Posts
09:35 – Baghdad. A number of days back, my mission to see the pump stations at Razzaza was scrubbed by the detonation of an IED. We turned and fled.
A couple of days later, I was driving the return route from BIAP with Chuck, we came upon an intractable traffic jam, caused when an EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) team shut down the highway to deal with an IED they found on a bridge. After about twenty minutes of going seriously nowhere, the Iraqi’s started to turn their vehicles and bug out. First the small cars, then the larger and larger vehicles until there was enough room cleared on the slab to turn the articulated rigs one hundred eighty degrees and west, to head back down the eastbound lanes of the Qadisiya Expressway. There would be an on ramp just down the road that they could go the wrong way off and seek out an alternate route to wherever.
This left a mostly empty highway, populated by primarily Coalition vehicles. However, as much as I appreciated the opportunity to be out of doors, the disappearance of the Iraqi vehicles changed our security profile, leaving us rather exposed. After a quick confabulation, I four wheel drove our Durango through a break in the guardrail and followed a couple of Humvees through the severely rutted and brushy parkway, eventually losing our escort, getting just a little bit lost ourselves, and eventually finding the obscure truck entrance to the Green Zone downstream of the palace.
While still with our escort, we drove through one of the worst neighborhoods I’ve seen here. It was filled with crappy, cinderblock houses, seemingly dropped from the sky both in their randomness and condition. The rag clad residents stopped doing whatever little they may have been doing and stood to watch our small group drive by, find the road blocked, make a half dozen five point turns (even more turns for the Humvees, the pigs) and parade past them again. These hovel communities in Iraq piss me off to no end. This one in particular - just a mile from the palace and immediately adjacent to the expressway. There was no way that The Evil Puke could not have known the condition of his people.
What surprised me most was the ground clearance of these new Durangos. Mine handled the deep tank ruts and sharp edged irrigation ditches and spoil banks next to the highway with no problem. Then, when our makeshift escort went in a direction we weren’t prepared to follow, we ably hopped the twenty centimeter curb, did much of a u-turn on the median, then the down version of hopped off the curb and screeched back towards a piece of highway I knew, back end bouncing a little as the roar of the V-8 woke a couple of Iraqi cops napping under a shady tree. Maybe the performance capabilities will change after we get more than six hundred miles on the thing but, for a new truck with just a few visits by the dent fairy, it seems to perform like the adverts suggest.
The next day, a suicide bomber went to Allah via 500 kilograms of military explosives at the Green Zone gate that I was scheduled to use just an hour later. There was well over a hundred casualties, with over a score and a half of Iraqi’s dead. Our mission to the Ministry was scrubbed for the day.
One day later, we tried again for the Ministry, and were almost thwarted by a massive demonstration that caused us to pursue a tertiary route to our destination. We got there eventually, and even returned without incident.
The demonstration, it turns out, was attended by about 100,000 Iraqis (plus the tens of thousands attending by default, due to the lack of effective surface transportation and the tie up of the streets) in an estimated ten-mile (or two-mile, depending on the media) line of continuous protest. Theirs was a call for free and fair elections, as soon as possible. Soon come. What they fail to realize is that there will be elections when they will be in the best interests of the Coalition and no sooner.
Four missions in a row, though, redirected due to circumstances unanticipated and unavoidable. In this anarchic place and time, it’s best to keep flexible. In the words of the Infantry – improvise, adapt, overcome.
Read More......
2004-01-27
2004-01-26
Monday, 26 January 2004
0930 - Baghdad. Through a variety of factors, including a combination of work and work, much of it the same old same old, I’ve got nothing imperative or particularly pithy to say. It’s like that weekend between the end of the playoffs and the Super Bowl, when there’s little to do but rehash. Therefore, barring an unanticipated burst of insight, the proverbial hash.
But first, the disclaimer:
Portions of the following have been circulating through the palace electro-mail over the past few weeks. As such, I can take credit for little more than readability. Some of it applies more to the more rural camps, but all of our accommodations are a bit underdeveloped. So, just in case you might like to experience a TDY (temporary duty) assignment in Iraq, here are some tips on preparation. Trust me. If you lived here, it would all seem funny for a little bit,… and then horribly sad.
1. Sleep on a cot in the garage.
2. Replace the garage door with a curtain.
3. Six hours after you go to sleep, have your wife or girlfriend whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble, "Sorry, wrong cot."
4. Renovate your bathroom. Hang a green plastic sheet down from the middle of your bathtub and move the shower head down to chest level. Keep an inch of cold graywater on the floor. Stop cleaning the toilet. Pee on the floor. Remove the toilet paper. On random days, leave half a roll of paper towels next to the stool. For a more realistic experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor's. Choose a neighbor who lives at least a quarter mile away.
5. When you take a shower, wear flip-flops and keep the lights off.
6. Every time there is a thunderstorm, go sit on a wobbly rocking chair and dump dirt on your head.
7. For that tactical generator smell, put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it on "HIGH".
8. Don't watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.
9. To stimulate the proper ambient noise level, leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24 hours a day.
10. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
11. Develop your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your pantry or refrigerator. Serve some kind of meat in an unidentifiable sauce poured over noodles. Do this for every meal. Serve it in a brown plastic bag.
12. Set five alarm clocks to go off at random times during the night. When the fourth one goes off, jump out of bed and get to the shower as fast as you can. Use only cold water.
13. Use 1/2 scoop of coffee per pot and allow it to sit unplugged for five or six hours before drinking.
14. Invite 185 people you don't really like because of their strange hygiene habits to come and visit for a couple of months. Exchange clothes with them.
15. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.
16. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip over the threshold or hit your head on the sill every time you pass through one of them.
17. Keep a roll of toilet paper on your nightstand and bring it to the bathroom with you. Bring your gun and flashlight.
18. Announce to your family that they have mail. Have them report to you as you stand outside your open garage door after supper and then say, "Sorry, it's for the other Smith".
19. Wash only 15 items of laundry per week and don’t dry them thoroughly. Roll up the semi-wet clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat urinates. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look like or how you smell. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.
20. For proper ambience, shoot a few bullet holes in the walls of your home.
21. Sandbag the floor of your car to protect from mine blast fragmentation. Put a big crack the windshield.
22. While traveling in your car, stop at each overpass and culvert and inspect them for remotely detonated explosives before proceeding.
23. Fire off 50 cherry bombs simultaneously in your driveway at 3:00 a.m. When startled neighbors appear, tell them all is well, you are just registering mortars. Tell them plastic will make an acceptable substitute for their shattered windows.
24. Drink your boxed milk and sodas warm.
25. Spread gravel throughout your house and yard. Sprinkle sand in your underwear drawer.
26. Before they come in, make your children empty their squirt guns into a clearing barrel you placed outside the front door.
27. Make your family dig a survivability position with overhead cover in the back yard.
28. When your 4 year-old asks for a stick of gum, have him find the exact stick and flavor he wants on the internet and print out the web page. Type up a Form 9 and staple the web page to the back. Submit the paperwork to your spouse for processing. After 2 weeks, give your son the gum.
29. Announce to your family that the dog is a vector for disease and shoot it. Throw the dog in a burn pit you dug in your neighbor's back yard.
30. Wait for the coldest/hottest day of the year and announce to your family that there will be no heat/air conditioning that day so you can perform much needed maintenance on the heater/air conditioner. Tell them you are doing this so they won't get cold/hot.
31. Spell phonetically. Change your accent daily.
32. Drive to the worst crime-infested place you can find. Go heavily armed and paranoid, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet. Set up shop in a tent on a vacant lot. Speak in a foreign tongue. Announce to the residents that you are there to help them.
KBR is hiring. Read More......
But first, the disclaimer:
Portions of the following have been circulating through the palace electro-mail over the past few weeks. As such, I can take credit for little more than readability. Some of it applies more to the more rural camps, but all of our accommodations are a bit underdeveloped. So, just in case you might like to experience a TDY (temporary duty) assignment in Iraq, here are some tips on preparation. Trust me. If you lived here, it would all seem funny for a little bit,… and then horribly sad.
1. Sleep on a cot in the garage.
2. Replace the garage door with a curtain.
3. Six hours after you go to sleep, have your wife or girlfriend whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble, "Sorry, wrong cot."
4. Renovate your bathroom. Hang a green plastic sheet down from the middle of your bathtub and move the shower head down to chest level. Keep an inch of cold graywater on the floor. Stop cleaning the toilet. Pee on the floor. Remove the toilet paper. On random days, leave half a roll of paper towels next to the stool. For a more realistic experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor's. Choose a neighbor who lives at least a quarter mile away.
5. When you take a shower, wear flip-flops and keep the lights off.
6. Every time there is a thunderstorm, go sit on a wobbly rocking chair and dump dirt on your head.
7. For that tactical generator smell, put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it on "HIGH".
8. Don't watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.
9. To stimulate the proper ambient noise level, leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24 hours a day.
10. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
11. Develop your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your pantry or refrigerator. Serve some kind of meat in an unidentifiable sauce poured over noodles. Do this for every meal. Serve it in a brown plastic bag.
12. Set five alarm clocks to go off at random times during the night. When the fourth one goes off, jump out of bed and get to the shower as fast as you can. Use only cold water.
13. Use 1/2 scoop of coffee per pot and allow it to sit unplugged for five or six hours before drinking.
14. Invite 185 people you don't really like because of their strange hygiene habits to come and visit for a couple of months. Exchange clothes with them.
15. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.
16. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip over the threshold or hit your head on the sill every time you pass through one of them.
17. Keep a roll of toilet paper on your nightstand and bring it to the bathroom with you. Bring your gun and flashlight.
18. Announce to your family that they have mail. Have them report to you as you stand outside your open garage door after supper and then say, "Sorry, it's for the other Smith".
19. Wash only 15 items of laundry per week and don’t dry them thoroughly. Roll up the semi-wet clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat urinates. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look like or how you smell. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.
20. For proper ambience, shoot a few bullet holes in the walls of your home.
21. Sandbag the floor of your car to protect from mine blast fragmentation. Put a big crack the windshield.
22. While traveling in your car, stop at each overpass and culvert and inspect them for remotely detonated explosives before proceeding.
23. Fire off 50 cherry bombs simultaneously in your driveway at 3:00 a.m. When startled neighbors appear, tell them all is well, you are just registering mortars. Tell them plastic will make an acceptable substitute for their shattered windows.
24. Drink your boxed milk and sodas warm.
25. Spread gravel throughout your house and yard. Sprinkle sand in your underwear drawer.
26. Before they come in, make your children empty their squirt guns into a clearing barrel you placed outside the front door.
27. Make your family dig a survivability position with overhead cover in the back yard.
28. When your 4 year-old asks for a stick of gum, have him find the exact stick and flavor he wants on the internet and print out the web page. Type up a Form 9 and staple the web page to the back. Submit the paperwork to your spouse for processing. After 2 weeks, give your son the gum.
29. Announce to your family that the dog is a vector for disease and shoot it. Throw the dog in a burn pit you dug in your neighbor's back yard.
30. Wait for the coldest/hottest day of the year and announce to your family that there will be no heat/air conditioning that day so you can perform much needed maintenance on the heater/air conditioner. Tell them you are doing this so they won't get cold/hot.
31. Spell phonetically. Change your accent daily.
32. Drive to the worst crime-infested place you can find. Go heavily armed and paranoid, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet. Set up shop in a tent on a vacant lot. Speak in a foreign tongue. Announce to the residents that you are there to help them.
KBR is hiring. Read More......
2004-01-17
Saturday, January 17, 2004
10:45 – Baghdad. Amman was totally not Baghdad. Nice hotel, nice sites, mostly nice weather, nice folks, and no guns.
Our stateside bosses decided to send us out of Iraq as sort of an xmas present mixed with a mid-tour vacation. Sure. Absolutely. It wouldn’t be as nice as going to Kuwait, mostly because Kuwait means Europe then home, but it was still an anticipated break. Not in the least restful, since the two overly short days we spent there were spent on excess.
There aren’t many ways to get out of Iraq. Driving is one, but Amman is ten hours away on a bandit-strewn highway, and really, you can see most of the countryside of Iraq in about ten minutes. Endless sand is pretty much endless sand,… until you get to the rocks.
We took Miltrans (MILitary TRANSport) instead. Not a crowded flight either, only four of us Ungrateful Whiney Prima Donnas (the first wave) and six or eight PMO wheels who were going to a conference in Amman. Just a dozen passengers and our bags on the entire C-130 allowed us to put up our feet and relax a bit more than when there’re forty passengers, crammed shoulder to shoulder so that cargo pallets can be maximized.
Departures from BIAP, like the arrivals, are tactical. However, there are some limits to the rate of climb of a C-130 so, instead of zooming straight up from the runway, we zigged and zagged at treetop level until we had enough speed to climb. With each zig, I was looking nearly straight down out of my little porthole, not seeing the trunks of the date palms due to the view through the fronds. With each zag, looking straight up into the desert sky. A few zigs and zags later, and we began a steep spiral ascent to an elevation out of rocket range.
After a more traditional landing, we were met on the tarmac by armored Suburbans from the U.S. Embassy and shuttled to the Four Seasons (your tax dollar at work). My holiday group went to the Four Seasons. The wheels went to the Sheraton so we’d have no further contact with work until we left.
Now what?
Drinks in the bar. A red Thai curry, perhaps, and another drink. Nice start. I could do this all day long. But sightseeing was the order of the days. Eating well and drinking well were orders as well, and who was I to contradict an order?
Lots of old stuff in Jordan. Two Roman amphitheatres in downtown (old) Amman. The temple to Hercules and a seventh century restored mosque on the citadel above town. The spectacular ruins of Jerash north of Amman. Mount Nebo, where they say Moses looked over the Jordan River valley to the Promised Land. An incredible mosaic map of the Middle East on the floor of a Greek Orthodox church in some little town somewhere between Amman and the Dead Sea.
And the Dead Sea, where we had mud baths and bobbed like fleshy corks in the hyper-salty water.
I went juza shopping one day, but the best I could do was a small zarib and an oud. “Fine”, I thought, the zarib I can pack, but I really wanted to ship home the oud, since they’re a little large sometimes. Armed with the information that I could ship my oud home for around twenty Dinars a kilo, I left the thing with the concierge to deal with.
After supper, I found a note on the desk in my room, informing me that FedEx was going to charge the princely sum of 437 Dinar and 50 Piastas (over 600 USD) to box and send the thing, plus the 5% take for the hotel. The result is that I’m traveling now with an oud, which is sure to make interesting carryon for the trip home.
The highlight, though, was just walking down the street. We took the opportunity on our first afternoon to see some of the downtown sites. Once visited, we set off walking towards the hotel. We’d never make the five uphill miles, but there were plenty of taxis and English-speaking taxi drivers that we could flag down whenever. There were plenty of shops downtown. Trinket shops were mixed in with the small restaurants, bakeries, clothing, luggage, jewelry, electronics and miscellaneous business concerns present in a thriving city center. We spent a couple of hours nosing a round, and it was well past dark when we finally hailed a cab.
But I had walked freely and casually amongst the souqs and citizens of Jordan. No guns. No Humvees. No desert camouflage uniforms. I was still a target, but the target symbol was no longer a bulls eye but a dollar sign.
Absolutely fine. Read More......
Our stateside bosses decided to send us out of Iraq as sort of an xmas present mixed with a mid-tour vacation. Sure. Absolutely. It wouldn’t be as nice as going to Kuwait, mostly because Kuwait means Europe then home, but it was still an anticipated break. Not in the least restful, since the two overly short days we spent there were spent on excess.
There aren’t many ways to get out of Iraq. Driving is one, but Amman is ten hours away on a bandit-strewn highway, and really, you can see most of the countryside of Iraq in about ten minutes. Endless sand is pretty much endless sand,… until you get to the rocks.
We took Miltrans (MILitary TRANSport) instead. Not a crowded flight either, only four of us Ungrateful Whiney Prima Donnas (the first wave) and six or eight PMO wheels who were going to a conference in Amman. Just a dozen passengers and our bags on the entire C-130 allowed us to put up our feet and relax a bit more than when there’re forty passengers, crammed shoulder to shoulder so that cargo pallets can be maximized.
Departures from BIAP, like the arrivals, are tactical. However, there are some limits to the rate of climb of a C-130 so, instead of zooming straight up from the runway, we zigged and zagged at treetop level until we had enough speed to climb. With each zig, I was looking nearly straight down out of my little porthole, not seeing the trunks of the date palms due to the view through the fronds. With each zag, looking straight up into the desert sky. A few zigs and zags later, and we began a steep spiral ascent to an elevation out of rocket range.
After a more traditional landing, we were met on the tarmac by armored Suburbans from the U.S. Embassy and shuttled to the Four Seasons (your tax dollar at work). My holiday group went to the Four Seasons. The wheels went to the Sheraton so we’d have no further contact with work until we left.
Now what?
Drinks in the bar. A red Thai curry, perhaps, and another drink. Nice start. I could do this all day long. But sightseeing was the order of the days. Eating well and drinking well were orders as well, and who was I to contradict an order?
Lots of old stuff in Jordan. Two Roman amphitheatres in downtown (old) Amman. The temple to Hercules and a seventh century restored mosque on the citadel above town. The spectacular ruins of Jerash north of Amman. Mount Nebo, where they say Moses looked over the Jordan River valley to the Promised Land. An incredible mosaic map of the Middle East on the floor of a Greek Orthodox church in some little town somewhere between Amman and the Dead Sea.
And the Dead Sea, where we had mud baths and bobbed like fleshy corks in the hyper-salty water.
I went juza shopping one day, but the best I could do was a small zarib and an oud. “Fine”, I thought, the zarib I can pack, but I really wanted to ship home the oud, since they’re a little large sometimes. Armed with the information that I could ship my oud home for around twenty Dinars a kilo, I left the thing with the concierge to deal with.
After supper, I found a note on the desk in my room, informing me that FedEx was going to charge the princely sum of 437 Dinar and 50 Piastas (over 600 USD) to box and send the thing, plus the 5% take for the hotel. The result is that I’m traveling now with an oud, which is sure to make interesting carryon for the trip home.
The highlight, though, was just walking down the street. We took the opportunity on our first afternoon to see some of the downtown sites. Once visited, we set off walking towards the hotel. We’d never make the five uphill miles, but there were plenty of taxis and English-speaking taxi drivers that we could flag down whenever. There were plenty of shops downtown. Trinket shops were mixed in with the small restaurants, bakeries, clothing, luggage, jewelry, electronics and miscellaneous business concerns present in a thriving city center. We spent a couple of hours nosing a round, and it was well past dark when we finally hailed a cab.
But I had walked freely and casually amongst the souqs and citizens of Jordan. No guns. No Humvees. No desert camouflage uniforms. I was still a target, but the target symbol was no longer a bulls eye but a dollar sign.
Absolutely fine. Read More......
2004-01-16
Friday, January 16, 2004
19:30 – Baghdad. The Missive Unreleased.
The day of our trip to Razzaza squished in and out of sloppiness. Not raining when we left the palace, but cold and moist by the time we got to the old Ministry building, just a klik east and south of the Ministry’s temporary quarters at the Ministry of Oil (MOO, honest). We had to stop there first to pick up an FPS (Facility Protection Service) interpreter. You see, the troops that drive me to and from the Ministry have more than just my protection on their plate. Their duties also include recruitment and training of one of the many police forces that the CPA is establishing here.
The CPA argument could be that, in using various police forces throughout the country, as well as an independent Army, Navy and Air Force, no one entity will ever be powerful enough to wrest control from a duly elected civilian government. Fair enough, but it means lots of independent militias and lots and lots of AK-47’s.
My guys have a particular interest in the branch of the FPS that protects the facilities of the Ministry of Water Resources, providing guard service at offices, pump stations and dams. The interpreter, then, was an armed member of this Service, as was his driver.
Both were late.
And we waited for forty minutes or so in the figurative shadows of what remains of the old Ministry building, thoroughly looted and burned by folks who apparently don’t believe that one should avoid shitting where one sleeps. For a while, we bitched about the lateness, and then just bitched in general, which is mostly a joke of a dialogue, common to soldiers while they wait for nothing to happen. There were seven of us from the Coalition side, four soldiers and three civilians, myself and two from the CPA’s shadow ministry.
We headed out eventually into a light cold rain with the two Iraqis as lead in a four-door Mitsubishi pick-up, reminiscent of the old Dogwagon, but less old and more two-wheel drived. I was in the second vehicle, a dark blue civilian Suburban, the senior sergeant driving, MP5 in his lap, a Specialist in the front passenger seat, M-16 at the ready, a spare SAW between them. I was in the second row of seats, just behind the driver. One of the other civilians, a relative youth from D.C. was in the third tier of very bouncy seats on the passenger side.
The third and last vehicle in this minor convoy was a black suburban they call “the Intimidator”, due to it’s oversized profile, accentuated by an aftermarket luggage rack mounted half a foot too high on the roof. The other sergeant was driving this one, M-16 stuffed between the seat and the console. Another Specialist and his M-16 were in the second tier behind the front seat passenger, the other civilian.
[Yeow! What a waste of text. Why, prey tell, would your author bother with such detail?]
There’s no easy way out of Baghdad, and Razzaza is about an hour out, once you get out. Our interpreter’s lateness would certainly make us late for our rendezvous with the pump station manager and local DG. We pressed on through the heavy morning traffic as the moist air finally couldn’t hold it anymore, and let loose with a spotty and cold winter rain.
We needed a dual carriageway, but access to ramps were limited, unless you go on the off, turn right at the herd of sheep and, alakazam, seventy miles an hour. Eighty miles an hour. Ninety miles an hour. Bobbing and weaving through traffic. Using speed as a tactical element. It’s almost a game of chase. The lead car drives as fast as he can, and the following vehicles don’t fall behind. Note that it’s not “the following vehicles don’t try to fall behind”. There’s no trying. Falling behind is just not an option.
Ten minutes of this and we were out of expressway, routed now down a four-lane with earth median, then into one of many midsized cities. Thursday, the day prior to Friday, must be a more formalized market day in the hinterlands, as the markets were full to overflowing with people and goods, increasingly sodden by the steady light rain. Sloppy mess as well, as the dust here never gets washed away, just hydrated for a brief time and redeposited. The dirt’s relocation strategy involves applying itself as a slick film on everything around – streets and cars especially, although the fresh vegetables and raw meats displayed throughout this particular market couldn’t have been immune from the spray of filth.
The mud slime was so thick on most of our windows we couldn’t see out the back window at the trailing ‘burban (had to use the mirrors) and barely caught sight of the tractor as it passed us in the slow city traffic.
Honor tarnished, the best of the United States Army picked up the tempo, and forced our convoy down the street eventually passing the tractor when it’s way was blocked by a parked car.
The sergeant slipped more heavy metal into the stereo as we slipped out of town and cruised up to seventy or so on another southbound four-laner with grassy/weedy/scrub brushy median. The rain was falling harder and the mud slime was getting thicker on all the glass surfaces.
And then the “BANG”.
Not “pop”. Not “pow”. Not “boom”.
“BANG”. And I was more alert than I’ve ever been.
Self check. No damage. I looked up to check out the rest of us in my vehicle and met the eyes of each of them doing the same. We were apparently unblemished, and slowed to maybe forty to allow the other ‘burban to approach on our right. It took me a moment to realize that the reason I could see the following crew so clearly is that they had no window glass at all on the driver’s side of the vehicle. The door panels, fender and quarter panel were perforated, and the front left tire was flat.
IED.
An Improvised Explosive Devise. Command detonated in an unmitigated attempt to kill me and my mates.
Command detonated about half a second behind me.
Fuckers.
There are some people here who have yet to lose the war along with the rest of the country. They’re the same guys who lob mortars and rockets at us, and spray small arms fire when they feel they won’t get hurt doing so. Call them what you will. Insurgents. Former Regime Loyalists. Bad Guys. Terrorists.
Fuckers.
And these fuckers set about a dozen of these IED’s across central Iraq each and every day. Old munitions mostly, mortars and mines, reconfigured to be easily camouflaged along the roadside as a pile of rocks or a piece of junk or a small dead animal. Then they hide and wait for an appropriate target. Not a particular target, just an appropriate one, like a couple of Coalition Suburbans with some soldiers in them.
Fuckers.
I must admit, though, that I wasn’t so pissed at the time. I was on a very serious adrenaline rush. The senior sergeant radioed to the other vehicle to pull over when they could, which happened to be a wide area by the side of the road, a hundred meters or so from the blast site. Doors sprung open and armed and angry men emerged, eyes intent in the direction we had just traversed. Sometimes, IED’s are followed up with SAF, small arms fire.
There was none just yet. The FPS Iraqis had stopped as well, and their two AK’s joined the ranks of Coalition weaponry to secure our perimeter as the situation was assessed. The second vehicle’s driver had a few small cuts on his hand and ear from the flying glass. He had been knocked unconscious by the blast, but recovered as his passenger’s hands went to the steering wheel. The Suburban was toast. At least it didn’t look like it would travel well with all of its transmission fluid in a blood red pool intermingling with the slick mud as it spread out from under the chassis. It was leased, anyway. There was no effort to pursue our attackers. With no immediate following action, we figured that they had fled the moment the IED went off.
I later learned that our attackers did pursue us, and my guys were wise to remain vigilant. However, it took little more than five minutes for us to stop, assess, treat the injured, salvage everything we could from the much less intimidating Suburban, and pile seven of us into our remaining vehicle, abandoning the other. We would continue south for a time, get out of the urban area, then cut over to an expressway to Baghdad by speeding a few miles along a winding piece of asphalt. We were stoked. We were pissed. We didn’t need the heavy metal. Like myself, I’m sure everyone was playing a passionate and extreme soundtrack in their heads, penned just for the occasion.
The roads dried out by the time we hit the cutoff, and remained dry at the expressway, where the suburban ran back into Baghdad at about as fast as it would go, about one hundred twenty.
I was back in the office by ten, having left barely three hours prior. The adrenaline was starting to wear down and, by lunchtime, I found myself immensely tired and in a state of mild shock. I retired to my hooch to contemplate mortality and take a long nap.
That’s my war story. Read More......
The day of our trip to Razzaza squished in and out of sloppiness. Not raining when we left the palace, but cold and moist by the time we got to the old Ministry building, just a klik east and south of the Ministry’s temporary quarters at the Ministry of Oil (MOO, honest). We had to stop there first to pick up an FPS (Facility Protection Service) interpreter. You see, the troops that drive me to and from the Ministry have more than just my protection on their plate. Their duties also include recruitment and training of one of the many police forces that the CPA is establishing here.
The CPA argument could be that, in using various police forces throughout the country, as well as an independent Army, Navy and Air Force, no one entity will ever be powerful enough to wrest control from a duly elected civilian government. Fair enough, but it means lots of independent militias and lots and lots of AK-47’s.
My guys have a particular interest in the branch of the FPS that protects the facilities of the Ministry of Water Resources, providing guard service at offices, pump stations and dams. The interpreter, then, was an armed member of this Service, as was his driver.
Both were late.
And we waited for forty minutes or so in the figurative shadows of what remains of the old Ministry building, thoroughly looted and burned by folks who apparently don’t believe that one should avoid shitting where one sleeps. For a while, we bitched about the lateness, and then just bitched in general, which is mostly a joke of a dialogue, common to soldiers while they wait for nothing to happen. There were seven of us from the Coalition side, four soldiers and three civilians, myself and two from the CPA’s shadow ministry.
We headed out eventually into a light cold rain with the two Iraqis as lead in a four-door Mitsubishi pick-up, reminiscent of the old Dogwagon, but less old and more two-wheel drived. I was in the second vehicle, a dark blue civilian Suburban, the senior sergeant driving, MP5 in his lap, a Specialist in the front passenger seat, M-16 at the ready, a spare SAW between them. I was in the second row of seats, just behind the driver. One of the other civilians, a relative youth from D.C. was in the third tier of very bouncy seats on the passenger side.
The third and last vehicle in this minor convoy was a black suburban they call “the Intimidator”, due to it’s oversized profile, accentuated by an aftermarket luggage rack mounted half a foot too high on the roof. The other sergeant was driving this one, M-16 stuffed between the seat and the console. Another Specialist and his M-16 were in the second tier behind the front seat passenger, the other civilian.
[Yeow! What a waste of text. Why, prey tell, would your author bother with such detail?]
There’s no easy way out of Baghdad, and Razzaza is about an hour out, once you get out. Our interpreter’s lateness would certainly make us late for our rendezvous with the pump station manager and local DG. We pressed on through the heavy morning traffic as the moist air finally couldn’t hold it anymore, and let loose with a spotty and cold winter rain.
We needed a dual carriageway, but access to ramps were limited, unless you go on the off, turn right at the herd of sheep and, alakazam, seventy miles an hour. Eighty miles an hour. Ninety miles an hour. Bobbing and weaving through traffic. Using speed as a tactical element. It’s almost a game of chase. The lead car drives as fast as he can, and the following vehicles don’t fall behind. Note that it’s not “the following vehicles don’t try to fall behind”. There’s no trying. Falling behind is just not an option.
Ten minutes of this and we were out of expressway, routed now down a four-lane with earth median, then into one of many midsized cities. Thursday, the day prior to Friday, must be a more formalized market day in the hinterlands, as the markets were full to overflowing with people and goods, increasingly sodden by the steady light rain. Sloppy mess as well, as the dust here never gets washed away, just hydrated for a brief time and redeposited. The dirt’s relocation strategy involves applying itself as a slick film on everything around – streets and cars especially, although the fresh vegetables and raw meats displayed throughout this particular market couldn’t have been immune from the spray of filth.
The mud slime was so thick on most of our windows we couldn’t see out the back window at the trailing ‘burban (had to use the mirrors) and barely caught sight of the tractor as it passed us in the slow city traffic.
Honor tarnished, the best of the United States Army picked up the tempo, and forced our convoy down the street eventually passing the tractor when it’s way was blocked by a parked car.
The sergeant slipped more heavy metal into the stereo as we slipped out of town and cruised up to seventy or so on another southbound four-laner with grassy/weedy/scrub brushy median. The rain was falling harder and the mud slime was getting thicker on all the glass surfaces.
And then the “BANG”.
Not “pop”. Not “pow”. Not “boom”.
“BANG”. And I was more alert than I’ve ever been.
Self check. No damage. I looked up to check out the rest of us in my vehicle and met the eyes of each of them doing the same. We were apparently unblemished, and slowed to maybe forty to allow the other ‘burban to approach on our right. It took me a moment to realize that the reason I could see the following crew so clearly is that they had no window glass at all on the driver’s side of the vehicle. The door panels, fender and quarter panel were perforated, and the front left tire was flat.
IED.
An Improvised Explosive Devise. Command detonated in an unmitigated attempt to kill me and my mates.
Command detonated about half a second behind me.
Fuckers.
There are some people here who have yet to lose the war along with the rest of the country. They’re the same guys who lob mortars and rockets at us, and spray small arms fire when they feel they won’t get hurt doing so. Call them what you will. Insurgents. Former Regime Loyalists. Bad Guys. Terrorists.
Fuckers.
And these fuckers set about a dozen of these IED’s across central Iraq each and every day. Old munitions mostly, mortars and mines, reconfigured to be easily camouflaged along the roadside as a pile of rocks or a piece of junk or a small dead animal. Then they hide and wait for an appropriate target. Not a particular target, just an appropriate one, like a couple of Coalition Suburbans with some soldiers in them.
Fuckers.
I must admit, though, that I wasn’t so pissed at the time. I was on a very serious adrenaline rush. The senior sergeant radioed to the other vehicle to pull over when they could, which happened to be a wide area by the side of the road, a hundred meters or so from the blast site. Doors sprung open and armed and angry men emerged, eyes intent in the direction we had just traversed. Sometimes, IED’s are followed up with SAF, small arms fire.
There was none just yet. The FPS Iraqis had stopped as well, and their two AK’s joined the ranks of Coalition weaponry to secure our perimeter as the situation was assessed. The second vehicle’s driver had a few small cuts on his hand and ear from the flying glass. He had been knocked unconscious by the blast, but recovered as his passenger’s hands went to the steering wheel. The Suburban was toast. At least it didn’t look like it would travel well with all of its transmission fluid in a blood red pool intermingling with the slick mud as it spread out from under the chassis. It was leased, anyway. There was no effort to pursue our attackers. With no immediate following action, we figured that they had fled the moment the IED went off.
I later learned that our attackers did pursue us, and my guys were wise to remain vigilant. However, it took little more than five minutes for us to stop, assess, treat the injured, salvage everything we could from the much less intimidating Suburban, and pile seven of us into our remaining vehicle, abandoning the other. We would continue south for a time, get out of the urban area, then cut over to an expressway to Baghdad by speeding a few miles along a winding piece of asphalt. We were stoked. We were pissed. We didn’t need the heavy metal. Like myself, I’m sure everyone was playing a passionate and extreme soundtrack in their heads, penned just for the occasion.
The roads dried out by the time we hit the cutoff, and remained dry at the expressway, where the suburban ran back into Baghdad at about as fast as it would go, about one hundred twenty.
I was back in the office by ten, having left barely three hours prior. The adrenaline was starting to wear down and, by lunchtime, I found myself immensely tired and in a state of mild shock. I retired to my hooch to contemplate mortality and take a long nap.
That’s my war story. Read More......
Friday, January 16, 2004
08:45 - Baghdad. John called Wednesday evening, wanting to know if I’d like to go to Razzaza to see the many pump stations there. Of course, I said yes. I’ve found that it’s tough to improve a system that I’ve never seen up close. Not impossible, just tough to do when all your data is paper, electronic, captured images, or word of mouth. I truly appreciate the site visit. To see, hear, and smell the project. To capture its gestalt and shove it in a small box I keep in my pocket for that very purpose.
If you believe what you read about the pump stations at Razzaza, you might learn that Razzaza wasn’t always a lake. Sadly, it never advanced beyond a depression. Holes in the ground, I have learned, are good places to put stuff. In this case, the Iraqis long ago decided to fill this depression with water, developing a happy, although incredibly saline lake, or buhayrat, or even bahr, which is probably an abbreviated way to say buhayrat, which is probably just an Arabic way of saying depression filled with saline water, only said with one word, instead of lots of them.
The saline water comes from the downstream end of the irrigation process, as the naturally occurring salts in the soil are washed away with the drainage water. It’s kind of like the way I remember the human circulatory system to work. The recollection is modified by close to thirty years of not thinking about the subject, but here goes. Fresh water is pumped from the source river into a main canal, which branches into branch canals, which is branched into secondary canals, distributary canals and water courses. These are like increasingly smaller arteries, moving the precious alcohol, er, oxygen to the various muscle groups and organs.
At the field level, farmers will cut very small canals in and around their crops to perform the final distribution and primary collection (capillary-like activity, but not capillary action) then, on the downstream end of the fields, the collection process begins in earnest, as saline water is routed through larger and larger canals. The problem, though, is what to do with this saline (that’s “salt” for the uninitiated, and those not paying attention) water.
If it wasn’t so saline, the drainage water could be discharged right back into the source river, to be used again further downstream. But this drainage water is far from suitable for use as irrigation water again (if you’ve got doubts, try watering your houseplants with saltwater for the next five weeks), so it would end up polluting the source water, so huge, river-sized drains are constructed to convey the drainage water either to the sea or to huge depressions like Razzaza.
At a couple of points in this system, gravity gets in the way, and pumps are required to lift the water, so that it can flow for a while longer. Some of these pumps can be huge. At Razzaza, for instance, the pumps which finally lift the drainage water into the lake have a design capacity of 35 CMS (cubic meters per second). Whereas thirty five is sort of a small number, it’s really the CMS that we need to understand.
Remember those Jello-brand pudding cups? The ones you toss in your lunch box or snack on during mid-afternoon lulls? Each little can holds about four ounces of pudding. As such, a properly configured pump station could move about 300,000 cans of pudding every second. If you could fit, say, sixty of the convenient four-packs in a shopping cart, this would equate to about 1,250 shopping carts of pudding every second.
Hmmm, maybe the small can of pudding thing is going nowhere. Lets suppose you live in a 2,500 square foot house with those nice nine-foot ceilings. The pumps at Razzaza, if configured for creamy Jello-brand pudding, could fill your house to overflowing in less than 20 seconds. That’s a lot of pudding! And twenty seconds doesn’t give you much time to grab the cats before the advancing pudding flood.
The point being, the pudding is wasted and your rugs will never get cleaned. Not dissimilar to Razzaza, where the water is wasted, and the lake is sort of a pit (I guess “pit” means “depression”, too, but in this case I meant “pit” as in “dump”).
As it turns out, I didn’t get to tour the site. Our mission got scrubbed during the ride down there, so we came back to the palace.
It was a sloppy day, anyway. Read More......
If you believe what you read about the pump stations at Razzaza, you might learn that Razzaza wasn’t always a lake. Sadly, it never advanced beyond a depression. Holes in the ground, I have learned, are good places to put stuff. In this case, the Iraqis long ago decided to fill this depression with water, developing a happy, although incredibly saline lake, or buhayrat, or even bahr, which is probably an abbreviated way to say buhayrat, which is probably just an Arabic way of saying depression filled with saline water, only said with one word, instead of lots of them.
The saline water comes from the downstream end of the irrigation process, as the naturally occurring salts in the soil are washed away with the drainage water. It’s kind of like the way I remember the human circulatory system to work. The recollection is modified by close to thirty years of not thinking about the subject, but here goes. Fresh water is pumped from the source river into a main canal, which branches into branch canals, which is branched into secondary canals, distributary canals and water courses. These are like increasingly smaller arteries, moving the precious alcohol, er, oxygen to the various muscle groups and organs.
At the field level, farmers will cut very small canals in and around their crops to perform the final distribution and primary collection (capillary-like activity, but not capillary action) then, on the downstream end of the fields, the collection process begins in earnest, as saline water is routed through larger and larger canals. The problem, though, is what to do with this saline (that’s “salt” for the uninitiated, and those not paying attention) water.
If it wasn’t so saline, the drainage water could be discharged right back into the source river, to be used again further downstream. But this drainage water is far from suitable for use as irrigation water again (if you’ve got doubts, try watering your houseplants with saltwater for the next five weeks), so it would end up polluting the source water, so huge, river-sized drains are constructed to convey the drainage water either to the sea or to huge depressions like Razzaza.
At a couple of points in this system, gravity gets in the way, and pumps are required to lift the water, so that it can flow for a while longer. Some of these pumps can be huge. At Razzaza, for instance, the pumps which finally lift the drainage water into the lake have a design capacity of 35 CMS (cubic meters per second). Whereas thirty five is sort of a small number, it’s really the CMS that we need to understand.
Remember those Jello-brand pudding cups? The ones you toss in your lunch box or snack on during mid-afternoon lulls? Each little can holds about four ounces of pudding. As such, a properly configured pump station could move about 300,000 cans of pudding every second. If you could fit, say, sixty of the convenient four-packs in a shopping cart, this would equate to about 1,250 shopping carts of pudding every second.
Hmmm, maybe the small can of pudding thing is going nowhere. Lets suppose you live in a 2,500 square foot house with those nice nine-foot ceilings. The pumps at Razzaza, if configured for creamy Jello-brand pudding, could fill your house to overflowing in less than 20 seconds. That’s a lot of pudding! And twenty seconds doesn’t give you much time to grab the cats before the advancing pudding flood.
The point being, the pudding is wasted and your rugs will never get cleaned. Not dissimilar to Razzaza, where the water is wasted, and the lake is sort of a pit (I guess “pit” means “depression”, too, but in this case I meant “pit” as in “dump”).
As it turns out, I didn’t get to tour the site. Our mission got scrubbed during the ride down there, so we came back to the palace.
It was a sloppy day, anyway. Read More......
2004-01-07
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
2030 – Baghdad. It’s a question that’s bugged me all day long. You know the type. The one that just festers in the background, happy to be bourn in silence for minutes or for hours, then sneaking back into the front, burning up with a primal urgency. This is a question that must be answered.
What Warner Brothers cartoon used Bizet’s Farandole, from L’Arlesienne, as a theme?
Bugging me. Bugging me. Bugging me. But it wasn’t Bugs.
Bugging me since I heard the tune played at a performance of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra last night. As well, it was their last number, so I was humming the tune as we “bowled a few frames” at the Al Rashid. Driving me nuts again this morning, as I enlisted the more cartoon-enlightened. [There’s really a scary number of those here.] To no avail. There would be no reach back into an up to date Loony Tunes database.
The rest of the performance wasn’t nearly so frustrating in retrospect.
First off, I had no clue that this was even an event until less than 24 hours prior. Makes me wonder why there’s so little advance notice for local events, be they cultural, political, or morale based. One possible motive this time may have been the target audience, primarily Iraqi and diplomatic wheels – a number of ambassadors and the president of the Iraqi Governing Council (about as important an Iraqi as there is today), among others. Advance notice to me equates to advance notice to the bad guys, affecting their time to plan a suitable response.
As it was, the bomb sniffing pooches were nose to the task at the convention center, examining cameras and cases and bags and other stinky interesting things. In the two or three thousand seat hall, there were at least a dozen visible automatic weapons, and who knows how many in the wings, keeping the president, ambassadors, timpani and me safe from music haters.
For whatever reasons, the attendance was only about five or six hundred. Lots of suits. Even a mink or two. Lots of Iraqis. Makes me wonder where the cultural elite was hiding during the past twenty years. Certainly, the folks who used to enjoy this sort of distraction used to be upper crust, but the upper crust used to all be Baathists, who should all be gone now. This may only leave scattered literati, but I’d guess the guests that night were mostly returning Iraqis, here to lead the country into the new age (and reap the potential).
I had no suit. Neither on or even with me, but found a fine seat anyway in the middle, about a dozen rows from the front, and settled in with a half dozen Whiners to enjoy the show.
The Orchestra was freaks about tuning. Once he entered, the concertmaster led not with a single sustained note, but with a small digital tuner, pointing to each brass player in turn, to tune, pointing them flat or sharp until they got it right. The strings could do this unassisted. However, the process was repeated (albeit in an abbreviated form) after each number.
Eventually, the conductor, dressed in some way wide tails, took to his riser and did his conduction thing. As it turns out, he was quite the dancer. I was hoping for the Greatest Hits of the Dark German Composers (as always), but instead got a more happy German, Ludwig Van to start. Following was a piece the conductor (Ezzat) composed, including the use of a few traditional Iraqi instruments. The featured soloist was a cellist, Karim Wasfi, playing well enough on a Faure number, then some Mommer and Sagirma before the enigmatic Bizet tune to close the show.
As usual, the cameras were there. Between two of the latter numbers, one video unit appeared in an aisle near the stage, accompanied by a talking head, who appeared to be giving a play by play of the concert. Perhaps the extensive tuning was some sort of TV time out, allowing journalists the opportunity to provide some commentary.
Although small, sixty members strong and weak (the strings were tight, the brass less so), their performance was well appreciated. If naught else, for a chance to forget about where we are and when and why we are.
The highlight for me was the use of the traditional instruments, featured especially on the Mommer number (I think). Six Iraqi men in traditional costumes were given seats around the conductor. They settled in with their zarib, oud, balaban, santur, tar, daf, and juza, and raised the roof. Highly energetic, and obviously pleased to be making music for the masses once again.
I hope I can find a juza in Jordan this weekend. Read More......
What Warner Brothers cartoon used Bizet’s Farandole, from L’Arlesienne, as a theme?
Bugging me. Bugging me. Bugging me. But it wasn’t Bugs.
Bugging me since I heard the tune played at a performance of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra last night. As well, it was their last number, so I was humming the tune as we “bowled a few frames” at the Al Rashid. Driving me nuts again this morning, as I enlisted the more cartoon-enlightened. [There’s really a scary number of those here.] To no avail. There would be no reach back into an up to date Loony Tunes database.
The rest of the performance wasn’t nearly so frustrating in retrospect.
First off, I had no clue that this was even an event until less than 24 hours prior. Makes me wonder why there’s so little advance notice for local events, be they cultural, political, or morale based. One possible motive this time may have been the target audience, primarily Iraqi and diplomatic wheels – a number of ambassadors and the president of the Iraqi Governing Council (about as important an Iraqi as there is today), among others. Advance notice to me equates to advance notice to the bad guys, affecting their time to plan a suitable response.
As it was, the bomb sniffing pooches were nose to the task at the convention center, examining cameras and cases and bags and other stinky interesting things. In the two or three thousand seat hall, there were at least a dozen visible automatic weapons, and who knows how many in the wings, keeping the president, ambassadors, timpani and me safe from music haters.
For whatever reasons, the attendance was only about five or six hundred. Lots of suits. Even a mink or two. Lots of Iraqis. Makes me wonder where the cultural elite was hiding during the past twenty years. Certainly, the folks who used to enjoy this sort of distraction used to be upper crust, but the upper crust used to all be Baathists, who should all be gone now. This may only leave scattered literati, but I’d guess the guests that night were mostly returning Iraqis, here to lead the country into the new age (and reap the potential).
I had no suit. Neither on or even with me, but found a fine seat anyway in the middle, about a dozen rows from the front, and settled in with a half dozen Whiners to enjoy the show.
The Orchestra was freaks about tuning. Once he entered, the concertmaster led not with a single sustained note, but with a small digital tuner, pointing to each brass player in turn, to tune, pointing them flat or sharp until they got it right. The strings could do this unassisted. However, the process was repeated (albeit in an abbreviated form) after each number.
Eventually, the conductor, dressed in some way wide tails, took to his riser and did his conduction thing. As it turns out, he was quite the dancer. I was hoping for the Greatest Hits of the Dark German Composers (as always), but instead got a more happy German, Ludwig Van to start. Following was a piece the conductor (Ezzat) composed, including the use of a few traditional Iraqi instruments. The featured soloist was a cellist, Karim Wasfi, playing well enough on a Faure number, then some Mommer and Sagirma before the enigmatic Bizet tune to close the show.
As usual, the cameras were there. Between two of the latter numbers, one video unit appeared in an aisle near the stage, accompanied by a talking head, who appeared to be giving a play by play of the concert. Perhaps the extensive tuning was some sort of TV time out, allowing journalists the opportunity to provide some commentary.
Although small, sixty members strong and weak (the strings were tight, the brass less so), their performance was well appreciated. If naught else, for a chance to forget about where we are and when and why we are.
The highlight for me was the use of the traditional instruments, featured especially on the Mommer number (I think). Six Iraqi men in traditional costumes were given seats around the conductor. They settled in with their zarib, oud, balaban, santur, tar, daf, and juza, and raised the roof. Highly energetic, and obviously pleased to be making music for the masses once again.
I hope I can find a juza in Jordan this weekend. Read More......
2004-01-04
Sunday, January 04, 2004
10:30 – Baghdad. Sometimes I wonder what the Iraqis think of us. Not lots of the time, only sometimes. And not lots of Iraqis, only the ones that work in the palace, providing for a few of our perceived basic needs, like clean bathrooms and floors.
In our end of the building, there are three Iraqis who work to keep the place tidy. Two of them do most of the work and, as we are American ignoramuses, their given names are “Bathroom Boy Number 1” and, what the heck, “Bathroom Boy Number 2”. In all honesty, I can’t tell Number 1 from Number 2, so I tend to use their real names. They are both supervised by Mohammad, a huge man who just points them to new tasks throughout the day.
Bathrooms are just a part of their three bucks a day existence. They also sweep and mop the floors. The sweeping is effective enough, but there’s so much dust and dirt here, that mopping is really the only way to effectively pick up the filth. Sadly, modern mopping techniques have yet to immigrate to Central Iraq. In Baghdad, mopping involves a moist and dirty rag draped over a squeegee and pushed back and forth over the floor. The rag is never rinsed, so the result is just temporarily moistened dirt.
At the Ministry, they use the same process, and I’ve witnessed the stooped, black-clad old women moistening the dirt through the corridors and down the stairs, without benefit of the squeegee. It’s cleaning chaos, really. Push brooms are pulled. Pull brooms are pushed. Teams of Squeegee Boys are tasked with moistening the dirt in the palace parking lot. I even saw a man sweeping the dirt (as in, there was no grass, only dirt, dirt) outside the office door yesterday. Meanwhile, there’s a guy at BIAP who spends his day propelling one of those rotary buffers across the terrazzo floors in the international terminal – never applying wax or cleansers, just buffing and buffing.
In the palace, the cleaning gets done while we work, so we’re distracted as it occurs and relocated while it happens right around the desk. This marks the time for another snack.
You see, we eat all the time here. Now, whether it’s for comfort, or for calories, or to make up for the lack of taste and variety at the DFAC, it really doesn’t matter. We keep huge amounts of snacks in each office, and pause to consume them at regular intervals. Cleaning time is just another excuse. Typically in each office, a separate table is assigned the responsibility to hold and display these snacks. The arrays of food are often compared and bragged about, “Well, this is nothing. You should stop by sometime and see our huge pile of crap”.
I guess it’s not all crap. Well, sure it is. Some of it’s better for you (dried fruit and popcorn) than others (Peeps and Pop Tarts), but there’s a lot of it. Scads and scads. Candies, crackers, chocolates, chips, chewy stuff, crunchy stuff, and bad beef jerky (to hell with the alliteration). The snack table gives us something to do for a moment’s break, and entices visitors to stay a while and be sociable, instead of just delivering orders or assignments and disappearing.
This is especially effective with a senior USACE guy, who can hear a bag of Peanut M & M’s opening from down the hall, a bird Colonel who is addicted to Hot Tamales, and a General who will give you a medal in exchange for a bag of Twizlers.
Sometimes snack food shows up from the DFAC, typically in the form of canned fruit and chips. Not the Brit “chips”, but the Kuwaiti kind. They’re much like American chips, made from thinly sliced potatoes and deep fried, but with odd flavorings – like paprika, green pepper, chicken, and tomato ketchup. The latter variety was introduced just today, to very bad reviews throughout the bullpen. What condiment-flavored chips are next? Mayonnaise? Relish?
More strangeness. The Iraqis aren’t poor starving Third Worlders, but they are poor Third Worlders, and the cost of keeping us in empty calories is lots more than they make in a day. Our response? We continue to consume, demonstrating our excessiveness. Continuing to establish our assemblage of plenty in the midst of dire need. Read More......
In our end of the building, there are three Iraqis who work to keep the place tidy. Two of them do most of the work and, as we are American ignoramuses, their given names are “Bathroom Boy Number 1” and, what the heck, “Bathroom Boy Number 2”. In all honesty, I can’t tell Number 1 from Number 2, so I tend to use their real names. They are both supervised by Mohammad, a huge man who just points them to new tasks throughout the day.
Bathrooms are just a part of their three bucks a day existence. They also sweep and mop the floors. The sweeping is effective enough, but there’s so much dust and dirt here, that mopping is really the only way to effectively pick up the filth. Sadly, modern mopping techniques have yet to immigrate to Central Iraq. In Baghdad, mopping involves a moist and dirty rag draped over a squeegee and pushed back and forth over the floor. The rag is never rinsed, so the result is just temporarily moistened dirt.
At the Ministry, they use the same process, and I’ve witnessed the stooped, black-clad old women moistening the dirt through the corridors and down the stairs, without benefit of the squeegee. It’s cleaning chaos, really. Push brooms are pulled. Pull brooms are pushed. Teams of Squeegee Boys are tasked with moistening the dirt in the palace parking lot. I even saw a man sweeping the dirt (as in, there was no grass, only dirt, dirt) outside the office door yesterday. Meanwhile, there’s a guy at BIAP who spends his day propelling one of those rotary buffers across the terrazzo floors in the international terminal – never applying wax or cleansers, just buffing and buffing.
In the palace, the cleaning gets done while we work, so we’re distracted as it occurs and relocated while it happens right around the desk. This marks the time for another snack.
You see, we eat all the time here. Now, whether it’s for comfort, or for calories, or to make up for the lack of taste and variety at the DFAC, it really doesn’t matter. We keep huge amounts of snacks in each office, and pause to consume them at regular intervals. Cleaning time is just another excuse. Typically in each office, a separate table is assigned the responsibility to hold and display these snacks. The arrays of food are often compared and bragged about, “Well, this is nothing. You should stop by sometime and see our huge pile of crap”.
I guess it’s not all crap. Well, sure it is. Some of it’s better for you (dried fruit and popcorn) than others (Peeps and Pop Tarts), but there’s a lot of it. Scads and scads. Candies, crackers, chocolates, chips, chewy stuff, crunchy stuff, and bad beef jerky (to hell with the alliteration). The snack table gives us something to do for a moment’s break, and entices visitors to stay a while and be sociable, instead of just delivering orders or assignments and disappearing.
This is especially effective with a senior USACE guy, who can hear a bag of Peanut M & M’s opening from down the hall, a bird Colonel who is addicted to Hot Tamales, and a General who will give you a medal in exchange for a bag of Twizlers.
Sometimes snack food shows up from the DFAC, typically in the form of canned fruit and chips. Not the Brit “chips”, but the Kuwaiti kind. They’re much like American chips, made from thinly sliced potatoes and deep fried, but with odd flavorings – like paprika, green pepper, chicken, and tomato ketchup. The latter variety was introduced just today, to very bad reviews throughout the bullpen. What condiment-flavored chips are next? Mayonnaise? Relish?
More strangeness. The Iraqis aren’t poor starving Third Worlders, but they are poor Third Worlders, and the cost of keeping us in empty calories is lots more than they make in a day. Our response? We continue to consume, demonstrating our excessiveness. Continuing to establish our assemblage of plenty in the midst of dire need. Read More......
2004-01-02
Friday, January 02, 2004
18:00 - Baghdad. Notice: Impending whining.
Someone in this space once wrote that the “increasing bureaucracy makes me think that the Americanization of Iraq is almost complete.” I guess that was me.
Anyway, I just received notice of some near term incoming personnel to the PMO. Out of twenty newbies, we expect one Major General, three SES (members of the Senior Executive Service), one Colonel, two Lieutenant Commanders, one Major, two Captains, two Lieutenants, two GS-15’s, two GS-14’s, and one each of GS-13, GS-12, GS-11, and a lowly GS-9.
It’s likely that a GS-14 is equivalent to a Lieutenant Colonel. And commonly, a GS-15 is equivalent to a full Colonel. And, uh, generally, an SES is equivalent to a General. With Lieutenant Colonels and above considered management, the new guys will consist of nine Indians and eleven Chiefs.
Add this to the four SES’s, four Colonels, one Major, one Captain, one GS-14, four GS-13’s, and a GS-11 already deployed here, and we’ve got twenty-two Chiefs and fourteen Indians.
Oh, and we contractors (although worker bees at heart) are all GS-14’s and 15’s, bringing the totals to thirty-seven Chiefs and fourteen Indians. It’s no wonder I have to make my own coffee.
Next on the ungrateful whining - the new space. When these new executives arrive, they will undoubtedly want the rooms with windows that we belly crawling contractors currently occupy. We’ll be evicted, of course, and relocated to the ballroom, the ghetto, the Frisbee court, the place where we have rallies with the little remote controls cars I got for my birthday. Whatever it’s called, it’s a big space, over five thousand square feet, and soon home to over seventy desks.
But the place needs adequate lighting. Sure, there’s already a few sconces about the room, even a line of small cans recessed into the perimeter of the ceiling, but the three Ronco Chandeliers had never worked, so the Major and I developed a supplemental lighting plan, and brought it to KBR/Halliburton for a quote. Of course, there’s no bidding. KBR is the sole source for this type of work in Iraq, so we swallowed hard at the $45,000 cost and waited two weeks for them to get into the task.
A fairly simple process, really. Just drill a few holes in the concrete ceiling, spaced every six feet or so, and anchor some steel rods on which will hang wiring tracks and nearly one hundred fluorescent fixtures. The only problem with the installation so far was that there was too little light in the room for the workers to see what they were doing.
The solution, reconnect the switch that controls the Ronco Chandeliers. That gave them plenty of light. So much, in fact, that there is really no need to install the fluorescents at all. Except KBR won’t stop what they’re doing, because they have a signed work order.
Grrrr. As it turns out, KBR electricians disconnected the light switch when their guys had lived/slept in this space, so that the overly bright additional lighting wouldn’t disturb their sleep. The electrician we worked with in the development of the project assured us that he “had never seen those lights working.”
Not surprisingly, we just spent forty grand to install shop lights in a palace ballroom. Read More......
Someone in this space once wrote that the “increasing bureaucracy makes me think that the Americanization of Iraq is almost complete.” I guess that was me.
Anyway, I just received notice of some near term incoming personnel to the PMO. Out of twenty newbies, we expect one Major General, three SES (members of the Senior Executive Service), one Colonel, two Lieutenant Commanders, one Major, two Captains, two Lieutenants, two GS-15’s, two GS-14’s, and one each of GS-13, GS-12, GS-11, and a lowly GS-9.
It’s likely that a GS-14 is equivalent to a Lieutenant Colonel. And commonly, a GS-15 is equivalent to a full Colonel. And, uh, generally, an SES is equivalent to a General. With Lieutenant Colonels and above considered management, the new guys will consist of nine Indians and eleven Chiefs.
Add this to the four SES’s, four Colonels, one Major, one Captain, one GS-14, four GS-13’s, and a GS-11 already deployed here, and we’ve got twenty-two Chiefs and fourteen Indians.
Oh, and we contractors (although worker bees at heart) are all GS-14’s and 15’s, bringing the totals to thirty-seven Chiefs and fourteen Indians. It’s no wonder I have to make my own coffee.
Next on the ungrateful whining - the new space. When these new executives arrive, they will undoubtedly want the rooms with windows that we belly crawling contractors currently occupy. We’ll be evicted, of course, and relocated to the ballroom, the ghetto, the Frisbee court, the place where we have rallies with the little remote controls cars I got for my birthday. Whatever it’s called, it’s a big space, over five thousand square feet, and soon home to over seventy desks.
But the place needs adequate lighting. Sure, there’s already a few sconces about the room, even a line of small cans recessed into the perimeter of the ceiling, but the three Ronco Chandeliers had never worked, so the Major and I developed a supplemental lighting plan, and brought it to KBR/Halliburton for a quote. Of course, there’s no bidding. KBR is the sole source for this type of work in Iraq, so we swallowed hard at the $45,000 cost and waited two weeks for them to get into the task.
A fairly simple process, really. Just drill a few holes in the concrete ceiling, spaced every six feet or so, and anchor some steel rods on which will hang wiring tracks and nearly one hundred fluorescent fixtures. The only problem with the installation so far was that there was too little light in the room for the workers to see what they were doing.
The solution, reconnect the switch that controls the Ronco Chandeliers. That gave them plenty of light. So much, in fact, that there is really no need to install the fluorescents at all. Except KBR won’t stop what they’re doing, because they have a signed work order.
Grrrr. As it turns out, KBR electricians disconnected the light switch when their guys had lived/slept in this space, so that the overly bright additional lighting wouldn’t disturb their sleep. The electrician we worked with in the development of the project assured us that he “had never seen those lights working.”
Not surprisingly, we just spent forty grand to install shop lights in a palace ballroom. Read More......
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