War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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09-Apr-03 10:06 AM

The nights here are getting worse and worse, it’s getting so hard to sleep at night, and if the heat goes up anymore there won’t be any hours of the day or night that I’m not sweating and panting.

Last night another dust storm came through, it looked like it would be as bad as the one that hit us in Camp Cedar so I took all the spreaders down out of my camo netting. That night after the movie (the movie was “Enough”, it sucked, bad) I went out and spend the first of the night talking to Layton and Hansen who had guard duty and Svedin. It’s always nice to talk at night on guard duty, if you have duty it makes the night pass faster, if you don’t have duty it something to do while the temperature drops enough to go to sleep.

The whole area had been pretty dusty all day making the light seem red but it had all stayed up in the sky so it was still easy to breathe. When I got my chair out and sat down we could still see the runway lights, today was the first day they had been on. As we talked they slowly faded in and out as the wind blew. Then all of the sudden it seemed like half of them just turned off. You couldn’t see what was happening but the trees upwind started making a lot of noise like the wind was really whipping through them. Suddenly we were hit with a blast of dust and sand that didn’t let up for about 15 minutes. Svedin said he had enough and went back in his room, I tried to stick it out for a bit longer but I couldn’t take it either.

But things weren’t much better in the C&E van, since I wanted to keep most of the dust out I closed the vents but that trapped all the heat inside. I stripped down to my boxers and laid on the cot without the sleeping bag then tried to force myself to sleep though it but I just had sweat rolling off my face and couldn’t get any sleep.

I decided to open the door vent to let some fresh air in and at first the wind felt great but then when the sweat dried off of me the wind felt hotter than it was inside the van. I got inside, this time with the vent open and shined the light at t he vent to see how much dust was getting in and so much dust showed in the light it looked like smoke coming through the vent. The vent was supposed to have a filter in it but the unit didn’t give us one to put in when we shipped out but I was able to jury rig one of my towels to fit in the vent. It worked great at keeping the dust out but now there was no breeze coming through, but I felt better knowing that I had fresh air coming in and I went to sleep.

The heat was too great to stay asleep long and I woke up two hours later drenched in sweat. I sat up trying to think of a way to cool off with out letting the dust in, I went out of the van for a few minutes to dry all the sweat off me which felt great but there was still a ton of dust in the air. I went back in and thought about pouring some of my bottled water on the towel to create a simple evaporation cooler. The water was warm so it didn’t seem to work very well so I laid back and tried to sleep for a few minutes. 30 minutes later I was still awake so I checked to see if the towel was working. The wind wasn’t blowing hard enough to have any real airflow through the towel but when I put my hand against the towel it was cold, colder than anything I had felt in the last two weeks. I spent 15 minutes just pressing my face into the cool towel trying to enjoy it while it lasted. Finally I decided to try to sleep again, I only woke up once more that night, the wind had settled down so I was able to crack the door open a bit and let the wind blow through.

Today everything is covered with dust but it sounds like everybody else here is in the same boat, nobody got any sleep and everything has a deep layer of dust on it. I thought of a quote I read in the paper from Donald Rumsfield about how long he expected the war to be. He said he didn’t know then he said that if it goes all summer it won’t affect the troops, the heat won’t affect them. Obviously he’s never actually been to the Gulf Region.