Ok, Kuwait is really bad...

I watched the sun come up yesterday morning around 6 am. I turned to all four cardinal directions to see if I could see any kind of landmark at all, anything like a tree, blade of grass, building, tower, anything. I only saw sand. Sand as far as the eye could see. From the small atoll from which we camped last night (we had tents, some slept outside under the stars) I could see miles in two of the four directions. It was barren and desolate. I haven’t seen much alive out here in this desert; a couple of dung beetles and ants, an occasional bird and some camels. Oh, yeah, the camels!

On one of the convoy training exercises, we came across green scrub bushes which looked so out of place in the barren wasteland and then, lo and behold, there they were, maybe about 30-40 of them in a group with two shepherds (bedouins?). The camels were kind of cool; they were munching away and moving along. They were about to cross our path so the bedouins stopped walking and then so did the camels, all of them! They all stopped and looked back to see what the chief was doing, so that was kind of cool. I guess they’re smert (?)!

We’ve been in the field for the last couple of days. We came in this afternoon in time for hot food at dinner time and that was most welcome. We’ve had days of training on different lanes. One of them is called close quarters maneuver and it’s where we shoot at targets from a number of different positions. Some we have to pivot left or right to bring the target to bear, some we have to run up to a point and fire, or walk and shoot into the target. On one of them, the target is behind us and we all pivot to shoot without flagging the muzzle at the guy (or gal) to your left or right.

This is unheard of from the Army of old. For those who were in the Army fighting the Cold War, it is so much different than it used to be. The safety considerations that we use to “play” under would NEVER let us move outside of a highly restricted firing line where we all fired on command. It’s not that they’ve loosened the safety restrictions, they still have extremely high safety standards, it’s just that they’ve realized that valuable reaction time on the battlefield was being lost when soldiers didn’t feel comfortable firing without an order from the tower. The rules of engagement here are pretty strict; you will fire without hesitation in order to protect yourself or those people under your protection. There are just too many people being hurt and killed when they give the other guy the benefit of the doubt. Now, we fire upon hostile intent, no questions asked. Welcome to the war zone.

God love people like Paul and the 3rd ACR who live in the field all the time, I just don’t know how they do it. We’re only getting a taste of this because we’re going to be in a relative office environment when we finally go north. But for our soldiers in the field with day to day duties working with the people or driving/protecting convoys, they deserve our total gratitude. They certainly have my utmost respect.

We head north soon if there’s a flight available. More later from Iraq!