War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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12-Apr-03 10:58 AM

Well we just had a group meeting and we’re moving forward to LSA Scandia which is 26 miles from Baghdad, It sucks big time. And for some reason I blame Slocum, I’m not sure if it’s really his fault but he seems to be excited about it. He said that we they’re sending the best maintenance unit forward which is idiotic because the only reason that we were able to fix anything here was because we cannibalized parts of wrecked vehicles, if there’s nothing wrecked in Baghdad then we won’t have any parts to work with.

Plus there’s the fact that Baghdad is 200 miles away so we’re looking at another convoy like the one we had to get here, hopefully we’ll average more than 15 miles per hour but this is still going to be a long drive. I don’t know why there still sending troops forward, according to what Durham said the word on the news is that the war is pretty much over. The fifth corps of the Iraqi army just laid down its weapons and went home so now all the resistance that is in Baghdad is from pockets of civilians resisting. And there isn’t any organized resistance in the whole of Iraq now.

It makes me wonder when I’ll be going home, my detachment was one of the first groups into the region and we’ve always been just a few steps behind the front, so shouldn’t we be one of the first groups expected to leave when this is over. The last few days have been so slow that I wonder why they even keep us out here, no work got done yesterday; there was just nothing to do.

Anyway we don’t have any word when we’ll be moving out, Andersen asked Slocum what date our orders to move are and Slocum replied that he’d check the time but it might be as soon as tomorrow morning. He asked the date not the time you senile old man! Either you know that we’re leaving tomorrow or you don’t know what day we’re leaving.

Just last night me and Durham were on guard duty and we were talking about how nice it would be to get out of here, we were pretty sure that we were going to be moving back to Doha no matter what and probably moving home soon after that.

I also wonder who we’ll be attached to now, if the 171 coming to the same place or will we be getting orders from a different group now. That fear of being such a small group that we get lost in the paperwork and left out here for two years is starting to seem a very real possibility, and I don’t trust Slocum to do anything to change that, He’s happier out here than he would be at home, and he definitely wouldn’t have the balls to tell an officer that we need to go home, he wouldn’t even have the guts to ask when we might be going home.