Got this one a few days ago, pretty nutty place is the consensus...
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
14JAN06
Saturday, 6:59 p.m.
Christmas and New Year came and went uneventfully. It seems like it
would be sad or lonely, or emotionally negative in some way, to spend
the holidays alone. But once you are actually doing it, sitting right
there alone and it's New Year's outside, it's really nothing. It
actually brings a sense of relief that you don't have to be expending
any energy smiling or laughing with anybody else, or pretending that
"this year things are going to be different." Every day we wake up we
have a chance to do it again differently, and to think that a new
year's
resolution is somehow more powerful is just a cheap trick.
New Year's Eve was the second time I was sitting in my trailer when the
city around me lit up with gunfire. The first time was a month or two
earlier when the Iraqis won a soccer match against Syria, but we didn't
know that at the time. Suddenly there was gunfire everywhere, and it
wasn't the familiar 10 second burst, normal for fire fights. The noise
came and stayed. I went outside to see the black sky alive with
thousands of tracer rounds 360 degrees around us. It was as if all the
insurgents had decided to attack at once, except that the rounds were
going upwards. I could here the booming of our 50 caliber machine guns
admixed with all the other small arms fire.
Myself and another guy who came out to investigate were standing there
outside our trailers with our T-shirts, looking up and wondering what
inthe h_ll was going on. Then I heard the trailer door slam behind me,
and I saw the goofy Optometrist chick running out wearing her Kevlar
and IBA (individual body armor), her head and torso bent low to the ground.
"You guys are crazy! I'm going to the bomb shelter!," she said as she
ran off to the shelter, which is nothing but an elongated hollow box
made out of concrete and missing 3 sides, like a row of staples out of
the package. The guy I was with turned to me and said, "Yeah, I think
we better get our stuff on too." I agreed and we both hurried inside
to get dressed and get other people out of their rooms.
Once we were all gathered in and around the shelter, one of the
soldiers had the good idea of setting up a perimeter around the trailer park.
We sent two people to every corner of the lot, and the rest of us hunkered
down inside, waiting for the bullets to stop flying. It was dark in
the shelter, but there was some light coming in at either end, and I could
see the light of a Gameboy that the Dentist had brought with him--he's
a fat black dude called Charlie , and he once told me that he ate
all he wanted before coming to Iraq because he planned to work it off
once he got here. After about half an hour, all of the gunfire died
away, and we emerged to go check in with our units at the hospital. It
was then that we found out the Iraqis were celebrating and that our
troops were celebrating right back at them with superior fire power.
On New Year's Eve, I was sitting on my bed studying my Mandarin
Chinese, when the fusillade began again. This time I just sat there, trying to
concentrate on the lesson, but distracted by the thought of bullets
coming down through the flimsy trailer roof. I was wondering if I
should put the mattress over me, or if I should protect my head in some
way--someone was rumored to have gotten hurt in the last celebration by
a falling bullet penetrating the trailer roof. How fast can a bullet
fall (9.8 meters/sec?) and what is the probability that it will carry
enough energy to damage me once it comes through the roof, if it can
come through the roof in the first place? I opted to curl up on my bed
with my hands protecting my head, like how they taught us to behave in
my grade school if an earthquake ever struck. I felt silly but, man,
getting seriously injured by a falling bullet is one sorry-a__ way to
get a purple heart in Iraq. I heard one round hit the trailer and
ground outside, but that was all. Those fricking Iraqis, I'm telling
you, stupid! Anyway, what else for a sh_tty third world country.
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
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