Back from Iraq

Art was back from Iraq, and gave the church Men's Breakfast a talk about his experiences there. His was an engineering unit, and most of what he said dealt with things they built or tore up. First job: fetch a Bradley out of the Tigris. They devised "cop in a box" buildings: take a shipping container and fit it with doors, windows, light and fixtures--just add a generator and the cops. Or fit it out differently to make a jail. What next?

Build headquarters, repair bridges with the central pylon blown out, build bypass roads in deep dust finer than flour, try to clean up cities after the action--with a few Saddamites still at large. Find and dispose of over 300 IEDs. Four men died doing that.

Look for WMD component caches: find one, excavate it, bury it again, and wonder why it never gets mentioned.

Forget to return your soil/concrete testing kits, and so wind up as the only unit able to test the concrete the locals try to sell for runway repair.

Always wear your helmet. Plant concrete barricades around all your buildings, so if mortars come in at night you'll be OK so long as its not a direct hit and so long as you're asleep in bed.

Pray a lot. Work the extra hours so your men don't have to. Send the men out to work at night if you can: less heatstroke that way.

Figure out who the trouble-makers in your own hierarchy are and send them to Kuwait.

Wonder why ammo is in such short supply. Jump through complex hoops to make sure the Iraqis you hire for inspections actually look like they're working for somebody else (safety first!). Pay cash for everything. Learn what "Insh'allah" really means ("God willing I'll be able to get around to it someday").

Everybody loves D9 bulldozers. Even generals yearn to climb up in one and make walls fall down.

Pray some more. Learn to really appreciate chaplains and officers who care about the men and look to serve. Mourn for 7 comrades.

What else? A whiteboard with a countdown of days left: "39 days until we get extended again." An engineering unit is not going to be content with sagging tents when its a piece of cake to fix up something decent--and they do. Learning cultural accommadations: They tried to build Western-style showers and toilets for the Iraqis, only to find that (thanks to some nutty interpretation of a story about Mohammad) Iraqis won't sit to urinate or defecate, and want water to clean off afterward--so they used the showers as latrines. Back to the drawing board...