Well, this FNG had a whole host of connectivity troubles the last week+ (and then Bob was hit) so forgive me…
That said, I wanted to answer some of the Q’s from the original version of this thread.
Please feel free to add any new Q’s.
We mostly lived in tents in various states of repair. We started out in NICE mini apartments fab’d in a shipping container, they were great, didn’t leak, kept the dust out etc. We moved a lot, when we hit the USMC base outside Fallujah we were placed in the transient housing. Tents fell apart, tents picked up and blew away in 80 mph winds (and these are HUGE 60+ man tents that are moved around by forklifts before being set up, must weigh 400+ lbs.) We ended the tour in nicer 2-10 man tents,more privacy after the 60 man tents and had good A/C.
As for beds it was a mix of real beds, cots, and surgical beds.
Bathrooms were mostly porta-johns with random mix of real ‘throne’ trailers. Although the facilites never seemed to stay in the same place (thanks KBR!) so there you are, its 2a.m. and your freezing in your shower shoes looking frantically around standing in the spot it USED to be and hoping…
Showers were (for the most part) very accessable and we only had a few times where water supply was an issue.
Of course, were were in the transient housing during the summer and they weren’t much on A/C, power, lights, fire extinguishers, any sort of bunkers or barriers (we ran to our Brad’s the one time mortars etc. came in). When we showed the sorry state to the full bird he said ‘I think there is a better place for some of our resources, I’m just here to make an assessment.’ We said ‘but sir, we’re here NOW and this is the 13th assessment team we’ve seen, are you assessing what not do give us?’
In short, we left things a WHOLE lot better than we found them when it came to living conditions.
We had free time. Even the grunts, for sure. For the most part they came off mission cleaned their weapons and that was it for the day. We had public Army TV’s etc, many private ones but for the most part EVERYONE had a laptop and used that for multimedia. LOTS of movies, the locals sold legits cheap and pirates for really really cheap. you could get 4 movies (of dubious quality) on one DVD for $5. Guys went home with over 400 titles. Xbox’s etc were sold at the PX so they were used a lot too.
We had a phone/laptop center. A private corp. had rights to charge us on the phones (4 cents a min on VOIP) and gave free laptops and service for the net, it was just about perfect without the taxpayer footing the bill. I got to call the Mrs. with varying frequency. I would call and say ’ sorry I haven’t called in a couple days babe.’ She would exclaim ‘A couple days? Its been 2 weeks!!’ I just lost track of time, no one knwo what day it was (except maybe Sunday 'cause of church) only the date mattered. We just had so much randomness going on, it was just Get 'Er Done!
My wife is the BEST ever, hands down. She was a bit nervous all the time I think. Iknow she freaked when she got a letter from my Lt. Col. Turned out he just wanted to say congrats on our anniversary and say thanks to her for giving me up for the year. She thought it was a death notice ‘We Were Soldiers’ style. Mostly she trusted to Providence and knew that everyone that had even ever heard of me, and all their friends, were praying. That said, the eldest kid was an interesting case. He was old enough to know what Daddy does for a living, after all he’s lived his whole life with machine gun fire just miles away with choppers and tanks etc all around. He was still young enough though to think that only the bad guys got shot. He did know the song that CBS played when showing the names of the KIA, and he would come runnin to the TV if the Mrs. didnt’ mute it.
We mostly lived in tents in various states of repair. We started out in NICE mini apartments fab’d in a shipping container, they were great, didn’t leak, kept the dust out etc. We moved a lot, when we hit the USMC base outside Fallujah we were placed in the transient housing. Tents fell apart, tents picked up and blew away in 80 mph winds (and these are HUGE 60+ man tents that are moved around by forklifts before being set up, must weigh 400+ lbs.) We ended the tour in nicer 2-10 man tents,more privacy after the 60 man tents and had good A/C.
As for beds it was a mix of real beds, cots, and surgical beds.
Bathrooms were mostly porta-johns with random mix of real ‘throne’ trailers. Although the facilites never seemed to stay in the same place (thanks KBR!) so there you are, its 2a.m. and your freezing in your shower shoes looking frantically around standing in the spot it USED to be and hoping…
Showers were (for the most part) very accessable and we only had a few times where water supply was an issue.
Of course, were were in the transient housing during the summer and they weren’t much on A/C, power, lights, fire extinguishers, any sort of bunkers or barriers (we ran to our Brad’s the one time mortars etc. came in). When we showed the sorry state to the full bird he said ‘I think there is a better place for some of our resources, I’m just here to make an assessment.’ We said ‘but sir, we’re here NOW and this is the 13th assessment team we’ve seen, are you assessing what not do give us?’
In short, we left things a WHOLE lot better than we found them when it came to living conditions.
We had free time. Even the grunts, for sure. For the most part they came off mission cleaned their weapons and that was it for the day. We had public Army TV’s etc, many private ones but for the most part EVERYONE had a laptop and used that for multimedia. LOTS of movies, the locals sold legits cheap and pirates for really really cheap. you could get 4 movies (of dubious quality) on one DVD for $5. Guys went home with over 400 titles. Xbox’s etc were sold at the PX so they were used a lot too.
We had a phone/laptop center. A private corp. had rights to charge us on the phones (4 cents a min on VOIP) and gave free laptops and service for the net, it was just about perfect without the taxpayer footing the bill. I got to call the Mrs. with varying frequency. I would call and say ’ sorry I haven’t called in a couple days babe.’ She would exclaim ‘A couple days? Its been 2 weeks!!’ I just lost track of time, no one knwo what day it was (except maybe Sunday 'cause of church) only the date mattered. We just had so much randomness going on, it was just Get 'Er Done!
My wife is the BEST ever, hands down. She was a bit nervous all the time I think. Iknow she freaked when she got a letter from my Lt. Col. Turned out he just wanted to say congrats on our anniversary and say thanks to her for giving me up for the year. She thought it was a death notice ‘We Were Soldiers’ style. Mostly she trusted to Providence and knew that everyone that had even ever heard of me, and all their friends, were praying. That said, the eldest kid was an interesting case. He was old enough to know what Daddy does for a living, after all he’s lived his whole life with machine gun fire just miles away with choppers and tanks etc all around. He was still young enough though to think that only the bad guys got shot. He did know the song that CBS played when showing the names of the KIA, and he would come runnin to the TV if the Mrs. didnt’ mute it.
We mostly lived in tents in various states of repair. We started out in NICE mini apartments fab’d in a shipping container, they were great, didn’t leak, kept the dust out etc. We moved a lot, when we hit the USMC base outside Fallujah we were placed in the transient housing. Tents fell apart, tents picked up and blew away in 80 mph winds (and these are HUGE 60+ man tents that are moved around by forklifts before being set up, must weigh 400+ lbs.) We ended the tour in nicer 2-10 man tents,more privacy after the 60 man tents and had good A/C.
As for beds it was a mix of real beds, cots, and surgical beds.
Bathrooms were mostly porta-johns with random mix of real ‘throne’ trailers. Although the facilites never seemed to stay in the same place (thanks KBR!) so there you are, its 2a.m. and your freezing in your shower shoes looking frantically around standing in the spot it USED to be and hoping…
Showers were (for the most part) very accessable and we only had a few times where water supply was an issue.
Of course, were were in the transient housing during the summer and they weren’t much on A/C, power, lights, fire extinguishers, any sort of bunkers or barriers (we ran to our Brad’s the one time mortars etc. came in). When we showed the sorry state to the full bird he said ‘I think there is a better place for some of our resources, I’m just here to make an assessment.’ We said ‘but sir, we’re here NOW and this is the 13th assessment team we’ve seen, are you assessing what not do give us?’
In short, we left things a WHOLE lot better than we found them when it came to living conditions.
We had free time. Even the grunts, for sure. For the most part they came off mission cleaned their weapons and that was it for the day. We had public Army TV’s etc, many private ones but for the most part EVERYONE had a laptop and used that for multimedia. LOTS of movies, the locals sold legits cheap and pirates for really really cheap. you could get 4 movies (of dubious quality) on one DVD for $5. Guys went home with over 400 titles. Xbox’s etc were sold at the PX so they were used a lot too.
We had a phone/laptop center. A private corp. had rights to charge us on the phones (4 cents a min on VOIP) and gave free laptops and service for the net, it was just about perfect without the taxpayer footing the bill. I got to call the Mrs. with varying frequency. I would call and say ’ sorry I haven’t called in a couple days babe.’ She would exclaim ‘A couple days? Its been 2 weeks!!’ I just lost track of time, no one knwo what day it was (except maybe Sunday 'cause of church) only the date mattered. We just had so much randomness going on, it was just Get 'Er Done!
My wife is the BEST ever, hands down. She was a bit nervous all the time I think. Iknow she freaked when she got a letter from my Lt. Col. Turned out he just wanted to say congrats on our anniversary and say thanks to her for giving me up for the year. She thought it was a death notice ‘We Were Soldiers’ style. Mostly she trusted to Providence and knew that everyone that had even ever heard of me, and all their friends, were praying. That said, the eldest kid was an interesting case. He was old enough to know what Daddy does for a living, after all he’s lived his whole life with machine gun fire just miles away with choppers and tanks etc all around. He was still young enough though to think that only the bad guys got shot. He did know the song that CBS played when showing the names of the KIA, and he would come runnin to the TV if the Mrs. didnt’ mute it.
Then the FNG hits ‘submit’ 3x… :smack:
Bet you were surprised by our cold winter, weren’t you?
Can you tell us what you were doing (and if they would hire me to do it)?
Assuming that you are a US cit. and under the age of 35, yes the ARmy would LOVE to hire you to serve as an elisted or comissioned servicemember.
If you want some big bucks though, look into KBR or Blackwater (for huge $)
I live in the desert here in the states so the winter wasn’t unexpected, its just when its 87 deg. in our tent and I have the heater on full blast.
Moonshining was a HUGE No Go. Besides only the docs seem to have enough kowledge to do it. Except for the guys from Mississippi, they have the methods built into their DNA, but we made fun of them, no moonshine.
Well, there aren’t really any local pubs, alcohol is forbidden in Iraq, the only exception I’ve heard is for the Caldean Christians and the Catholics (like Saddams press guy) to use for communion etc (and maybe a bit more 'cause of fewer religious restrictions)
To get an M-14 I would have had to beg and bribe the one guy in our unit that had one. He ended up with a 9mm pistol, an m-14, an m-16 (the m-14 is thought of as a sniper rifle) besides the machine gun he manned from the top of the vehicle. There were so many weapons he was signed for I probably could have gotten it off of him. However, if my boss ever saw me with it… remember, its a sniper rifle, and taking it away from a ‘designated marksman’ doesn’t make sense (and again I only went out like 3 dozen times so I was pretty far down on the ‘need it’ list).
As for acclimatizing, wearing the body armor etc did add to the temps but the worst was just ridding in the hummers. with all the belly armor in place the heat from the exhaust system has as must chance to come up through the floor boards as it does any where else. If you saw guys with gloves in summer it may have been 'cause they had to wear gloves to keep from getting burned by the hot metal all around them. Magazines would get so hot from resting against the inside of the hummers they would burn you.
The only folk who didn’t take responsibility were the locals. The service in general is VERY good about maiking it absolutely clear who is responsible. For our part of the province my boss’ boss was the guy who was responsible for EVERYTHING that happened or failed to happen. If I screwed up and the general found out about it, it was my boss’ boss who was getting the butt chewing. NO dodging of responsibility is allowed (generally, we all know there are exceptions to this, espically when polotics gets involved). I think the prob with elec. wsa just the major scale of the effort needed. My infantry unit was no where able to plan, resource, and construct a major elec. plant to support x number of million people etc. We CAN pull security for the Army engineers who do know all that stuff. As for why we didn’t see more of them, that’s a Q for the general types. We did spend a lot of effort defending the power plants though. we had one whole battalion (750) living on site at the one plant in our brigade area. The sabo. work did happen though, blowing up pipelines and the like. Also attacking our local contractors (this happened a lot, and they could be super brutal) and destroying work.
First off, welcome home!
Second—well, this is kind of a lame question, but you mentioned there were Xbox and other video games to be bought/used. I just couldn’t help wondering what kinds/genres of games seemed to be the most popular? I’m kinda assuming FPS’ aren’t in big demand—but does that mean our guys are all playing Dance Dance Revolution or Mario Party? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, just that it brings up some…interesting mental pictures, is all. 
)
It would probably impact on my Army pension. Soldiers need not be US citizens.