Day Eight

Day Eight
03 August 2007

Today should be the day the equipment comes in, but by 0930 it’s nowhere in sight. I don’t think I can handle another day like yesterday. *sigh* I can’t keep writing about days like these! You know, I had some exciting times back in training. Like the ruck marches Paul and I went on, or the time I got waaaaayyyy too drunk and missed bed check, or how I went temporarily awol to get married, or those awesome drives from Ft. Benning to Tampa, or that crazy Christmas when the spider shit in my leg and I didn’t tell anybody about it until after the holidays (which happened to be like three days before my *second* wedding) while my leg was leaking some strange yellow ooze and I could barely walk…You know, maybe we don’t have to go into that last one, but there are plenty of other stories I’ll start going into on these down days.

But after a lunch of rice & beef, a very over-fried corndog and some mashed potatoes, I find that this is not one of those days!

It’s 1300 and a voice comes crackling over the radio saying that there’s a big truck full of electronics at the gate and our contractor (the contractor poet) needs to get out there to verify that it is in fact supposed to be there and is not a giant eighteen wheeled explosive device. Hey, that’s a real concern out here. So out we go to the road leading out to the perimeter gate. As I’m looking around at all the interesting architecture of the buildings surrounding us I hear the guy walking next to me say, “Tanner, what the fuck are we doing?” “We’re going out to the gate to…” “No no, I mean, look around. See the perimeter right there? And the civilian buildings right on the other side? Yeah, now look down. What are we wearing?” “Wow. This is not a smart idea” If you haven’t guessed yet, we were walking down a street in downtown Ba Qubah with no hooah gear. No IBA, no Kevlar, let alone the gloves, knee pads, etc, that are usually required for a patrol. He says, “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done…in country. And look at that guy!” He points at the soldier walking a little way ahead of us, “He’s just strolling along with his coffee mug! Word? A coffee cup?” Yeah, it was an officer.

As we’re crouched down behind a cement barrier, the big voice comes over the loudspeaker system. You see, there are five prayer times throughout the day and during these times a prayer is chanted over these huge speakers placed all over the city. And it’s a great opportunity for the insurgency to stir up some unrest by chanting anti-American phrases. This is confirmed by the interpreter who is there with us who translates the big voice for us as it goes along, “Kill the Americans. Destroy the infidels. You know, stuff like that” “Greeeeat.” So lets make sure we’re all on the same page. We’re now in the street at the perimeter gate of a coalition force post, wearing no protective gear, while the entire city hears chants about bringing down the “white devil”. Oh and there’s an officer out here with a coffee cup.

While I was out there, I did get to see the other side of the building we live in and it looks really nice. So that’s kinda cool. Doesn’t make up for the incredible levels of stupidity that we’ve created, but still. Finally the truck is deemed non-explosive and is allowed to come in. Amazingly, the driver didn’t hit anything while maneuvering the beast through the cramped little streets and the tiny parking lot.

This thing is friggin packed with mountains of boxes, crates of construction equipment, and who knows what else. I know it took all of us two hours to unload it all and pack the conference room with towers of cardboard that stretched halfway across the room!

The jundee helped a little but they had no idea that it was their job to inventory it all. We broke contact and only left two guys back with them to force them into the task. On our way out, the G6 tried to split but he was caught by the General who told him off (at least that’s what it sounded like. It’s impossible to read emotions from someone speaking Arabic. They ALWAYS sound angry!). The G6 was practically crying in a pitiful whine, “Nooo, sadee, noooooo…” (sadee is Arabic for sir and is pronounced “say-dee”).

I decide it’s time to find some productive activities to occupy my sporadic downtimes that pop up during the day. Kinda like right now. So I hit up the Army distance learning site and start the Rosetta Stone Arabic Language courses. We have access to around thirty language training suites from Rosetta Stone and it’s all free, so what the hell, right?

By dinner time I’ve gone over some introductory stuff like numbers and direction and am struggling with the style (total immersion) used by the software. The only thing in English are the navigation buttons and the idea is to figure out what the picture is by the spoken clues and repetition. This is going to take some time, and some brain food.

The meatloaf is surprisingly good and the potatoes are tasty for a change! The shrimp on the other hand…well. For one thing, I haven’t seen too many shrimp boats out here, so I have to wonder how far away they came from. And the other thing is that I always make the mistake of looking under the breading and always find that most of them have not been de-veined. Eww.
I pick back up on the language training, and stick with the basic stuff until around 1830 when it’s finally time to start working again. The building next door has the usual smell of stale smoke with a hint of urine, but the energy has become something more…active. The buzz of change is in the air.

The six long, wooden desks in the JOC (Joint Operations Center) have internal wiring. The problem is that the current wiring is, for lack of a better word, fucked. So our first project is gutting them and installing our own lines. The process is pretty simple. First we pop off the old adapters mounted to the desk:

Then we make sure the current lines are disconnected:

Then one of us grabs the cables poking out of the side and rips it out along with anything that gets in the way:

(there was wadded up paper, some little plastic pieces, and some kind of wiring connection…wait, I think that was supposed to be in there. Oops.)
Finally we just run the new lines through the hole in the side and wire them up to the old adapters:

Too easy.

By 2100 we have three desks wired up and have to wait to get to the other three because they are still in use. That’s okay with me. I’m kinda sore from all the box moving earlier, anyway. So I poke around the internet for a while trying to find something to do and end up finding another social networking site called “Zooped” that is very much like MySpace. The only differences are the names and the millions of people that use MySpace versus the like dozen that use Zooped. Whatever, of course I signed up for an account, but I’ll probably never use it.

It’s closing in on 0030 when I get to bed looking forward to…