| 18 April 2003 |
Yesterday's weather was interesting. I got up and went to wash up at the latrine, which is at the end of the road. It looked like a fairly normal sunny day, and I wasn't in there more than 15 minutes, but when I came out there was a dust storm that had overcome everything. I know I've said they were brown before, but this one was yellow. No doubt about it, the air was a very bright yellow. I think it was because the sunlight was hitting the sand, but it looked just as if I was wearing yellow tinted sunglasses. It was just downright weird looking. The storm lasted until midday and was gone as quickly as it came.
Things are becoming very routine now as we switch from Phase 3 to Phase 4, which is the end of hostilities to reconstruction. The Commander said that the switch from this phase to the next would be different in the different regions of the country and sometimes blurred in the same sectors. Phase 4 is in full swing in the very south, while other parts of the country have yet to meet certain conditions to transition. However, even in those sectors there is a mix between phases as we are doing a little of both and trying to get the counties infrastructure back on line. There are still bad guys out there, but most of them are foreign fighters that the Iraqis want nothing to do with, as they are slowly getting their lives back to a routine. The country is getting divided into two sectors with the Army's responsible for the North and the Marines in charge of the south. Not sure what the Marines are doing with their guys, but 4ID is moving in and going North. They even saw a little bit of combat already, the first for the IVY Division since Vietnam. Hopefully the 3ID guys will get to go home before too long. Some elements of 3ID have been here for almost an entire year. Those guys need to have their own ticker tape parade after the job they did.
The mission that I was supposed to support last week was postponed twice and is now on hold until next week. Since my replacement is due in anytime, I should be on my way home and unable to participate, which is good and bad. Anybody in the military will tell you that there's a fine line between stupidity and bravado. In fact, it's so fine that sometimes one becomes the other. Case in point, this mission was to go with my boss to assess the disposition of one of his missiles that had fallen out of its pod. The mission was to fly some 400 miles into the dessert and blow up the missile if it could not be recovered. Something like that must be destroyed so it doesn't cause collateral damage or fall into the wrong hands. Anyway, the plan was to fly a Chinook into the middle of the dessert to assess the rocket and decide to either secure it or blow it up. The EOD guys were going, and they were bringing a full pallet of explosives with them. The explosive of choice for the EOD is C-4. The EOD guys take this stuff and chew on it like gum just to prove that it's totally safe without adding the other necessary ingredients of heat and some sort of compression of which a blasting cap provides both. Of course this made me think about all of the hard helicopter landings that I've read about because of the harsh environment and the sand (compression), and the enormous amount of static electricity that comes with the rotors of a helicopter (Spark)? ...but there I go thinking too much again.
Anyway, that wasn't even the stupid part; the stupid part was the plan on how we were going to get back. Apparently we were going to have to get the other missiles that we could recover and drive them back to Kuwait. Now I was going along on this just as an observer and pretty much because there was space and I thought watching them blow something up would have been very cool. As the "go" day got closer I started to ask more questions like how we were going to get back, and what vehicles we would use to get back in if we were flying in, but driving out. How were we going to get fuel, and what kind of security would we have, and water, and food, and other things found on the very lowest end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was one of those times when you assumed the other guy had the plan, until you figured out that you just may be the other guy. It wouldn't have been a stretch to vision us out in the middle of the Iraqi desert with someone asking, "I thought you brought that?" It would have been fun, but when I weighed my options, the flight home sounded a little better.