Belaying the delay...

Ok, so normally I post stuff with about a week and a half delay, which is understandable, for OPSEC reasons. Any near-term follow-ons are protected because I'm not saying anything. I'm also leaving out where exactly we are on any given day, and more importantly who we work with in order to protect them. All that said, I'm sitting today to hammer out both today's post, and the post I'll let go live on Friday, right before I go on leave.

I won't have any pictures of my own from here while I'm back in the states, unless someone here sees fit to email some to me (hint, hint). Instead, I'll probably post pictures of the lovely Green Mountains of Vermont as a bit of an interlude. So what have I got today, you ask? Damn antennas.

What?!?

I tried to take some overlapping shots so I could photochop them together. For some reason I can never seem to get this to work. I went so far as to carefully hold the camera above the turret edge, and rotate only my wrist as I took this series... But to no avail. Apparently just the repositioning of the camera lens by centimeters moved the near and far field far enough relative to each other that stitching becomes impossible.

WTF is he talking about?

Note orientation of the car at the fuel pump furthest to the right in relation to the large green antenna:



Basically this means I can only pull off this stitching technique without stuff being predominant in the near field. Pretty aggravating with all the antennas hanging off our trucks.

Anyway, there was some other interesting stuff going on as we hung out in the market while the dismounts did their thing. You could smell the watermelon cooking as it sat out in the sun. I got a combination of that smell and the pumpkin like gourd on the left hand end of the picture. Best I can describe it is like a butter-squash, but that's not quite right. Well that's enough for now.


Next week we'll be revisiting this market, with more gas-station strangeness, along with some gratuitous thermometer and Ma-Deuce photos.

TTFN!

Too many words behind.

Thus, in order to catch up rapidly, I will be using a string of 1000-word substitutes with only minor explanation. We left off at canal water chai...

Yet another whirlwind. The dust is ever-present, and the wind blowing it around is pretty much mesmerizing.


Note the extra rocker: That's right, its SFC Moncree now!


Doc reinlisted.


Then doc went home. Due to a degenerative condition (vascular necropathy) caused by a training accident, Doc needed surgery. He's a tough, tough dude, and just 'sucked it up' for longer than he probably should have. We took him to Anaconda to get what he thought was a muscular pull checked out, just to find out that he needed surgery and had to be Medevaced immediately. God speed, Doc. Get better. Surgery recovery is a bitch, believe me, but I know Doc'll be fine.


A local handyman's mobile workshop out at one of the checkpoints:


A local motor-cop:


The local "Mookie-shack". (Offices of the political party headed by Moqtada al Sadr). Though the Sadirist movement has gained some political legitimacy recently, I still find their leader to be somewhat of a caricature of himself.


Down the street from the above, I got served more chai. Note the amount of sugar in a serving roughly the size of a shot-glass.


We fixed the fire-pit. CPT Stangle, SFC Shuck, and I built up the brick, but didn't mix the mortar with sand. Since it's everywhere here, it's understood that people will mix it themselves. We didn't know.


Of course Walt got us squared away, and finished the exterior. It's covered in rags that we kept soaked because otherwise it would dry way too fast and crack everywhere. I'll get a picture of the finished product later...


More joint range-time. This time the company commanders came in from the checkpoints to shoot as well. Some of the jundis that came in with them could really shoot!


Last two. Local wildlife, found over on the IA side. I was considering building a cage and keeping the cute little bugger, but instead I let it go just outside the front gate.


Isn't it cute?


That's all I've got. I realized I was kinda deficient in taking photos for the first week and a half of June, so pickings are kinda slim. However, I am now up to date with regard to the timing of stuff (week to week-and-a-half lag). To any of the guys reading this, if I've missed out on one of your big events in this catch-up post, I apologize. However, I think you all understand, as we've all been pretty busy.

Canal water chai, brimstone, and handguns.

Chai is tea. Overly sweetened, it is served with the tea leaf pieces left in the bottom of the cup, at a temperature I can best describe as 'volcanic'. Our interpreters make it, some better than others. We had an interesting discussion about the chai they serve in the Iraqi DFAC. (Dining FACility, for my non .mil type readers). One of our interpreters' brother works on the FOB as well, and Joe (as we call him) had this to say:

Joe: "It's bullshit."

Me: "What?"

Joe: "You know, it's like everything else in the Army. The food sucks, the tea sucks. The tea in [town] is better."

SFC Moncree: "Yeah, he's right. The tea in [town] is better."

What had kicked that conversation off was a discussion of canal water chai, the home-brewed variety of which we had gotten from a local 'sheik' while out on patrol. His 'village' barely had houses numbering in the double digits, but with multiple families in each house there were close to 150 people. Most of them were small children, and those are the ones I can post pictures of:


Here's another, with the 1LT Platoon Leader from the unit we're living with here. We did a joint, combined patrol with his platoon and some IA soldiers in order to distribute a humanitarian assistance (HA) drop.


It was a bit of the normal 3rd world crush when we started handing out stuff. Big kids pushing smaller kids out of the way, no real order to the handouts, despite having the sheik in the back of the truck trying to direct traffic. When we got done with the stuff in the pickup, I grabbed MSG Jones and had my counterpart take his place assisting in the handout of the remainder from the back of the IA HMMWV. Amazing what a little stern talking to in your own language can do for getting kids organized.

Back on the IA FOB, MSG Jones did some great work that week: He got all the IA NCOs to actually wear their rank.


As trivial as that may seem, it's a big deal for them to take this step. One of the fundamental issues we've been having with the IA is the lack of an empowered NCO corps. I've lost count of the number of times I've read about officers in Arab armies being knowledge / power hoarders, and it's reinforced pretty much weekly here. Some are better than others, but on the extreme end, one officer had the only Arabic-translated copy of a training manual and kept it on the shelf in his office. NCOs make my job easier. Apparently they don't understand that, and believe that by loosening their grip on information they actually increase their powerbase instead of decreasing it. Inshallah.

On our side of the FOB, we had a piece of equipment give up its magic smoke (machines run on magic smoke, when it comes out, they stop working).


Not good. To add insult to injury, the AC compressor in SFC Shuck's CHU also died. Following the line of thought that stupid ideas that work aren't stupid, he figured out the compressor was overheating, and tried icing it. It worked.


Of course that was not until after we had come back from a mission and he found it so hot in there that the devil was fanning himself in the corner...


And now for something completely different...

Range pics. We spent some time back over at the 25-meter range on the back 40 and I've got a couple pics and accompanying story. The boss brought this on himself, and he had to know it was coming eventually, so here goes. We were concentrating on M9, and had brought a couple of the IA officers with us. Toward the end of the range day, the boss watched me shoot the following groups from 25 and 10 meters respectively.


That would be a 7" and a 3" pattern, each consisting of 15 rounds from my M9 fired offhand. Seeing this, he decided to challenge me to a bit of a shoot-off, 5 shots offhand, object was to group closest to the dot in the center of our 8 1/2" by 11" 'targets', from the 25-meter line. The first picture below is my target, the second is his:


Yo soy un pistolero. That would be a 6" pattern this time. The boss got 4 of 5 on the paper. Next! The previous range trip had us shooting our recently zeroed ACOG equipped M4s. Binden aiming concept, etc, etc. From the prone, at 25 meters, I managed this on the first attempt:


I'm pretty sure I'm the best shot on the team with the M9, but am probably not the best M4 shooter, so I'm pretty proud of that one.