So it's another day in paradise (not) where every day is just like the last. Mine usually begins around 0600, shaving and getting into ACUs for the walk to chow. I'm not a "morning person" per say, but I usually enjoy it because most people aren't up and about at that time (or skip breakfast). The coolest time of the day is around 0700 which is when I run on some days. It's actually still quite hot all night until 5am, so most of us don't hang around outside much. I can't wait until fall so we can socialize more again...
because there's nothing to do and nowhere to go. Our MWR is a tiny room in one of our buildings, with one TV and a couple game tables. Ten people would be a crowd. There are several "haji" shops, mostly selling pirated DVDs, and one coffee shop with tables out front, but nobody feels like sitting outside, drinking coffee when it's 120 degrees. Sometimes we, well, mostly the guys, smoke cigars one night a week, but I even stopped going to that about two months ago. When it's so hot you work up a sweat just breathing, at 9pm, it's not fun.
So, unless we're at work, we're confined to out billets with whomever we lucked into having for a roommate. Mine is pretty cool, fortunately, but I haven't even spent this much "quality" time with my wife! No guests of the opposite gender allowed, not even to watch a movie with the door open. What??? Treat us like adults? Hell no! We can't even swim in our new pool without full PT clothes. I know, I shouldn't bitch, at least we have one, recently anyway, but come on, like we're going to have a big orgy if people wear swimsuits. sigh
So where was I? Oh yea, breakfast, best meal of the day, but no real eggs. Damn, I forgot to eat more eggs when I was on leave. I had like 6 one morning and forgot to ever make more, too hungover I guess, well, and able to sleep in with my wife :)
Nope, just egg beaters. I always get an omelet, but the cheese isn't the greatest, and 2-3 strips of bacon, 1-2 hashbrowns, OJ and coffee. The coffee sucks, even with cream and sugar, I never finish it. There's a haji coffee shop on a different fob that is very nice. It's a large building, with a coffee bar, second floor, lot's of tables, widescreen TVs and all decorated in pastel colors. It's usually fairly empty, but it makes me think of how nice Baghdad could have been, with American dollars pouring in and business booming. Ah well, not my fault. Oh yea, and they have a Turkish coffee to die for, mmmmm, it's thick, but I don't get there often :(
I'm so sick of the rest of the food that I've found it surprisingly easy to eat more salads and I usually get a sandwich to go for dinner, saves a walk in the heat too! It's not that there isn't enough food nor even a good variety, but imagine eating at your local buffet, three times per day for "365 days or until mission complete" like my orders say. Like Bill says, um, yea...it gets old.
Off to work after breakfast. It's usually pretty quiet, but you never know when you'll hear an IED go off somewhere in Baghdad. Sometimes it's kinda loud, but doesn't sound like it was a large explosion. Hmmm, I have no idea how to put in words, to accurately describe how it sounds anyway, "boom" just doesn't seem to cut it. Other times it's, well how about "whooHMP" and you just know it was big, almost like you can feel it. Sometimes it's easy to pick out which one you heard after reading CNN the next day, depending on the body count you know. Oh, there's another just now, sounded more like a "crummmp" though this time.
One time we had one go off right outside our wall. We were all standing in formation when it happened, awards ceremony ya know. It's funny now, because it happened right in the middle of a pep talk on all the great things we were doing for the country. Everyone just stopped and looked at each other, like "oh shit" lol, it was freakin' loud! My first thought was that they finally breached the wall. We started running toward it, thinking somebody might have been hurt, but I kept thinking to myself "um why are we running toward it?" as I heard gunshots ringing off after the fact and seeing smoke drift over the base...
My office isn't far from the red zone, about 100 meters, so it's not unusual to hear nearby firefights. I'm still not very good at picking out AK vs. M4, but when the big ones start going I know we're giving them hell. I worry about our guys, but I hope they are blowing the crap out of them. Single gunshots are fairly common, but I always wonder if a round will come through my window. I find myself imagining my own memorial service. Would people cry? What would they say? Yea yea, I can just picture it, everybody would boo hoo, say it sucked, then move on and nothing would change, just another statistic. Of course it would be devastating on the homefront. I try not to think about that much.
Work is steady but not busy. If it's really slow I usually leave and head back to my "hooch." Killing time on the internet, like now, watching movies, playing games, bitching about anything and everything. I'm a CNN junkie. I hate it. Then there's this place. Both depress me. Ignorance is bliss. I'm so tired of the war, of reading about it, of hearing about it, of living it. It was easy to forget it when I was on leave though. It was weird. I felt like I could have just gone into work any weekday and it would be like I had never left. Good in the sense that my wife and I were still like two peas in a pod, but bad in how like it seems so easy for people to forget there's a war going on. Do people really care? Paris' woes seemed the bigger story at the time. I guess why should they though, it's not as if we're rationing meat and gas as in WWII. It's kind of amazing when I think about it, this war going on for so long with very little overall affect on American lives, mainly those who've lost loved ones.
Morale is actually quite high though. It has surprised me. We're more resilient, as a group, than I would have thought, given the unpopularity of the war. I mean, sure, we're ready to go home, we bitch about a lot, but the mission is getting done and people are trying to make the best of it. So why the post? I don't know, just filling time, it's groundhog day.