October 07, 2004

We spent the last seven days guarding a bridge and searching every body and vehicle that crossed. It got pretty old pretty fast, for us and for the farmers and townspeople who cross the bridge several times daily.

We’re supposed to be on a six days in the field, four days in the rear rotation but we’ve yet to come back after only six days or spend an entire four days in the rear. That’s the way it goes. I’ve recently been informed that ours is the only company of Marines in this entire area that stays in the field. Everyone else goes out for whatever mission then comes back to the rear upon completion. I’m not sure why we insist on being different.

I can’t stress enough how much I hate MREs. I’ve been living on one meal about every other day supplemented by a serving of chicken noodle soup and about a pot of coffee made from packets stolen from the chow hall. It’s almost noon right now, I’m absolutely starving, but the chow hall doesn’t serve lunch and I absolutely refuse to eat an MRE.

The bridge mission was boring and sleepless. Both our platoon sergeant and platoon commander were hit on our very first op out here, so they’re both kinda paranoid and insist on all sorts of crazy observation posts and security patrols at night. They obviously don’t have to participate in anything of the sort, though.

We did apparently get attacked. A few guys fired maybe thirty rounds through an RPK from over a kilometer away and then ran. It was pretty pathetic. It occurred on the other side of the river so I didn’t even get to pretend to engage the enemy.

What disturbs me is that we let these jackasses get away. The machine gun we had placed apparently jammed, and our .50 cal sniper rifle position didn’t even get a shot off, I know not why. Besides all that, we have 14-ton 8-wheeled all-terrain tactical vehicles that we just didn’t deploy, I suspect simply because our command is scared. From what I could see, Lance Corporals and below were all maneuvering on the enemy as fast as their legs would carry them. I personally was hauling ass upriver securing our side, just praying that it was some kind of coordinated attack, but no such luck.

Gunfire at night barely registers anymore, but the intermittent mortars still startle me. The dogs are conspiring with the enemy to keep me awake, but after a five-hour post and a night patrol, I’m not sure that I’d wake up for a firefight.

The little kerosene stove we got is a godsend. I fried up some Spam on the bottom of my canteen cup one day, and it was heavenly.

The riverbanks are pretty lush with vegetation, but all of it is hostile. There are about five different types of thornbushes. One you can’t even tell is a thornbush until you’re walking through it and the spines are stabbing right through your trousers and socks, inflicting a truly exquisite sort of pain. Another kind sheds these little thorn balls that I think stalk you and crawl up inside your uniform and into your sleeping bag. And you have to be really careful extracting the little bastards because they’re so sharp they’ll tear up your fingers, gloves or no gloves. Maybe this is the very spot at which God inflicted Adam with thorns to make his labor more difficult.

My Arabic training is surprisingly useful. I’m even managing to learn from the Iraqis. They seem generally confused about my ethnicity and amused by my attempts at their language. Occasionally one will vastly overestimate my proficiency and start babbling at me and I’ll have to insist I speak only a little and don’t understand. A few know a decent amount of English. Like this one farmer who must be something like 6′ 4″ and 250 lbs. Nice guy, though. He brought us a squash that we didn’t know what to do with.

Mornings are pretty cool, now, but the nights are still pretty warm, and the proximity of the river makes for a bit of humidity. Every night is a struggle between: covering up to escape the bugs and burn up, or stay cool but get eaten alive.

I got to catch up with my old platoon when we relieved them on the bridge. I miss those guys. I’m getting more and more dissatisfied with this new platoon, mostly the higher-ups. Everyone E-4 and below are cool as hell.

I remember being pretty apprehensive about the IRR Marine we got just weeks before we came over, but most of them have turned out to be really cool. They’re Inactive Reservists, which means they’ve done their four years of active service and gotten out, but volunteered to come back as combat casualty replacements. Which means they’ve been civilians for some amount of time and are therefore, for the most part, pretty chill. Also, they’re all 0311 Infantry Riflemen, almost none of them are from LAR, so they know their stuff, having gotten real, non-LAV training in their previous units. We even have one guy who was a Scout Sniper (read: complete badass), but lost his paperwork for it so got redeployed as a groundpounder.

My team leader, Cpl P_______ is awesome. His first two years he was in FAST (Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Team) Company, which is the Marine Corps’ counter-terrorism group. He’s had all kinds of high-speed, low-drag training as well as real world missions (including combat action) in Bahrain and West Africa. He’s also a pretty big gun nut, and talking with him totally brings out the gun nut in me. I surprised myself with the ridiculous amount of gun lore I’ve gleaned just from video games and the internet. The difference is he’s actually handled all these guns I’ve only read about.