War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

We cleanup what we can after the storm and get ready to move again. It's not much use getting cleaned up but it will be another few weeks before we get accustomed to being filthy all the time.

26-Mar-03 4:16 PM

Well when you don’t think things can get any worse they do. Our horrible sandstorm turned into a rainstorm. The air just turned to mud and so did the ground, I hadn’t seen a rainstorm like that yet in Kuwait of Iraq. Even in Utah it’s hard to get rainstorms that come down that hard; some times it sounded like hail it hit the side of the C&E Van so hard. I didn’t want to be out in the dust so I had moved into the back of the Deuce then it started raining. Everybody else had a pretty crummy night cramped in the other trailer but I was warm and dry in the van.

The next day sucked though, there was mud everywhere; in and outside my bags. So most of the first of the day was spent cleaning out all of my stuff and getting mud out of it.

There wasn’t much to do but we moved the TV out of its tent since the bags had been moved into the tent and there was no place to sit and watch. As we moved the bags we saw a couple of scorpions we decided the next ones we found we’d have them fight to the death, we didn’t want them crawling around the camp anyway; I mean their scorpions, not cute little puppies. I don’t really have any regret killing them. I actually got the idea from dad when he was telling me stories about how they would pass the time in the Salt Flats trying to pass time during his stint in the National Guard; now we were in the exact same situation bored, doing nothing, and trying to make the day pass a little quicker. But since we weren’t finding any new ones I started looking around for the nests and digging them up. We found a few good sized scorpions that were about 4.5-5 inches head to tail. We put them all into a road triangle container and let them fight it out, it was hard to see when they got good hits in but soon they all started slowing down and we figured it was time to put them all out of their misery so they got burned with our garbage.

I took the time to take a bath and wash my hair since we found out that we’ll be going up to the airbase tomorrow and I’m not sure when the next chance to take a bath will be. I call it a bath but it’s more like washing what you can easily get to with a bottle of water; pretty much armpits, chest and face. Plus it will be a more pleasant drive if I get a good night's sleep in some new clean clothes. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll even get some showers and bathrooms.

Now we’re all watching our last movie before we pack up and get ready to move in the morning.

It’s been nice just relaxing here but it’ll be nice to sleep indoors, IF we get a place to sleep; we were promised a place to sleep here and things fell through. No tent and a huge sandstorm/rainstorm comes through. Hopefully we’ll be luckier this time.