War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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06-Apr-03 10:23 PM

Another day bites the dust. You’ve probably noticed that all of my recent journal entries have been done at night; it just shows how hot it gets out here. Even now at 10:30 it’s like a sweat box here in the van.

I’m a little pissed off tonight; SGT. Slocum has been singleing me out at every chance he gets. He’s always treated me different than he treats others like Layton or Hansen, he probably thinks I have a bad attitude which is true but the reason I have a bad attitude is him.

A perfect example was a few days ago. I was out of clean brown shirts because I hadn’t done laundry in the last two weeks but we finally had our shower up. I was clean and I didn’t want to put dirty clothes back on, so I put on a grey PT shirt. Usually that’s a big no-no but nobody was wearing uniforms anymore, we had been at MOPP 1 for two weeks, and the heat made it stifling to wear anything under the MOPP suit. But Slocum tells me that I have to change because, “Grey Shirts aren’t the uniform.”

I my head I was screaming, “NOBODY”S IN UNIFORM YOU SENILE OLD MAN!!”
But I just did what he said so he’d get off my back. Later that day SGT. Garcia was wearing cutoff DCU shorts and Gibson was in a Baseball cap. Were any of these things uniform? No. Did Slocum make them take their stuff off? No.

Today just made things worse. I‘ve been wanting to put up camo netting around the C+E shop to keep it cool enough that I won’t have to wait till midnight for the temperature to get low enough to sleep. But again he started arguing and making lies about how it’s not needed. Sure unless you DON’T want your soldiers to become heat casualties. We argued and finally I told him that if he was going to let there be a Poncho sunshade over his room he should allow a sunshade over my room, especially since mine also makes sense tactically and that seems to be one of his big worries.

The icing on the cake was an hour ago. I was in the Van with the lights on and there was some light leaking out of the vent in the front. Even though all of the units around us have white lights shining out across the base and our very own MWR Room has light poring out of the windows. So Slocum comes to tell me to turn off my light. It wouldn’t bother me so much if he was also enforcing the light discipline standard to the rest of our unit but instead he orders me around like I’m breaking all the rules while everybody else gets away with murder.

I really can’t wait to get home and explode to the Captain how Slocum has dragged this deployment down. I don’t know how anybody who’s spent more than 15 minutes with the man can still feel he’s fit to lead a squad let alone command a detachment. It’s obvious that the unit sent him out here just to get him out of their hair, he’s in a slot two ranks above the one he has earned (which is the same rank as me consequently), in command of a squad that needs a commissioned officer to be leading it.

I seriously believe that in a combat situation our lives will be at stake with him in charge of us. The question for me is what the better choice is: following his suicidal orders, ignoring him and doing my own thing, or shooting him so he doesn’t waste another friendly soldier’s life? Obviously I wouldn’t shoot him, but I hope everybody else in the detachment is smart enough to ignore him and follow SSG. Andersen’s lead rather than risk their lives. They’re lives are worth a lot more than his.

From talking with the rest of the lower enlisted I’m sure everybody else would be smart enough to let the old man do his own thing while we save some lives.

I’m sure anybody reading this would think I’m overreacting, but they don’t know how far bad it is. I’ve never known that incompetence could be this bad in a human being. All you have to do is look at our track record of work when he’s been here and when he was gone.

We spent 2 months in Arifjan fixing 1 vehicle every two days and generating a back log of broken vehicles numbering over 20, not to mention that under his orders we were cannibalizing one vehicle to fix another (a HUGE no-no in military maintenance). Often times cannibalizing an important “Priority” vehicle to fix a simple problem on another vehicle. One of the Humvees had so much stuff cannibalized off it we weren’t able to remember all the things we took off it when we finally got around to fixing it.
As soon as he left we cleared out the back log in less than a week including two engine and three tranny swaps on Humvees.

Plus when he was gone the amount of complaining among the soldiers went from a lot to hardly any while he was gone. That was the golden days of the deployment, we enjoyed working, even the shit jobs like sweeping the sand off our concrete pad, or mopping up other units oil spills. As soon as he came back it all went straight to hell again. In fact the first day he was back SSG Andersen said he was going to go pick up some Water and MRE’s from Class One (something that any soldier can do) and SGT Slocum stopped him saying, “That now that he was back, he was in charge, NOT SSG. Andersen.”

I’m always going to wonder why the unit put an E-5 who only had his E-6 till his time to pass BNCO ran out in charge rather than a soldier that has had E-6 for three years and is a manager in the civilian world.

Well less bitching for now, there will be plenty of time for that when the unit “Debriefs” us.