Hillah, Iraq.

I wanted to get out of town. There is nothing going on of late, so when we sent a group up to Baghdad, I jumped at the opportunity to hit the road. I even burned a brand new CD for the trip.

There was a particularly heavy sand (dust, really) storm blowing. This was a mixed blessing. Blowing sand hides us from the booger eaters, who cannot see us to detonate IEDs. However, the dust gets into everything, including the CD player. All things considered, I will take not getting blown up over smooth playing CDs any day.

We went up to a Coalition base near Baghdad to coordinate an upcoming operation. Our local source of intelligence has learned where a lot of the IEDs are being made and by whom. Unfortunately, the location is not in our battle space, so we must go coordinate with the guys whose sandbox the target is in. This is not just a matter of professional courtesy. If we get into a gunfight in their backyard, we do not want them to decide to just go in with guns blazing, and sort the details out later. I do not consider myself a detail.

Dust storms are other worldly. The best reference I have is the photographs of the Martian surface I have seen. What little light makes it through the dust was filtered orange. Visibility was down to about 300 feet as we headed up to Baghdad. Dust quickly covered everything as I sat in the front seat commanding. Progress was predictably slow as traffic crawled along the highway. At one point, we drove up the shoulder, then even over a dirt field in an effort to make better time. When the dirt field ran out, we found that there was a loose but steep embankment back up to the highway. The lead vehicle had a bit of trouble getting up, and the second even more. I instructed Staff Sergeant to drive down a bit to find a better place.My guess is that Staff Sergeant hasn’t done a lot of off road driving. The place he picked looked like a three foot high dirt wall.

“You want to go up here?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Looks a bit steep, don’t you think?”
“Oh, sir,” he replied, “We can make it.”
“Better get a running start.”
“Good thinking, sir.”, and he stomped the gas.

We must have been doing fifteen miles an hour when we hit that berm. The front of the vehicle bounced up in the air, and the belly crunched into the berm. We sat there for a moment, high centered on the armor underneath. The front of the humvee slowly lowered to the roadway, and the vehicle scrabbled for hold as we clawed our way onto the road.

Staff Sergeant turned to me to say, “See, sir? Told you we could make it.”Not much dust had made it into my bottle of tea as we headed into the Coalition Camp, and I spent the rest of the trip crunching peach tea and wondering why I keep listening to Marines.

We met with a lot of the staff officers right away. I got a lot of looks from the staff as we sat down, looks that seemed to ask, “Who is the mid thirties private, and why is he in this meeting?” Fortunately, I had remembered to bring all my uniform devices. I stripped off my uniform blouse right onto the meeting table to pin on all my ‘bling’, and properly decked in gold, I was much more welcome at the table.

Not that it really mattered, as my opinion on cross boundary planning between Army units holds no great value. Soon, their JTAC was called in, and we headed off to the air center to compare notes. He confirmed what I had heard about the helo unit in Baghdad, and I got more contact information from him.After the meetings, we went over to Camp Victory so the Green Berets could visit their higher command. The Marines had to pick up a radio from the maintenance shop. Fortunately, the electronics shop is somewhat near the Exchange, where we had agreed to meet the Green Berets. The Exchange in Victory has a number of features not available at Camp Charlie that I wanted to take advantage of, so after getting some cash, I purchased a phone card to call my Beautiful Bride, as well as a couple of other folks that I had wanted to talk to for a while. We don’t have a phone center at Charlie, so it was nice to not have to use our satellite phone that costs a dollar a minute to use. Following the calls, I visited the coffee shop, and with a latte in hand, I used the final service that is unavailable at Camp Charlie: mail. It is not entirely accurate to say that we don’t have mail service at Camp Charlie. The incoming mail is delivered every other week, if someone happens to be coming up from Camp Echo. The outgoing mail is handled somewhat differently. Every Saturday, a delegation comes to the embassy to pick up their mail. From 1230 to 1630, they are supposed to come to Camp Charlie to pick up our mail, provided that they can find an escort over here, as well as one returning to the embassy when the mail service is completed. As one might imagine, there are not a lot of assets available to escort the mail people over here, wait four hours, then go back. Mail actually goes out once or perhaps twice a month.But in Baghdad, there are real mailboxes with daily pickup. I scrounged up a few pieces of paper and an envelope. I wrote a letter to my Beautiful Bride. It was tricky to complete as I had to write on the clipboard that serves as the vehicle’s battle board. My writing was somewhat messy as the clipboard kept slipping off my knee, or the papers were blown by the wind through the open door. But, write a letter I did, and I hope that it gets there soon. I miss my Beautiful Bride.

We finally met up with the Green Berets. Desiring to miss the typical hours of IED attacks, we went to the fancy chow hall at Camp Victory. The chow hall requires that everyone have a weapon. When you present yourself for ID check and weapons inspection, the weapon must be shown to be unloaded. I am not sure of the reasoning behind requiring everybody to have a gun with no bullets in the chow hall.

Having learned my lesson last time, I went easy on the ‘fancy’ chow. It was fun being a Navy guy in the chow hall. There are not a lot of Navy guys in Baghdad, that I could see. I had all my bling on, which created something of a riddle. I am a Navy guy, but not a SEAL. I am clearly an aviator, but why would an aviator have jump wings? And why would a jump qualified aviator hang out with Marines and Green Berets? And what is the deal with that hair? Of course, I played the part to the hilt. Second Lieutenants were particularly fun.

“Hey, man, what’s going on?”
“Um…good evening, sir.”

I did indulge in the ice cream dessert table, which offers hot toppings, shakes, and smoothies, true delights for us bumpkins from Camp Charlie. I had a large single scoop of cookies and cream ice cream with hot caramel.After chow, we drove back over to the Green Beret headquarters to pick up some supplies, then we headed down the road towards Camp Charlie. Spending so much time and research on the IED problem of late has not helped my ability to ignore the potential threats on IED Alley. I had a hard time relaxing as we rolled through this area that I knew was frequently attacked. That extra cup of coffee at chow didn’t help.

We made it though the IED Gauntlet, and I was able to relax more the closer we got to our base. As we neared the base, the CD player began skipping. I knew that there was a lot of dust in the air, but when I looked at the CD that had been brand new that morning, the surface was thoroughly scratched from spinning around all day on the dust inside the CD player. The CD looked like it had hosted hockey practice.

Although it was a quick trip, it again felt good to get out to do something.