Taji Trip

Great trip yesterday, first time I’ve been out since I got back from leave. It felt good to get out of this office. The fields have been greening up and looked pretty good from the air. The two pilots we had were both about 23 years old. I’m not sure why that scared me, but they did a nice job and didn’t hit anything.

Taji itself is really safe as a whole, but the front gates (heavily guarded/fortified) get rammed by VB-suicide bombers more and more lately as well as a lot of IED’s are going off on the roads near by. We’re tons safer in our vehicles than we were just last year but there’s definitely more IED’s and the overall injured/killed rate has been going up. It's been a tough couple of months since the election for our kids over here.

There’s lots of Iraqi’s on Taji. It’s a warehouse facility which we visit often. We work side by side with them but we’re starting to struggle. Some of them just up and quit when they want to and usually its payday. There’s no contract to stay in like our military so when they decide to leave, they just...leave. It’s being addressed on the American side at a pretty high level. It’s hard to train them and then see them take off. We’ve also run into problems (nationwide) where soldiers/police leave because they don’t feel any nationalism to fight in a province they don't live in. Then, they resurface next month enlisting in their home town units. It’s an issue.

We were looking at medical supplies. This is the last class of supply that’s a black hole to my group and it's support to the IA. The U.S. has combat medics embedded with them and any soldier hurt in the field has immediate care until a medevac arrives. The Iraqi’s don’t have Medevac capability (unless they’re training with us) so their next level of care is the local hospital. We went to see how much equipment they have in the warehouse, get some pictures and work with the guys on site to see if they needed any of our help. It’s 1 U.S. Sergeant and 3-4 Iraqi’s that distribute to the whole country. It’s probably not enough support when we leave but good enough for now. Lots of bandages, litters, but no controlled substances. That's handled at a higher level which cuts down on the pilferage.

I had a bit of a scare while we were there, we were in the PX walking thru and this huge BOOM went off that moved the shelving, the signs came off their chains suspended from ceiling and everyone just froze and looked at each other! A SECOND one, even louder than the first when off and we all dashed for the door and the cement bunkers. This one sounded closer and they always come in three’s (they can get three off before counter battery zeros in) and nobody wanted to be around to see where it landed. We were RUNNING for the door when the third one went off and then the BigVoice comes on and says, “controlled detonation, controlled detonation”. Damn. That meant somebody was getting rid of excess munitions and thank you very much for telling us AFTER you blow them up, how about a little warning?? They were getting phone calls from around the base on that, lots of irate people and I’m sure a couple of new heart attack victims. :)

Water- A couple of years ago I was reading about the Army's first tour in Iraq during the War. There was an article about U.S. forces taking truck loads of bottled water from the states and how expensive it was to bring it over here. They were spending millions of dollars and it wasn’t because they couldn’t get water anywhere else, we know how to transport water, we've been doing so for decades. In the past we’d drink out of water buffaloes (tanks pulled behind trucks) or we’d use lister bags (canvas bags suspended from a tree). Both were certified “suitable for drinking” but tasted really bad and they were buying bottled water because the soldiers weren't drinking the other. But if you’re thirsty, you’ll drink it. Anyways, I’m happy to report that we've solved that issue by building bottled water plants here in country. We now have pallets and pallets of locally produced bottled water and it doesn’t taste bad, either. These are being turned over to the Iraqi’s, another example of your tax dollars at work.

Dates- Iraq used to be the 3rd largest producer of Dates in the world but that’s slipped over time. We’ve agreed to spray herbicide/insecticide on the trees to jump start the Date farmers and the only speed bump is the information campaign to the local farmers and mayors. They want to make sure that the terrorists don’t poison a town and blame it on the Coalition spraying. No good deed goes unpunished around here.

I hope everyone is well, best wishes from Iraq!