War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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14-Apr-03 10:55 PM

Well we finally got word on when we’re moving, 10 hours before we have to be online. So we spent the last two hours packing everything up. There’s still a little bit to do but not so much that it can’t be done in an hour.

I spent the day walking around Adder taking pictures, they had taken one of the Saddam Murals down and defaced all the others, there was only one that you could still see his face, and it was in the press holding area. I also got pictures of the EPW’s (Enemy Prisoners of War) wandering around their little pen. As I was taking pictures of them a couple of them pointed to me and waved to be in the picture. I was putting my camera away at the time so I wasn’t able to get a picture of it.

The base is growing pretty fast. Now the PX is here and there is a large tent city going in. It’s not quite as big as Arifjan but it has the same tents and they have air conditioning. We got some tents to take with us to Scandia because we didn’t want to end up like we were at Cedar. But there isn’t any air-conditioning to go with our tents so we’ll probably be spending the afternoons out of the tent in whatever other shade we can find.

Now that we have a toilet and a shower it’ll be a bit better than the first time we got here where we didn’t get to cleanup for a week. I was surprised I didn’t have moss growing in certain places after that first week in Iraq. From what we’ve been able to gather Scandia is about as primitive as Cedar, even though Slocum/Anderson says it will be better. I’m just hoping that Hansen’s theory of us being there for only two to three weeks is right; I don’t care so much where we go now as long as we go home soon.

Now the speculation begins about what the next few days will be like, it should be asphalt almost all the way to Scandia so I’m hoping that it will be a quick two hundred miles to Baghdad. But I also worry about one of us breaking down, we’ve all PMCS’d the vehicles but it would be really easy to have a blowout on the way and be stuck along side the road in an unknown place. From what I gather we’ll have armed escorts to take us up there, which is good because the reason we’ve been waiting is because they say there have been armed civilians sniping at the convoys.

CSA (Combat Support Area) Scandia is 26-30 miles south of Baghdad and it’s a place where groups moving into Baghdad stop to get their supplies and rations before moving closer. And our mission will be fixing what has broken on the drive up there. So pretty much the same thing we were doing that first day in Cedar. That means we’ll be a quick Lube type place because we don’t have the parts to do any major work.

I just hope the drive goes smoothly and once we’re up there we’re in a secure area, from what news we’ve been getting the war seems to winding down. Most, if not all of the organized Army has surrendered or lain down their arms and gone home, all that’s left fighting is the Militia’s and any civilians that have taken up arms. I hope that Saddam is dead, the US will have the new government set up and the troops on the way home soon.