How dry I am

We have no water today. We had none this morning and its still off and it's after 1PM. Good thing I was a slug and hit the snooze alarm this morning and didn’t work out, I’d be stinking all day. It’s been on and off for the past week, not sure what’s going on with it. The other night two of the guys warmed up some water on the stove and took a sponge bath. We can brush our teeth and shave with bottled water. The toilets don’t flush and that’s going to be a problem shortly.

I went over to the base engineer’s office this morning and they said he’d gone off post to see if he could help. He’s at the source in a small town up stream that's affecting Kirkuk, surrounding areas and this base. Kirkuk got hit pretty badly yesterday with IED's, something like 7 of them. It could be related, I'm not sure. My IA officers were pretty excited we got Zarqawi so that was encouraging. We had another incident on post of an Arab harassing a Kurd, just words flying back and forth and that's not good, our guard is up.

I get the biggest kick out of talking with these officers here. I was in to see one of the younger Captains yesterday and he has a button under his desk to ring for help. I think I already wrote about this but I didn’t realize how widespread this is in their culture. I couldn’t help but poke fun at his button and he took it good naturedly.

This morning we planned Kraz training for them and I stopped into the Regimental HQ to see who would be going out with me to watch. They were all smoking and joking in the XO’s office, it would seem that Armies are the same the world over. I had an interpreter with me, so we sat for a bit and talked about upcoming missions. The XO yelled out the door to the door guard and I ask them for the word for “buzzer”.

My most valuable phrase is 'how do you say'? From there I can pantomime anything I want, so I ask, “how do you say buzzer?” The Captain was in there and he busts out laughing because he knows I’m going to poke him. It turns out none of them have a buzzer that works (batteries dead, go figure) so they all turn on him. That was fun; my Arabic is getting a bit better, there’s nothing like the old immersion technique to either learn it or look out the window.

The morning flew by, we stopped to watch them drive Kraz’s and try not to break the clutches. I saw 5 of our crew out there helping them, but they were standing off to the side and I asked them if they knew how to drive the Kraz and of course they said no, so how could they train them? I asked the leader to let my guys drive so everyone got a chance to grind some gears. Its a terrible vehicle and they’d much rather drive the U.S. vehicles; I can’t fault them on that. The majority of their vehicles are U.S. and maybe we shouldn’t be forcing them to learn these, they broke 8 clutches in the past 2 weeks. Training is certainly the cause of this, but there’s a reason the Russians gifted these to the Iraqi’s, I would have driven them off a cliff a long time ago.

Guests cancelled again, they’ll try and come tomorrow, en’shalla.

Best wishes from Iraq.