Craziness In Iraq

Who'd of thunk that when Arends and I were joking about snow in Iraq, that it would eventually happen? Yes, you heard me right, snow, in Iraq; Ironic? I think so! On the morning of 11 Jan 08 we're getting ready for a patrol through our AO (Area of Operations). I wake up, throw on my gear, and go to step outside and start prepping our humvee only to find myself running back in to quickly throw some rain gear on. Everything was soaked outside... I mean EVERYTHING. For some weird reason, the Iraqi soil doesn't really like to soak up water, so it just sits on the ground in gigantic puddles of nasty muddy goop. But the mission must go on, so I don my wet weather gear, as right now it is raining, and I trudge out to my truck, careful not to slip and land on my back, or worse yet my face.
When the Iraqi soil gets wet, it takes forever for it to soak up the water, but it does get pretty sloppy for at least the first few inches... which stick to the bottom of your boots and weigh your feet down. Seriously, the soil becomes more like the consistency of peanut butter, and you are walking on 4 inch stilts at times because of all the mud you just keep collecting, and collecting, and... yeah, you get the picture. There is still dry ground outside though! But I'm not just talking about the stuff under the humvee, I'm talking about after you peel the mud up off the ground, revealing perfectly dry, dusty Iraqi soot.
Well, here we are, trying to get the humvees going, water dripping off the sides of the humvees onto our boots, soaking our feet, which weigh a ton. We get them all set up and head off to the DFAC (Dining Facility) so that we can meet up with our other guys and eat some chow. We get there and notice something in the air that isn't rain... it is sleeting now. Lovely. Soaked feet, freezing cold air, with water and now ice falling from the sky on top of you. At least the humvees heater worked. We then get notified that we need to meet with the other half of our guys over at their building, which has a large common area everyone can gather in, instead of standing outside. Well, we get there, do our meeting, then head back to the DFAC to eat chow. We eat and everyone starts heading back outside, bracing for water and ice but getting something unexpected; HUGE clumps of snow!
Well, I know that we could have had limited visibility because of dust, but never would I have imagined that we would have limited visibility with snow! Everyone actually had a pretty good time, despite how freezing cold it was. The snow would melt right when it touched the ground, so you can imagine how the roads would just get wetter and wetter. Well, the drivers really had a fun time with that, peeling out, flinging mud all over the place, it was pretty fun! We only had one mission that day, so everyone was glad to get back, warm up, and dry off. Once we got back to our tower, we all decided we were going to watch a movie... Blazing Saddles to be exact. Well, while cleaning our weapons, and having the movie go through it's opening credits, something drastic happens.
The power goes out. You can imagine all of our disappointment; freezing cold, dirty weapons, just trying to relax and clean and all of us are now sitting in the dark, which is starting to get cold fast because the heaters are out. I don't know if it is just the the storms in the US are that much more efficient that the power goes out WITH the storm, but it seems to us that Iraqi storms are less efficient by taking the power out AFTER the storm is well gone. Anyways, we didn't get power back for at least 6 hours, I totally lost track of time, but I can say for sure it was longer than 6 hours. Something about some generator blowing out or something. I had to go replace one of our humvees with another one, and I tried taking the normal route back to the tower, but they had the generator pulled out INTO the road, with 8 trucks, all with flasher and brights shining on this thing and the area it was pulled from; talk about a task!
Anyways, that is what is happening here! I'll try to gather up some pics, from people that DIDN'T forget their camera that day, so that people can see what it was like. Hope everyone is enjoying your weather, and the new year, and I will see you all fairly soon!

Happy Birthday Sarah!

Yesterday was the day that my amazingly, awesomely, fantastically, righteously superb wife was born! Yay for 22 years of life!

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a fantastic new year! I know I did - nobody got hurt, nothing went wrong during patrols, everything went as normal on our internal posts, and things here are starting afresh! We are starting NCODP's (Non Commissioned Officer Developmental Program) through our First Sergeant! Which is something that Sgt Harcey, and I have been pushing for. There was one point 'last year' (hehe) that our Platoon Sergeant tried to get it going, but it fizzled out after the first one. Our First Sergeant has now caught wind of it, which he also has been learning about all the other communication issues among other problems, and he is taking the initiative this new year to get things moving!

What NCODP's are is a chance for the junior leadership (me) to be taught from our senior leadership (First Sergeant) about how to properly discipline, counsel, uphold standards, etc. I'm really excited, because of how things have been going here, with our platoons getting split in half and not really interacting with half our leadership, it has really put a strain on things, and now we have a chance to learn from those mistakes, develop ways to deal with these issues, and become better leaders. Hopefully, HOPEFULLY, this keeps going, and things continue to get better, because, frankly, things have been fairly de-motivating. Which isn't good because my soldier pick up on that attitude and portray it themselves.

But hopefully, because this is a new year, it will motivate our leaders to do away with the old and bring in the new. I hope everyone has had a fantastic winter thus far. Keep warm, lift with your legs not with your back (in regards to shoveling), and throw a snowball or 2 for me!

Brandon