War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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02-Apr-03 3:00 PM

Another slow day for the 872nd. I finally got to call home though, that was nice. I really appreciate MSG Grimshaw and SPC Anderson letting us use their phone. All we did for them was fix an Alternator on the convoy over here and they hooked the unit up with calls home. Not a fair trade for them in my opinion, calling home from this place is probably the most precious ability to have out here. But they don’t seem to have a problem with us keep using the phone. I don’t want to impose since they live out of the expando-van that they have the phone in so I’m keeping my time over there to a minimum. Maybe a call every week or two at the most just to keep my family notified that I’m all right.

We were told that the invasion of Baghdad was expected soon so we need to be ready in case Saddam sends any missiles out in retaliation. I'm kind of glad that they’re going in, maybe that means the war is wrapping up. We don’t get hardly any info on the war out here and rumors are treated like legitimate news a lot of the time. We just found out the girl that had been “dismembered’ was found alive and ok and has been rescued although she was raped and tortured.

Apparently she was part of an MST just like us, and she had been a few hours ahead of us when we made our big trek up to Cedar. The only difference is that they got lost and most of the group was killed and the others captured, if things had been just a little different that could have been us.

I’m hoping that when the war is over that we won’t be here much longer after that. Although from what MSG Grimshaw said all tours over here have been lengthened to a year but he says that that news was put out a few months ago so it would have been before the war was in final planning stages.

It was good to talk to my family but it’s always a bittersweet feeling. You keep hoping for the time to call home and if you don’t get through you feel like crap. But when you do get through it makes you feel good to hear their voices on the phone; it’s just like when you imagine them at night but its real. So you feel good till about an hour after calling when the homesickness sets in, and its worse that the homesickness you get when you wakeup because you can still hear their voices in you head. You want to go into the next room and talk to them again but it’s not like at home where you can do that because you don’t want to hold up others who want to call their family. There are a lot of soldiers here who want to talk with their families and you don’t want to abuse the little time you get to call home.

Let’s see. What else has happened today of interest.

There were a couple of Iraqi Civilians walking past our area that got taken away by the MPs. SGT Slocum watched the whole thing and started telling everybody that they had come across the airfield and “surrendered” but I had watched the whole things and that’s not at all how it looked to me. They came down the road in the first place not across the runways and they weren’t surrendering they were just trying to tell the soldiers that they were passing through and wanted to go to the other side of the base. It was a man and his son and they were carrying some things maybe from another village on one side of the base and were going back home to a village on the other side of the base and they just wanted to cut through the base so they didn’t have to walk as far.

Anyway they came up to the checkpoint and tried to tell the MP that they wanted to go down the road but he wouldn’t let them pass. After calling in on the radio he patted them down and made them wait while he got more authorization a bunch of MP’s kept coming by till there was a huge group at the intersection, some MP’s guiding traffic around the area some covering the civilians with M60’s mounted on the Humvees. Finally one Humvee came by and picked up the two Iraqis. I don’t know what happened to them after that.

I thought it was typical that Slocum would assume that they were dirty Iraqi’s trying to surrender, he’s seems to be very biased against all Arabs often to the point of being blatantly racist. Sometimes in conversation with him he says the US should just go in and carpet bomb Iraq regardless of civilian casualties because in his eyes they all hate the US so they should all die.

It worries me a lot of the time to have him commanding us. I think he would be disappointed if we get through this deployment without shooting anybody. I think best thing in the world would be if we make it thought without shooting or getting shot at. This isn’t the movies, it’s not a game. Things don’t happen like in “Black Hawk Down”, for every soldier that comes under fire and comes back out a hero 5 others don’t come back at all.

I really think about what my mom said to me today about how a lot of the Iraqis civilians are mad at us for invading their country. I wish I could just talk to them so they would know that most of us that are in their country don’t want to be here either.

That’s one of the reasons that they won’t let us put up our Utah flag because we’re not claiming this land for our own, were just here to get Saddam and leave. But from what MSG Grimshaw said that’s not entirely true, they want to build up this place into “Camp Adder” and make it as built up as Camp Arifjan. Hardly the actions of a country that was not going to remain involved militarily in another countries affairs.

These blood sucking gnats are really getting to me; I had to leave for a few minutes there just so they would clear out of the van a bit. Plus I realized I hadn’t taken a panoramic picture of Camp Adder yet so I took some pictures.