War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

Text

11-Jul-03 6:36 PM

Well we’re in Doha, and it’s so much nicer here that we just can’t get over how relaxed things are.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning. The trip out of Tallil was just as I thought, the guys from 171 that were coming down with us we’re 30 minutes late, then when we got to the gate to leave they had forgotten to get their clearance so we ended up leaving at 8:00am just like I predicted. The drive wasn’t as exciting as some of the other ones we’d done in the area; we didn’t even see any cities till we got to the Kuwait border. The traffic on the road was light which was good because there is always the possibility of getting shot when out in an unprotected convoy.

The Kuwaiti border wasn’t like we had thought, we didn’t even need any papers to show when we went through, we just went by and waved at the border guard. At Navstar all we did was gas up and keep going.

By time we were at Navstar the sand storm that we had been expecting was in full force, so visibility was only about 1 mile for the drive through Kuwait. We had a good idea where we were going and since I had a GPS I could tell when we were near the Doha turn off. Although we did take one wrong turn, we took a gas station turn off before the Doha one and had to maneuver all our big vehicles through the gas station parking lot.

Finally inside Doha we parked the vehicles and waited to find out where our stuff was. While we were waiting me and Weis went to the PX food court and had the first real food we had since the war began. The best was the huge ice cold Pepsi that I got with my Subway sandwich. Then we went through the PX picking up all the stuff we needed but couldn’t find for the last three months.

When we got back Slocum was back with the info on where we needed to be so we unloaded all our stuff and went to our home for the next few days. The place we got is a 60 man tent and the only people in it are the 17 of us and it has air Conditioning! It’s only a swamp cooler but it’s a lot better than the 100+ degree weather outside, plus now we can close the tent up and keep most of the dust and sand out.

The chow tent next door has even better A/C and is like a refrigerator, plus the food is just as good as the stuff they serve at the main D-Fac. The MWR tent has a big screen TV and is just as cold as the chow tent (we watched “Old School” today, it was awesome). And the showers are real showers, not the quick-fab ones like at Tallil, they’re just like the ones you get back home, well maybe a little cheap compared to the ones back home but close enough.

All together this place is great compared to everywhere we’ve been recently. And now I’m really anxious to get our stuff ready to get out of here; we’ve started getting our personal gear clean but we still have to clean the vehicles and the gear we were issued. Tomorrow we should get a list of all the stuff that we have to turn in here.

Eating real food is great but I’ve already spent a lot of money and eaten a lot of junk food, I’m definitely going to the gym at night to try to get my bod back in shape and to work off all the junk I’ve eaten in the last couple days.

Being back here is also a culture shock, it’s weird seeing everybody in Civilian clothing, plus a lot of the women around here are “hooked up” with guys , I wonder how many of them are married and how many of them will still be in love after their deployment is over. A lot of people think that since they’re away from home cheating is ok.

I called home this morning and told my dad and sister that I was ok and they said that they’d have a message given to mom down in Arizona. It was great talking to everybody when we’re all so happy, we were all just really relieved that I was in Doha and on my way out. They also told me that Bear Lake was 25-28th not 16-20th like I thought, there’s still not much chance of me getting home in time to go but there’s a chance that I’ll be getting home about the same time they get back. It gives me more hope that Ft. Carson gets us through quickly; it would be awesome if my family could pick me up at the airport and bring me up to Bear Lake to see everybody even if just for one day.

Oh well I just hope that the next couple weeks go quickly and smoothly.