War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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09-Jun-03 8:14 AM

Well we’re in Tallil now; it was a relatively quick trip down MSR Jackson. The traffic was insane, I tried to take as many pictures as possible but I was worried about getting in an accident so I had to take picture really quick, I didn’t have time to aim at anything I just pointed and shot. The road was so narrow and the trucks passing each other so fast it was hard to keep control. It reminded me of the Hana Highway on Maui except it was straight and the speeds were 45-50 MPH (Our max speed with the deuce and 5-ton fully loaded). The trip was hot, you could feel the temperature rise as you drove south and the palm trees got thinner and thinner then disappeared. One city we went through was pretty interesting; it was the largest city that I passed through so far. The buildings were two to three stories high and the downtown area actually looked like a downtown area back home. It actually reminded me of Kansas City because you had to pass over a bridge right into a dense busy city. Most of the people just treated us like normal traffic and waited to pass before crossing the road. A few kids waved as we passed but I was too busy trying to pay attention to wave back. There weren’t many rules for driving so I just tried to be nice and let people in when they needed to merge. I could see the convoy a few car lengths ahead so I wasn’t worried about getting lost. The scene on the main street reminded me of pictures from Thailand and China of the street markets next to the road and the signs up on the buildings and everything being so busy. I don’t know how anybody could possibly think of owning a car in such a dense pedestrian area. But there were people parked just off the road, wedged in between vendor stands.

Tallil is about the same as before, as we were driving in I noticed that there wasn’t as much security as there was when I left two months ago. They have a couple of check points but there’s no Bradley’s or machine gun nests guarding the entrances now. The base seems to have more people now but they also have better living conditions now, there are a lot of tent cities and most of them have A/C. And people don’t walk around in Kevlar and Flak vests anymore; in fact many are walking around in Civilian clothes. They have an MWR tent now with phones and a big screen TV and they even have a weight room. But none of its air conditioned and since the temp is higher here than up at Scandia I can’t see me ever going there unless it’s the middle of the night.

I hope we don’t have to worry about another night here though. We’re just waiting for our orders before moving to Doha, the Colonel said he’d look into what's going on today. I hope he does it soon; it only takes 5 hours to make the drive to Doha so we could leave as late as 3:00pm and still make it before 10:00pm. Plus the heat is so bad here I don’t want to spend anymore time here than I have to, yesterday was hard but today would be terrible. Plus we have absolutely nothing to do. We just sit and stare at each other, all we can talk about is speculation on how soon we’ll be out of here and you can’t keep your mind on anything else.

A couple of South Koreans just pulled up in a pair of Hyundai’s; they’re wearing camouflaged DCUs but they have bright blue base ball caps on so they look a little out of place. As we were coming in one of them at the check point waved at me. So they seem like really friendly people to me. It’s funny how many different nations I’ve seen on this deployment. Now one of the Koreans is taking pictures of the buildings, just like I did when I was here for the first time a few months ago. If I’ve learned anything from this deployment it’s how similar everybody across the world is. There’s no reason to ever look at people as “Us and Them” everybody across the world acts the same, with the same desires and same reactions. Somebody from a different country may have slightly different priorities, like the Iraqi’s here trying to scratch out an existence in the desert. But when you’re friendly everybody smiles the same and reacts the same. As for the soldiers me and this Korean are just a couple of tourists.

When I was at home I was always trying to be friendly to the people around me. To me it seems that if you’re nice to the people around you they will be nicer to you and then nicer to others. Then the pass on the kindness to others and it spreads. Now I know that all people in the world are like that not just Americans.

SGT Garcia just came and told us that the official temperature here is currently 95º at 8:30am. That sounds like a lot but we were just saying how nice it is right now, warm but still not hot. We’ve been wondering how hot it really is out here. The only way we could tell what temperature it was to look at the WeatherChannel.com and see what they said for the area. But we knew that they could easily be wrong and we weren’t actually in Baghdad, just nearby. Now that we got an accurate temperature reading it’s kind of amazing how well we’ve adapted to the heat. I can’t wait to go home and feel what it like to have a high of 85º and a low of 60º!