War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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21-Jun-03 7:33 PM

Well yesterday we finally got a “Frag” order that told us we have “Load Date” of July 17th. The trouble is that nobody really knows what exactly that means; it could mean that’s when we fly out of Doha, when we load vehicles on boats, or when we go off active duty. I get the feeling that it means load vehicles onto boats and we probably leave soon after that.

Plus we don’t know how set in stone that is, it’s an approximate date but I doubt it will change much if at all. I hope that if we get things out processed faster than the Army thought then we could then we can get bumped up to get out of here sooner. I really wanted to be home before the Bear Lake trip with my family on the 16th; I’ve been to 22 trips so far, if I miss this one then it will be the first one I’ve missed since I was born.

Oh well I really just want to be home, if I miss Bear Lake I’ve got a pretty good excuse; I was at war.

Now it’s just back to the speculation game, but that’s better than the, "I hate it here", game. The last few days have been hell too.

The winds are really bad during the day now, not quite as bad as "THE big storm” we got at the beginning of the war but it’s still pretty bad during the day. We were laughing about it yesterday; it seems you would be sitting there thinking to yourself, “It can’t get any worse here.” And just like that the wind kicks up and you get sandblasted. All I could think was, “Thanks for proving me wrong again, God!”

Now that we have a small idea when we’re going home it’s a lot harder to sit through the day without getting bored. All you can do is think of getting home even though it the load date is for us to go then we’ll still be here another 26 days. It would be a lot better to be waiting in Doha then up here; at least we could pass the time by going to the gym rather than sitting and watching the sand stick to your sweat.

In recent news here, I got in a big argument with the local networking Sergeants here. We’ve been using an IP address that we got the third day to get on the internet, but apparently we’re not supposed to use it because they need to give out the exact same IP address to others who use the MWR internet connection. Except the way they have it set up is so stupid. Only people that work in networking will be interested in this but they have such a security problem here it’s not funny.

The problem is that for whatever reason they cannot give each computer an IP address (which makes no sense because they use NAT for the connection to the internet so they can use any addressing scheme we want), so when they give an address to use the MWR connection they want us to take our laptops to the communications department so they can put the address on the computer. Then I can use the connection; but when I’m done I have to go back to them and have the IP address taken off. Their reasoning is that they can’t have us wandering around with that IP, if we go to another connection when somebody with the same address is using the MWR connection then there will be a conflict. I tried to tell them that we won’t be going to any other connection because we’re only here temporarily. That’s not good enough because they also say that people will steal IP addresses as soon as they know the network address by guessing the last octet till they get one that works.

The thing is that even with the Static Addressing Scheme they have they can just use a set up a class A network and they’ll have enough IP addresses to give one to every single person on base. Or they could use DHCP to have a computer give the IPs out when the computer comes on the network and automate the process. Plus they can setup permissions on the routers to block the IPs from accessing anything other than the internet. Right now it would be a piece of cake to hack into any computer on the net because they don’t have any permissions on the routers.

So they think by putting in tons of man power into a flawed way of keeping IP addresses under control that they can secure the network. If this was a corporate network these guys would be fired outright for incompetence, any hacker has full access to the net and all they have to do is look at the IP on one computer and use it for themselves. Good thing Iraq doesn’t have many malicious hackers.

God knows what other problems they have with their network, apparently they have a direct satellite back to the states, and they don’t have to go through Doha or Arifjan. They should have the same access speeds that Scandia had, nearly DSL, but here it takes three minutes to download a 156k email. I bet that the IP problem is just the tip of problems with this net, now I know why Doha and Arifjan had civilian contractors running their net. I wonder how much fixing their Addressing Scheme could help speed up the net.

Oh well, as soon as I get home and become a great Network Admin for a big company I can make fun of the Army with my coworkers.

As soon as I get home… I can never get away from that thought.