We are cut off from most of the world and the only news we get is what we see via 1 T.V. that has Satellite reception and the mail we get from home. We also have 2 phone lines in the Battalion (about 350 people) that we can use at specified times…the only problem is that those phones are unreliable and hard to get through on and as you can imagine, our time is limited so that everyone, eventually, gets a chance to call at some point.

Have you been getting my mail?
YES! Mail takes anywhere from 10 days to 2 months to arrive. Today I received mail from March (today is May 14th). It doesn’t matter if it is letters or packages, they all seem to get lost in their own black holes but we still receive the mail so keep on sending it!

Do you see Iraqi’s?
Yes and no. If you go to the gate of our base, you can see Iraqi civilians working in the fields outside. They are farmers who work the crops that surround the base. I have not talked to them but they seem friendly and are willing to talk to you if you approach them. When we fly over the country, we can see people all over the place. When we first arrived, the people were visibly scared of our presence and would run and hide when we flew over. In the past month, they people have come out and now they wave and the kids will run in an attempt to chase us as we fly by. It is a huge difference from day one of flying here.

Thats all of the question and answers for now...

Just came back from our Company area...the air conditioning in the CP is really cold!

PR mission launched to go extract a LRS team that was inserted a few days ago. The team was engaged by 7 to 10 enemy soldiers. The team called in Close Air Support (the Air Force) and the enemy was repelled. The team then called for emergency extraction.

Our on-call team was Sam DeNardi, CPT Smith, CPT Hester and Chad Fenner. As they assembled, the rest of the company ran to their aircraft and prepared them for flight. It was a total company effort and we were all amazed that they were off the ground in 57 minutes! As they took off, they were called by Brigade to turn around because the 4th Infantry Division picked the guys up with a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. They eventually got another call to go pick them up from a 4th I.D. compound. They flew out there and got shot at by a few people on the way. The shots were definitely at them, but were not coming close enough to get anyone too excited.

They picked the guys up and returned here.