Somewhere in between sleep and conscious thought in the wee hours of the morning the sound of a cat being bludgeoned to death repeatedly echos throughout the steel walls of my living box. From a purely analytical standpoint you'd expect this to be a singular event. Bludgeoning, screams, silence. But what is happening is that every 15 minutes, or however long it takes me to just start to fall asleep, someone or something is causing a cat to scream bloody murder no more that 10 feet from my wall. I'm torn. Half of me really wants to find out what the fuck is going on so that I can make it stop. I have a gun. I have an assortment of knives. I even have an ASP, a telescoping baton, and I'm positive there isn't a single thing that I will encounter that I can't negotiate some solution to this issue. The other half is asleep and doesn't want to get up or do anything that doesn't involve dreaming about Natalie Portman making me a sandwich. This half isn't even fully convinced that what it is hearing isn't just being made up. Like my idea that the inside of the building across the street from my room labeled "Filipino DFAC" actually houses cage fights, Blood Sport style. Which, I've decided either means I'm racist or confirms my suspicion that every other culture on earth is having more fun than Americans are. Regardless sleepy half is winning and so I continue to lay unmoving creating cat based scenarios. Then as unexpectedly as it began, all external noise ceases and I'm left with silence and a lot of unnecessary questions. I settle for sleep instead.
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It's a bit of a sport for the local kids to sit by the side of the road and wave at us as we drive by. Well I use the term "wave" loosely as it could really encompass any number of gestures from breaking in to a full sprint along side our trucks while smiling and shouting to flipping us off. Suffice to say, the youth of Iraq spend a lot of their time on and around roads doing very little with their lives. They are mostly waiting for the rare convoy with the sympathetic hearts and minds gunner who likes to throw candy as he drives by. This is never us. But either it happens more often than I imagine or the local kids are just incredibly resilient and hopeful. Or bored. Complicating this interaction further is the fact that somewhere along the history of our involvement with this country, somebody thought it would be a good PR move to toss out soccer balls for a group of eager young Iraqis and we've been paying the price ever since. The universal sign for "give me a fucking football already" is to scream at the top of one's lungs and hold one's hands out around the outline of the imaginary sphere of hoped for ball. This is a very serious affair. No kid just kind of puts his hands up absently at the off chance he may actually get what he wishes. No, you can see it in their eyes. They believe that the course of the rest of their lives hinges upon that very moment. Somehow everything will be OK if they can just... get... that... ball. I don't get it. It's not like they can't get go to the store and get a ball. This country isn't that poor. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of black market soccer ball trade, some sort of Bombs for Balls program.
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I'm not sure if this is really worth mentioning but thinking back over these two deployments I've realized that I've had a few notable encounters with goats (to every one of your that took that the wrong way, you're the sick bastard, not me). I've had staring contests with them, watched them be blown up like a ballon with a tire pump, seen them topple ass over head down the bank of a canal into the water, and now finally I've seen what happens when you run one over with a semi-truck. And I don't mean like I saw some random days old road-kill as we drove by at 40 mph, I mean I literally stared at a goat wedged halfway under the tire of a massive flat bed as we crept by avoiding the throngs of curious pedestrian onlookers. My gunner asked over the head set, "what do you think the last thing that went through it's mind was?" And I said, "Well... judging by what I'm seeing, I'd say it was his anus." I love a good set up.
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Since my 21st birthday every subsequent birthday has paled in comparison. That weekend at the Frog and Peach in San Louis Obispo I played my first live show, completely drunk, partied in three different cities and got my nipples covered in whipped cream (unfortunately that picture survives). It's not that I haven't enjoyed my birthdays since, it's just that they've all failed to imprint the same lasting (good) memories as that most excellent day back in 2003. This year, however, Iraq got me something special. Not surprisingly, Iraq and I aren't always on the best of terms. I say it's the worst country in the world, it tries to kill me, I say I want to see what it would look like after a nuclear strike glasses Baghdad, it tries to kill me, I see a cute puppy while on patrol, it tries to kill me. And so on. But for one beautiful day in late August we put aside our differences and Iraq gave me what every boy really wants for his birthday, dangerous explosives!
Our task that day was to head over to FOB Hammer as an escort for an EOD element. The day was shaping up to be just another dusty scorcher, which is what I'd planned on anyway so I wasn't too disappointed. Still, there were a couple bright spots. We played a game of "guess Doc's age" and everyone was at least 2 to 3 years on the young side which either means I don't look old or I'm immature. I was strangely OK with either. As we were waiting to get our gear back on and leave to go back home something strange happened. I was sitting in the truck reading when I noticed a change, slight as it was, a degrees shift in temperature. I glanced out the window and I couldn't put my finger on it but the ground looked darker somehow, like there was something blocking the sun, something that reminded me of home. I looked up and there is was. A cloud! One big, fat, juicy, gray, cloud out of no where had drifted over us. I took my sunglasses off and turned my face to the sky and began to feel tiny drops of rain splash against my skin. Guys started laughing and dancing around like they'd won something as the drops steadily increased in size to the point where they almost hurt as they hit. Just as quickly as it arrived the rain stopped and the cloud moved on and the sun returned to make everything terrible again with the added joy of increased humidity but it was worth it to have any kind of change. Really though, this story isn't about meteorological phenomenon. On to the explosion.
As we were rolling out the gate we got word that a IED had been found on the route that we were taking to get back home. Since we had EOD assets with us anyway we became the de-facto response team and so made our way over to the grid we'd been given. Before anyone gets too excited let me remind you that the Army is the worlds leader in taking things that are awesome and making them suck. Jumping out of airplanes, shooting automatic weapons, living in a big steel box, the Army has ruined them all for me. That being said nothing can ruin blowing something up... except expecting a bigger explosion.
The offending agent in question turned out to be a small anti-personel mine that had been placed on the side of the road. This couldn't have been meant for us since even the most rookie insurgent knows the armor on our trucks wouldn't have even been scratched by it. Regardless, it had to go. So EOD took out it's Johnny-5 bot and placed a small explosive charge on it's extending hook arm. J-5 is remote controlled but watching it move it kind of like watching a giant cockroach, it skitters along on it's mini tank tracks and then suddenly stops, shifts directions and it off again, then stops as if sniffing out crumbs of food. The rest of the team pulled security around the perimeter in case the mine was just a decoy for something more complex and as the minutes passed the initial excitement of knowing something was about to violently combust began to leave me along the trails of sweat rolling down my neck. After about 30 minutes we were ordered back to the trucks as J-5 retreated from the spot where it had placed the charge next to the mine. I had a clear view from my seat and I sat forward as EOD gave the order to fire. The two explosives went up in a remarkably un-Hollywood burst of dust that was as underwhelming to watch as it was to hear. When something explodes I want to feel it in my chest. I want to be knocked over. I want to have permanent brain damage. No such luck this time, but regardless it was a nice break from the monotony and as far as birthday gifts go, I figure this country could have done much worse.
--
I ran up to the top of the sandy berm on the western border of our base and instead of taking the long way around a winding dirt path like I usually do I decided to go right up the 136 stairs that reach skyward temple like a short way from my living box. I had avoided doing this since we arrived here because of all the parts of my body I feel need work, my legs aren't top on the list and because of what I feel is a justified fear of tripping and falling 100 meters down a 50 degree slope. Iraqi construction which as a general rule doesn't follow the strictest of standards fails most spectacularly in the arena of assisting locomotion to elevated positions. The effect of looking at steps as you run up them one by one is vertigo inducing under the best conditions, coupled with my decision to make my first summit attempt long after it had gotten dark out, by the halfway point I began to second guess the value of the activity in which I was currently engaged. I took my clear lensed Oakleys off to try and get a better view but it only served to bring what was making me dizzy more clearly in focus which magnified the problem. Of course I didn't just stop like an intelligent person would, no, the same ego driven logic that has landed many a fool begrudgingly into youtube stardom took me step by step closer to my goal, which I suppose was to prove that I could run up stairs at night or to become more physically fit, or something like that. About 20 steps from the top that familiar surge of adrenaline blurred out any doubt that this in fact was a fantastic idea and as I reached the top and turned around and looked down at the dull orange bulbs illuminating my temporary home I bent over panting with my hand on my knees. I scanned the horizon enjoying my small victory and wondering just how far my line of sight was from this position. I could see for miles, which meant I could be seen for miles. I felt the sudden shiver a soldier gets when he realizes he's made a tactical error. Then I remembered why I hate this country... and that I had to walk back down all those damn stairs.
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Two reasons I'm sure that evolutionarily speaking I'm a dead end: 1. My natural initial response to being startled is to scream like a girl and fail my arms around. 2. My natural initial response to the sound of an incoming rocket is to kind shift my body weight to one side and crouch a little like I'm dodging a Nerf football that I didn't expect to be thrown at me. Genius.
