War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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18-Apr-03 9:10 PM

Things remain quiet here, there’s not a lot for us to do. Besides pulling KP every other day and giving a little help here and there to units that need a wrench or something we have no purpose. I wonder how long we’ll stay here doing nothing, I literally spent the day trying to pass time, and the only time I officially did stuff for the Army was when I lent a cable reel to a Sergeant in the 551st.

I’m definitely going to call my family tomorrow, it will be a Saturday morning and I have bad luck getting hold of them on Saturday but this time I’ll keep trying throughout the day, we don’t have the restrictions that we had in Adder.

In fact I’m listening to DoCo songs right now and it makes me wish I was at home wasting the evening watching Japanimation with Jennifer. It wasn’t the best use of my nights but it was one of the most enjoyable. With us having no reason to be here it makes it that much harder to be away from home, if the Army wanted me to waste my time sitting on my ass all day the least they could do is to let me do it in Utah where I could spend my free time with my family.

I took a shower today, that’s the highlight of my day. I’m sure that many people will come back from this war with journals saying that they invaded a town outside Baghdad as the highlight of their day. And here I am under the command of the same people doing nothing. If they don’t need me, send me home, if they do need me lets get doing something! I’m sick of having nothing to do, it’s worse than the days that we’re overloaded with things to do. The days drag so much longer for one thing, things that happened this morning seem like they happened yesterday. And the only thing that makes missing home worse is the days passing slower.

The only thing that consoles me is how nice the area around me is, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m here against my will it would be a pretty nice place. Mildly humid, temperate, surrounded by palm trees and marsh. It’s like southern California without the smog. I wish this was just a vacation that I was on and I was making a road trip in my Xterra. If this was just a place that I was visiting with some friends this would be much better. Passing through, and stopping at places like this gas station to take a few pictures of the area and the locals.

Horsy mentioned that he couldn’t get a hold of his girl friend because she was down in Moab for Easter Jeep Safari. It made me sad that I wasn’t there; hanging out with the Xterra crew, talking about the trails that you had done that day. I wonder how many of the thousands of people down there living it up are thinking of us back here. With the war winding down the news networks probably aren’t seeing it as the ratings draw that it was a few weeks ago so we’re probably being moved back to just having the headlines reported. I’m sure that every night on the 10:00 news they report the latest about how many more troops have surrendered and how close we are to finding out what happened to Saddam, then they move on to the latest story of how big of buzz “Matrix Reloaded” has already become. And just that quickly the country forgets that there’s a quarter million people over here that have been involuntarily taken from their families. Besides the families of the soldiers and a few of their friends how many people really think of us all the time? Is it just that when CNN shows footage of tanks firing into the distance that most Americans become “patriotic”? When the war is over and we’re here still mopping up will Americans keep us in their prayers or be distracted by the latest gossip of what Michael Jackson is doing?

I don’t care one way or the other I guess; I just can’t wait to go to sleep and be able to mark myself one day closer to going home.