War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

All of this was written the first day I started my journal (MAR 24th) but since it happened in the days before I decided to take it out of the journal and have it as a separate story. The journal covers the day this leaves off onward.

I'm afraid I don't have any pics of when we crossed the border, the battery on my camera was dead and I couldn't get Sgt. Garcia to let me charge it in one of the contact trucks.

A map of where we traveled can be found here.

It started when I called home. I don’t remember what day it was, they’ve all mixed together in the last week. I believe it was last Sunday or Monday. I called my family because I had just found out that my detachment was moving forward from camp Arifjan to Camp Adder. It had been Camp Coyote before but had changed along with everything else that keeps changing; that’s the way the Military is, everything changes, nothing stays the same for more than a week or two. It wasn’t a big deal except for the fact that we were definitely leaving the relative comfort and safety of Arifjan for the unknown, what little rumor we had was that it was 3 miles into the border (I didn’t believe that rumor, there’s no way that we could already have a base INSIDE Iraq, that would be an act of war) and that it was very primitive, the only power was from generators. I was pissed that things had to change but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I also wondered what we would be doing in such low tech conditions. We were told that we’d be doing Direct Support maintenance and it was hard to do that in the sand with no jacks or equipment. Plus since we were moving from the 183rd my job would be useless again since I wouldn’t have access to a GRM-B to fix radios. But all I wanted was to be going home at the 6 month mark (about 1 ½ months off) and it didn’t matter where I was as long as I left then.

I called home because we were told that we were going in two days. My plan was that I would pack my stuff that day, go to the PX, and call home. The next day we would pack the shop, and finalize everything; then the next morning at 4:00pm we would leave with the convoy heading north.

I called home but couldn’t say where or when I was going but I gave my family the idea I was going north, we (me and them) had know that this was a probability for the last couple weeks so I didn’t need to tell them I was moving forward exactly, I just had to tell them that what we expected to happen was true. But at the time it didn’t look like war was for a few weeks so we talked about my dog who had just had her eye removed because of a tumor and the fact that my two birthday presents hadn’t arrived in the mail yet. Finally I told them that I probably wouldn’t call for a week or two until I got access to a phone again but I would still call them the very next opportunity I got.

That afternoon the first package showed up which was the highlight of my week, it came with three DVD’s for the group to watch, Chasing Amy, the last in my Kevin Smith collection, Space Balls, which everybody had been wanting to watch, and Lock Stock and two Smoking Barrels, which is one of my favorites. I spent the day packing what I could and getting supplies from the PX to last me for the next couple weeks.

That night on the way back from dinner I stopped at the MWR tent to watch some news. It was obvious what was happening. Hans Blix was pulling out the Weapons Inspectors in Iraq, the media was pulling out its journalists, embassies were being emptied, and foreign nationals were being advised to leave. It was obvious to me that war was about to start. I knew so much that this was a turning point in history I took the opportunity to take a picture of all the soldiers watching the TV. The MWR tent was pack and all eyes were glued to the TV as everybody watched the events unfolding in front of them.

We found out that Bush was going to be making an address at 8pm (4am local) so we decided to get up early the next morning to see what was going to happen. Then we were horribly disappointed when we found out the generator had gone down at the MWR tent. I checked to see if the news station was on the radio in the Gym tent but there was no mention of Bush’s speech.

The next day we found out what had been said because it was now on the English Kuwait station. Bush had given Saddam 48 hours to get out or there would be war. We spent the day wrapping up jobs and packing what was ready to go. I kept wondering if us leaving in two days was planned for the invasion of Iraq or if had just been a fluke. The more I’ve though about it the more things make sense, the last week people had been leaving Arifjan in droves it seemed every day there were less and less people in lines at the phones and at the dining facility. I guess in a way I knew the war was going to happen about a week before the rest of the world, I just didn’t believe what I was seeing.

That afternoon we found out that we had been bumped back to leaving Friday and that night we got bumped back even further to Sunday which was a relief to me because I didn’t want to be up on the border when the countdown ended. I figured the longer that it took us to move up the further the front line would be from Camp Adder.

The next few days we were glued to the news, as soon as the countdown ended we almost always had somebody in the MWR tent getting the latest scoop. That morning as I went to breakfast I heard one guy talking to somebody on his cell phone and then excitingly saying to his buddy that “they” were already on the move; the countdown had ended 3 hours before so I thought that it might be possible that the tanks were rolling into Iraq. At breakfast there was talk about a bunch of Tomahawks being shot at Iraq and one officer said to another, “I’m glad to see that you got the war started on schedule.”

When I got back to the tent SGT Slocum gathered us around and told us that were had been bumped back up in the schedule and we were leaving at 4am the next morning. We knew we were going so it wasn’t much of a shock, I wanted a little more time to prepare but I had my stuff ready to go since the first day we’d been told we were leaving.

That afternoon me and Harline stopped at the MWR tent on the way back from lunch. As we were watching the news we heard “Lighting, Lightning, Lightning” and then the gas alarm went off.

We had been told the night before that there would be no more exercises and the call sign “lightning” was the code saying it wasn’t a drill. So we immediately put on our masks and started running to the bunker by our tent even though it was about a ¼ mile away. By time we got there we could barely breathe because the mask restricts breathing so much. When we got to the bunker everybody was putting on all their MOPP gear so we got ours out and did the same. We sat in the bunker for 20 minutes talking about what was happening; everybody was pretty nervous and excited about what was going on, we were pretty sure that the Patriots would hit the missiles on their way in but there was still the chance that one could get through and hit our bunker. There was the possibility that those minutes could have been our last. Griffin was having trouble putting on his overshoes; they were one size to small so he couldn’t get them over his boots so he started to panic. He’s the one who’s always going on about how much experience he has and how high speed he is but he started to freak out in that bunker. I had tried my overshoes on when I first got my MOPP gear, I even ran around in them a bit to make sure I could still move quickly if I needed to; but I felt now was not a good time to badger him about not being prepared. Turns out Durham’s shoes were too small too but she just put them on as much as possible and stayed calm. Funny how you find out how people stay calm under fire.

The MOPP gear started getting really hot; we were already sweating from the run across camp, the outside temperature was in the 80’s and we had two layers of clothes on. Soon the all clear sounded and we were told to stay in MOPP 1 with our gear on us, but nobody complained because we knew that it was the real thing from now on.

The alarm went off 2 more times that afternoon about 1.5-2 hour intervals. And one time later right at dinner chow. After I ate dinner we went to the MWR tent to see the latest news. The reporter was talking about the 4 missiles that had been launched and that one was thought to have been a small plane and not a missile, but it all corroborated with the times our gas alarms that we had been going off. None of the missiles had been aimed at Arifjan but you don’t know that when the alarm goes off, you run and hide like everybody else.

The news had a reporter who was with the 3rd ID artillery as they were shelling Iraq, he seemed pretty spooked when the artillery next to him wet off and all the people in the tent laughed a little at the civilian spooked buy our big guns. Every time the closest Paladin fired he’d yell, “Holy, shit!” among other things. Even though all the soldiers in the tent thought it was funny I’m sure most of them had never see a Paladin live fired and I bet we all would have done the same in that situation.

Another reporter came on from a phone in an LAV the 7th marines were using and talked about an artillery round that had gone overhead. They skipped between stories, the 3rd ID guy talking about shelling to prepare the ground and getting no response and the 7th marine division who was getting fired at close enough they had to move.

After a while they were just repeating a lot of the same stuff so we headed back to the tent, the best news so far was that they didn’t report any American Casualties. So we we’re hoping our trip following up would be uneventful.

I thought of what I would tell my mother when I got on a phone next, she had no idea what had been going on and for all she knew I could be in the area that was being attacked on the TV. I was thinking that when I finally got to call her I’d have to put here mind at ease and tell her that when the ground attack had begun I was safe on the other side of the country same as always and that I didn’t even leave to move forward till 12 hours after the push began.

When we got back to the tent we got the news that we wouldn’t be leaving at 4 we needed to be ready to go at 12am which was about 4 hours away. We spent the next 2 hours loading up the last of our things with the hopes that we would get to take a nap once we were online waiting to move out but we got there at 11:30 and spent the next 2 hours getting things in the convoy in order. I remember wishing I had thought to buy a Mtn. Dew that afternoon to keep me awake for the drive, it turned out Keller had some accessible and hooked me up with one for the road. Even with that though I was already tired and I knew that this was going to be a hard drive.

The convoy got in order, we were the second to last unit in the convoy, the troop carrier and 5-ton was in front, then me in the Deuce, and the two contact trucks and the wrecker in back. The convoy commander gave us a quick safety briefing about keeping awake and if we come under any fire to just push through and keep moving, if any vehicles broke down our wrecker would be the one to tow them along, something that seemed to be volunteered for without our consent (but hey, we’re all here to help each other, right). Then at 3:00am the convoy finally left, it was my first time driving the Deuce more than a few miles so I was a little hesitant, but the Kuwaiti freeways were clear for the night so I was able to adjust pretty easily. When we pulled out of Arifjan we got stopped just 200ft outside of the gate and had to wait for 20 minutes, I’m not sure what we were waiting for but it turned out to be a sign of what driving in the convoys would be like.

I recognized part of the route until we got to one point and turned around, Griffin wondered if we were lost and I wondered what was going on since our way was being paved by the Kuwaiti police which seemed to be everywhere. As we would pass on-raps they would be parked off the side of the road or on the on ramp blocking traffic from joining us. At one point we passed a large group of 20 police vehicles parked together off the side of the road, as we passed I saw a few officers watching us as we passed by, they didn’t wave but they seemed to know what we were doing. I didn’t quite trust them since the soldier had been shot by a cop back when we had been in Camp Doha; we had been told that we need to respect their authority but not to trust them all the way in case more decided to fire on us. What really worried me was that we had two police in front of the convoy and two behind with one running up and down blocking intersections for us, and now that we were turning around it seemed they were guiding us not the convoy commander.

Soon we were off the highway moving down narrow streets through a refinery district and I grew more suspicious about what was going on, were the police really terrorists leading us to an ambush? The area we were in had no room to maneuver if we had to get off the road and we wouldn’t know how to get back to the highway if had to.

Griffin said he recognized the place from one of the contact missions he had been on and I comforted my self with the thought that police might be helping us around a place where there was an ambush or other problem and they were helping us out. Eventually we ended up at a place I recognized as being near Camp Doha and I realized that we had probably just cut through the center or the country to avoid the major freeways near Kuwait City.

Soon we were near Al –something-something (Ali Al Salem) airbase that had a lot of US military present and I figured this was the way to the Kabals. As we drove past the airbase light started to break over the horizon, but the more we could see the more could see that there was nothing to see. The convoy made a quick 3 minute stop to pee then we started out across the desert. It was very white sand with no topology on the horizon and the dust would obscure the road sometimes. The drive was so boring I was falling asleep as I drove and had to keep veering back onto the main road. I had done long drives in my Xterra where I would drive the whole day but then I had loud music, Mtn Dew, and I was stopping every two hours. In the Military convoy there’s no music, all you have to drink is warm water, you’re only going about 25 MPH and you only for about 5 minutes every 3-4 hours.

We were supposed to stop at camp New York to refuel and hopefully stay long enough to get some sleep. We passed a large radio tower and camp New Jersey which looked huge compared to what we thought it was; it was probably bigger than Arifjan but it didn’t have any buildings, just lots of tents and it looked like a giant dust bowl. After a 10 minute break we were back onto the long boring road.

By now the traffic around us was getting pretty dense; a lot of convoys moving back and forth between the camps, most were going our direction. Finally we got to New York; we idled at about 7 MPH all the way around the camp to the fueling point for what must have been 30 minutes even though it felt a lot longer. I kept falling asleep and nearly getting into wrecks but nobody but me seemed to notice, I guess they were all asleep too.

At the fueling point it was hectic, people were moving all over the place, sometimes cutting us off so we were getting detached from our convoy, it was anarchy. Nobody knew what was going on, one convoy would go one way and another would jump in front of them thinking they were butting in line to the fuel point. But when I looked around there were no fuel trucks, I think everybody was so confused about where to go they would just follow others around, a few convoys had been smart enough to pull off to the side and they just sat there watching people get worked up trying to figure out what was going on.

Finally we just pulled out of the mess into a clearing and formed a security circle with our vehicles facing out and were told that we had time to get some sleep. I thought it was kind of funny that we were in a security circle when we were surrounded by US Soldiers but I figured the Marine Officer in charge of the convoy was having his 15 minutes of fame for the war. Most of us started to eat since it had been 16 long hours since we last ate, most of that time being spent going 30MPH on the road.

As soon as my meal was gone I was getting ready to take a nap in the back of the Deuce when I was told by Keller that somebody had to pull guard duty, I didn’t know who it was but I figured that since I was a driver it wasn’t going to be me. They could have the people riding in the back of the troop carrier pull guard since they didn’t have to drive or watch the road as co-driver.

4 perfect hours later I was awoken by some noise and decided to check out what was going on with the rest of the unit; most people were dozing and the others were in quiet conversations. I took the chance to relieve myself and then relaxed against the cab of the deuce. It wasn’t 5 minutes later we were told that we’d be moving out in about 20 minutes. It didn’t take long to close everything up and get ready to go so we had plenty of time to wait, then we got another gas alarm. For ten minutes sat sweating as we moved the vehicles into a line before the all clear was sounded. Then we waited for our turn to move out; it turns out we were the last to go so we waited another half hour for all the other convoys to move out.

We didn’t go more than a slow mile before we were stopped again, surrounded by other lines of convoys. We found out we were finally going to get our fuel then move out so we waited for another hour or so for our turn. There were two tankers up ahead filling up all the convoys and we were at the end of a line that stretched half a mile of bumper to bumper vehicles. We all got out of our vehicles and talked till we finally got gassed up and formed up in our convoy and waited again. The sun went down as we watched other convoys leave then our chance came just after dusk.

This part of the drive was much more fun than the last, there was actually some broken terrain and I got to do a little 4-wheeling in the deuce. It’s so top heavy that I had drive around deep potholes and straight through others. A few times the deuce felt like it was going to roll but everything went fine if not a little bumpy, although the trailer in the back was bucking all over the place. Griffin said at one point it bounced out to a 45 degree angle with the deuce before bouncing back behind us.

Then came the deep powdery sand, sometimes we couldn’t see the hood of the deuce let alone the vehicle in front of us; and with the sun down the headlights didn’t do much other than reflect light back into our eyes. It was like a blizzard except it didn’t let up and the dust came through the door and covered my glasses. If the vehicle in front of us happened to hit the breaks we’d crash at about 15-20 miles per hour. For a car back home that would be bad but for two big heave army vehicles carrying trailers it would be catastrophic.

Every now and then we’d be able to figure out what was going on then the sand came again. Then we got to a point that we couldn’t see the rest of the convoy, and the dust cleared and we still couldn’t see the rest of the convoy. No lights in the distance nothing but a fading cloud of dust. We hurried ahead not wanting to get lost but the dust was still thick enough that we could easily rear-end the 5-ton tractor-trailer ahead of us. As we passed turn-offs we worried that that might have been the direction that the convoy had gone and us and everybody behind us would be lost, but we just kept following the dustiest trails hoping to see the convoy.

We were getting worried that we might have lost the convoy or that we were following another convoy or we were just following a sand storm when we finally saw the lights to the 5-ton again after about 10 minutes.

The convoy pulled up to a small camp that had a few vehicles and we were told that the front part of the convoy had gotten lost. Well not lost really they just went so fast that they left the rest of us in the dust which we had to slow down for and they were already at the stopping point for the night and wondering why we hadn’t kept up (typical officer thinking if you ask me). So we waited for them to come back and then followed them the last few miles to the gathering point.

When we got there we were surrounded by all the vehicles of the convoys that had gone before us. From what I gathered they were the 7th group that we were attached under and we were all going to the same place in the end. There was a nearby camp with lights but I couldn’t tell what it was due to the high berm around it. We were told that we would bed down next to our vehicles during the night and be up by 5am to move out around 7am. I took the time to get out the Night Vision Goggles (NVG’s) to look around a bit. Plus I got the coordinates from the GPS so I could find out exactly where we were but since I didn’t have a map they didn’t do me any good.

The moon was nearly full and the sky was clear so it lit everything up really well; especially once all the vehicles were parked and their lights were off. I remember looking at the moon thinking that with it being so close to the western horizon my family could probably see it back at home too; although it would be during the day probably just rising up over the mountains to the east.

It was nice to think that somebody in Salt Lake could be looking at the moon as it rose over Mt. Olympus and see the reflection of me looking back at them from Iraq.

That night was cold and it rained for a few minutes but not enough to get anything wet, just enough to make me wipe my windows off the next day. Many people didn’t get out their sleeping bags thinking they would be warm enough in their MOPP suits then froze in the cold desert night. I knew from home how fast the temperature in the desert could drop so I was toasty in my sleeping bag and slept fine I just pulled my jacket over my face when it started raining and went back to bed.

Griffin woke us all up at 4:55am (something that usually bugs me but not when we’re at war I guess), and we got ready to go. But in typical military fashion the rest of the convoys left and we didn’t get on the move till about 10am. But when we did move across the border it was a day I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

We got a briefing that we might encounter Iraqi troops but we would also be passing civilians so we weren’t allowed to fire unless fired upon. And whenever we stopped at least one person from each vehicle had to dismount to be on the look out for any attackers.

After about a half and hour of driving we crossed a continuous line of concertina wire stretching to both ends of the horizon. I told Griffin that it looked to me like we were close to the border. And a few miles later we crossed the obvious border with Iraq. It was a continuous line of concertina like the one before except that it was many “rolls” stacked on top of each other like a pyramid, 4 on the bottom, 3 on top of that, 2 on top of that, and one on top of that. All held with poles so the wire wouldn’t move even if something drove through it. At the point we passed through the wire had been cut and pulled out of the way to create a 20 foot wide gap to drive through. I regret that I didn’t have a spare battery for my camera to take pictures entering Iraq. I had given the battery and charger to SGT Garcia to charge in the contact truck and I didn’t see the battery till the next day when we reached our destination because he turned the charger off while driving.

About 800meters into Iraq was an obvious tank trap. It was a trench dug about 10 feet deep and 10 feet wide that ran parallel to the border as far as I could see and the excess dirt had been dumped into a 10 foot tall berm on the Kuwaiti side of the trench. One of the large “pontoons” I had seen in Arifjan was loaded on a PLS truck next to the trench. It must have been a mobile bridge that had been the way across for the first combat groups over the line but it had been removed and a section of the trench filled in by the combat engineers. There were a few more of these “pontoons” along the way in areas that looked like there had been small obstacles.

About a mile in we saw the hulks of tanks rotting in the thin grass that covered the sand. At first as I drove by the vehicles I wondered if they had been shot up the two nights before during the charge into Iraq, but by the amount of rust on everything it was obvious that they were relics of the first Gulf War. I don’t remember my tank recognition too much from playing “Tank Commander” on my computer as a kid but I figured they were T-62’s or T-71’s (see video war games do come in handy later in life). There were other vehicles too that might have been BMP’s of other troop carriers and a few smashed vehicles that looked like normal trucks and commercial vehicles. I remember one tank that had its turret blown off so bad that it was resting about 10 ft away. Some tanks had English words spray painted on them but I couldn’t read what they said.

There was a lot of trash and debris on the ground that was obviously from the US forces that had passed through mostly MREs and water bottles. One of the biggest pieces was a HEMITT door that me and Griffin figured was smashed off when somebody left it open and another driver drove too close and tore it off. Every mile or so there was a sign that said “MSR Aspen”. Other than that we didn’t see any burning hulks of American vehicles which I thought was a good sign for how well the American forces were handling everything.

I also kept looking at potholes and depressions in the area and wondered if they were from artillery shelling like I had seen on the news a few nights before. Every here an there we would see a Humvee with a missing wheel or a Super HET trailer that had obviously broken due to maintenance problems and left behind to be picked up later. Anything that had been left was stripped of most useful equipment they had been carrying.

At one point we stopped in front of a goat herders camp and watched the people milling about on their chores, we kept and eye on them because they were actual Iraqi’s but they didn’t seem to mind us and a few people in the convoy pulled out cameras and took pictures like we were a bunch of tourists. I remember one of the kids in the camp looked about 5 and he jumped on a barrel and looked at our convoy with as much curiosity we were looking at him with.

A bit further we passed an Iraqi family walking along side the road and the kids waved at us as we drove by so we waved back. The parents eyed us suspiciously as we drove by but I guess any parent protective of their children would eye a passing foreign army driving through their back yard the same way.

The next group of Iraqi’s we passed was another tent family off the side of the road, the parents ignored us but three children from the ages of 10 to 3 patted their stomachs and made eating motions to their mouths like they wanted food. I didn’t notice this till I was passing and waved at them (I thought they were waving at us) and as we passed they were nice enough to wave back although they did have a look on their faces like they were disappointed that we didn’t have any food to give them.

The road continued on pretty much the same as all roads in the region, flat and not much to see, but there was that small grass that was growing in the sand about 1 foot apart, at a distance it made the long flat expanses look like grassy pastures. At one point we passed some workers messing around with what looked like oil tanks and their oil trucks. I don’t know if they knew or cared what we were doing but they left us alone and we left them alone. Maybe the US government had already made a deal with them to let them use the oil.

In the sand off the side of the road was a Super HET buried to its axles in the sand and left to be extracted later, sometimes the vehicle broke down right in the middle of the road so I was glad I had gotten some sleep. If had been the day before I probably would have plowed right into one instead of going around.

At one point we got on a paved road temporarily and back off a few minutes later, I was hoping for more time on pavement, the off-roading was fun at first but I was sick of the constant bumps and the slow speed we had to go (I guess not all the army has had as much time off-roading as me). But then we stopped and waited for the convoy to catch up. SGT Garcia and the wrecker were at the end of the convoy to support broken vehicles so it was obvious I wouldn’t get my camera battery back till we stopped for the night.

As dusk began to fall we started passing more forces stopped off the side of the road to stay the night. At first it was transport trucks and other support vehicles, in front of one of them was two guys holding up cardboard signs that said, “Homeless, will drive for food.” They had huge smiles on their faces for coming up with the funniest joke of the war. It was kind of nice to see that some of the soldiers still had a sense of humor in the middle of war. A little further we started passing Humvees with missile launchers and then a company of the new Stryker tanks. This got me a little worried; all these guys were arranged into security circles to guard for the night. And I didn’t like the idea of moving up PAST combat forces.

Then we came to the first over-pass I had seen in Iraq, at the top was a building of some sort blocking the way but instead of going over we drove around and under the overpass heading westerly down a 6 lane highway (thank god pavement again). But night was falling and along the road to the south I could see Strykers and more rocket Humvees, which made me wonder if we were driving on the “Front Line”. They were obviously protecting from attack from the north and using the highway as a berm to protect the tanks; t hat would put us driving between the tanks and the enemy. But the convoy was so huge that if the enemy did strike while we were driving along they only had a 1 in 200 chance of hitting my portion of the convoy.

Driving along the highway was slow; we were stopping about every 500meters so we would turn our headlights off so that it was less obvious to the enemy that there were any vehicles there. The signs along this part of the road said “MSR Jackson”.

At one point we stopped and we looked to the east and saw the lights of a city on the horizon. Looking back to the west there was a similar glow but then we saw a fire ball rise into the air out of the middle of it, followed by the dull thump of a distant explosion, then a few more smaller fireballs and some more thumps.

It was surreal, like watching live video coverage of explosions from the other side of a city that’s being bombed except that it’s real and you know that the enemy is just over the horizon. Plus the freeway we’re following is going right to where the explosions are. And the explosions don’t sound like in the movies; they’re felt more than heard, like somebody hitting a wet blanket with a tennis racket.

Later down the road some soldiers had set two rows of concertina wire halfway across the road staggered so that vehicles could pass through if they went slow. And they were digging fighting positions on the north side of the road. That made me wonder even more what kind of danger we were in. It was obvious from the explosions that there was a conflict within 20 miles of where we were but we didn’t know if there was any danger to the convoy.

As we were driving past the guard point, we saw 5 Iraqi’s walking along the side of the road, some of them were wearing camouflage so I wondered if they were soldiers that had surrendered and been told to go home. They all had boots on which we found out later was a sign that they were Iraqi military, apparently some Iraqi soldiers had been dressing up as civilians but were always leaving their boots on.

There were a lot of combat vehicles in the area stranding guard, which made me wonder what we would do if the distant explosions started coming closer. We were in the way of the combat vehicles but the highway was built so it rose about 10ft above the surrounding terrain so the shoulders were very steep, it would be very easy to roll a vehicle going down the side if you didn’t go down straight.

The convoy kept moving slowly, we would go about 500m then stop for 15-20minutes then move another 500m and stop; I started getting really tired. Then there was one point we got going up to 20-25mph; but a bunch of convoys started to try to pass us at once. Soon all three lanes going our way had its own convoy, each trying to pass each other. Then some moron up ahead had his convoy merge with the one next to it…ours. Suddenly people were moving all over the place and about 5 people had close calls with accidents. It reminded me of traffic on I-15 during the construction except that instead of cars it was a bunch of fully loaded transports weaving in and out of traffic; some full of food and water, some full of guns and ammo. My biggest concern was to keep an eye on the vehicles ahead of me that were in my convoy, but they were about 5 vehicles ahead and I had trouble keeping an eye on them; I didn’t want to lose track of them in the confusion. Finally our convoy stopped and all the “foreigners” in front of me got out of the way and we waited 5 minutes while vehicles whizzed 5ft next to us at about 35 mph.

The night just kept dragging on and on. As we passed under overpasses there were always people up setting up positions and observation posts. Like the one that had blocked the overpass where we got onto the highway. All of the soldiers not in the convoy were digging fighting positions.

Right after passing under one of these underpasses we turned off the road and an officer was trying to divide where different vehicles were supposed to go; apparently many vehicles had gotten mixed up in the melee that had just past.

We kept following our troop carrier so we’d at least keep our detachment together and got into the camp we were supposed to be at, Adder 3 from what we’re told (turned out later it was Camp Cedar, but nothing had been set up yet). Then we wondered if the wrecker crew at the tail of the convoy would turn at the right place. It was about 11pm so we put our cots on the ground and went to sleep hoping that the unit hadn't just gotten divided.

The next morning we got up at 7am and checked out what was around us. In the light we could see that we were surrounded by the 7th group, there were hundreds and hundreds of different support vehicles in the area all arranged into groups for each different company and each part of the convoy they had been in. Our guys had found us in the night but they hadn’t gotten to camp till two hours after us, they were parked just 100ft from the rest of the group.

We got more information on what was going on. The airbase that we were going to had been captured the day before but last night it had come under attack when the Iraqi’s tried to take it back. The A-10 warthogs swept in and repulsed the attack; I guess that had been the explosions the in night before. Anyway they were going to have us sit tight at this gathering point for the next few days while they secured the airbase again.

As we were waiting we got some more fuel and some people were already coming up to us asking us to do repairs for them. One guy said that if we fix his alternator for him he’d hook us up with a DSN phone to use when we got to the airbase. A deal which has already paid off for us.

We decided if we were going to stay a few nights we’d re-arrange our vehicles to offer as much shelter as we could get, we were told by Col. Lockwood that there would be tents for us when we got here but it turned out he had lied so we were left in the desert without shelter. We arranged the vehicles in a rectangle with the generator on the outside so we could set up the TV/DVD for movies that night.

I spent the rest of the day watching the war machine pass us by on the way north. Every half an hour a couple of helicopters would pass over head, sometimes marine Hueys, sometimes Cobras, one time a group of 8 Blackhawks flew in a line about 30 ft off the ground right past the staging area. Plus the highway was bustling with activity, constant convoys of vehicles kept traveling past the point where we turned off (which was about ¼ mile from where we were camped). A bunch of tanks went past with the rubber pads on their treads buzzing because of the high speed (for a tank) they were making. There must have been at least 200 tanks that past, Abrams, Bradleys, Paladins, almost everything the army had to offer. The sound of them constantly passing made a deep rumbling sound we could hear for about an hour.

By nightfall other companies were getting ready to move out but the officers for the unit we were attached to and were staying put. When I got up the next morning we had the staging area to ourselves.