War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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27-Apr-03 9:49 AM

This place SUCKS!

I told my family I would call them on Saturday in and email and I almost forgot to do it, so instead of calling in the morning like normal, I tried to get through about 12pm Utah time, but the phones wouldn’t let me through no matter how hard tried so
I gave up for the night and had to go to sleep.

I got so depressed last night just laying in bed, because I had been in line to call from 10pm to 11pm and by time I got done trying to get through it was 11:45pm so I laid in bed at midnight pissed I couldn’t get through and it seemed like everything was going wrong. We haven’t gotten our orders to go home yet and there’s been no news. The bad thing is that none of our NCOs seem to be trying to change the fact that we have no information. SSG Andersen says he doesn’t expect orders till May 7th so he’s not going to think of leaving till then. SGT. Garcia is the only NCO who’s busy so he doesn’t have much time to think of going home, and SGT. Slocum and SGT Anderson both have things better here than they do at home. I know Slocum likes it here because he has some authority and purpose, that’s a bad thing because he’s the one with the most control over trying to get us out of here. He keeps saying that there’s no information about leaving but he could easily have been asked if he thinks we need to stay here and he would say, “No, we’ll stay here.”

Anyway I’ve got the sick feeling that we’ve been forgotten. In July or whenever that they finally pull the entire army out they be out processing us and say that we were supposed to be out of here in May and that we didn’t have to do the two months after that.

Well I finally talked to my family this morning and it was 10pm back home so I still got through on Saturday like I said but I feel bad for making them wait so long. I feel a bit better after talking to them but now that I feel like I’m going to be out here a lot longer it’s a bittersweet feeling, it’s more like I’m being taunted because it’s going to be so long before I actually do go home.

My sister said that she liked the part of the journal that I sent home so much that she’s thinking of joining the army. She said that it sounded like fun hanging out with friends and that it didn’t seem that scary. I guess that I didn’t express quite all of the feelings that I was feeling then. It’s not fun here and it is scary.

I don’t think about it all the time but every minute there’s the chance that I’ll die. This place isn’t safe yet. The group that got lost in An Nasiriyah and killed was an MST unit just like me that had been going the same place as me just a few hours earlier, if circumstances had been just a little different that would have been me. And here in Scandia things have been pretty safe but it could change in a heartbeat. Many people have been picked up in the area carrying AK-47’s and the area 20ft from my tent is accessible to civilians, if any of the locals wanted to they could grab their AK’s and walkthrough the reeds in the field across the road and get within 40ft of camp without being noticed. After that they could just open fire on our tents and there would be a lot more deaths suffered by the Americans. Luckily I’m near the other side of the tent so that the three people next to me would probably get hit before me but they could just wait till we go out to use the bathroom and pick us off one at a time.

Some people would compare the living conditions here to being like a camping trip, and in some ways we have it better with our generator and all of our meals prepared for us. But this isn’t camping, when you’re camping if things get bad you can just pack up the car and go home. Here you can’t escape, the heat climbs in the afternoon to upper nineties and hundreds, the coolest place to go is the tent which is about 5 degrees cooler. And at night you can’t sleep because of the heat, it doesn’t drop, it just stays 90 degrees and you sit there and sweat. And as you sweat you try to ignore how uncomfortable you are because the wind is bringing in dust and sand, enough that you can taste the dust on your tongue. So you move a little and all the sand has been sticking to your sweat so when your skin rubs together it feels like sand paper. But the dust permeates everything, not just the tent but your clothes too, so you end up with sand under your arms, between your legs, all over your back, behind your knees, between you toes, EVERYWHERE.

Finally around 3am you pass out for a few hours at a time, waking up is pools of sweat every few hours. In the morning you wake up at 9 because the temperature has already started to rise again, dust covers every thing and your nose is full of muddy boogers making it hard to breathe, but you’ve sucked so much dust down your throat that you’re coughing up huge amounts of brown phlegm and breathing feels like you have emphysema because you can’t breathe in all the way.

Today I woke up to the smell of burning shit. It’s a very distinctive smell and it makes you sick no matter how little of it you breathe in. I was thinking of being at Bear Lake and riding a jet ski to Garden City when it interrupted me. I just couldn’t think of anything else, there’s no place in the world that smells like that except here, so it brings you back here every time you smell it.

I keep trying to hope that we’ll get orders to go home soon but it just doesn’t help anymore, I feel worse because it makes home feel that much farther away. There’s still a chance that they’ll tell us today or tomorrow that we can go but I think it’s just wish full thinking right now, and we’re stuck till Bush orders the Army out of here once and for all.