What Is An Expat?

AKA

Two Completely Unrelated Topics Rolled Into One Post

Yesterday as we left chow and went up around the corner ahead of the JDAM Palace, I looked back down towards Mosul itself and the river. There is a bluff that I sometimes look at, though usually the air quality is so crap it’s hard to see anything. Today was different, however. It was about 5:30, maybe 5:45. I saw one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen. Shades of red, yellow, and orange filtered through the clouds. In fact this is probably the only time so far I recall noticing any sort of wonderful sunset or sunrise in Iraq. I hurried back to get my camera, but it faded out as we went back. We’re talking only 5-10 minutes here, but that was enough. No shots. It wouldn’t have come out anyway, I’m sure. I do need to read the manual on my camera again. Another interesting visual item, which I would certainly hesitate to describe as stunning, is the smoky mist that usually happens down in the fields below our hill. I am not sure exactly what the cause is. It may be some kind of smoke pot putting out bug-killin’ aerosol. It usually happens about the same time of evening, and sort of lingers lazily over the fields at about 100 ft elevation. Doesn’t really seem to drift much, and eventually disperses.

I have been going through an intermediate Russian reader. I do pretty good, and can understand most everything going on. I misread one chapter heading. It read “Tanya Protests” in reference to some poor girl who’s family lets her do all the work and never helps. Eventually she takes off (in this chapter, where she “protests”), and the family realizes the error of their ways, blah blah. Anyway, I keep seeing the heading as “Tanya Prostitutka” for some reason. Protestuyet is the word for protest, so you can see the basis on this one. It recalls to mind when Guli and I watched “Brigada.” This was a popular series in Russia about 4 friends who ended up being mafia guys. At one point they are leaning on some businessman, and refer to having his “secretutka” make them some coffee. I didn’t catch this at first. It had to be explained to me. The guy combined secretar with prostitutka – the meaning of both of those words should be fairly obvious. I found this so amusing, that for the rest of our trip I continually referenced it. A driver became chaufferitutka, a doctor (vrach) would be vrachitutka, a maid (slyzhanka) is a slyzhitutka…damn I love to make up and combine words. Russian is a little different in that while in English we like to make up acronyms, they prefer to abbreviate. Moscow Bank becomes MosBank, well you know…there’s a bunch of others, only I suddenly don’t feel like explaining them. It gets too wordy. You get the point. Anyways, I respect that because I have always liked to express my creatocity by creatulating new words. If I don’t know the Russian word for something, I might be able to make something up, or by reading the word literally, figure it out. For example, a windowsill is a podokonnik. A nik is a thing or person that does something, okno is a window (some knowledge of grammar and spelling changes is appropriate in this case), and pod implies being under something. Therefore, the literal meaning is “the thing under the window” or…windowsill! I really like that word. I have a lot of other examples but I won’t bore you with them right now, on account of I can’t quite recall any specific ones. Of course my favorite word is “doctoprimachatelnosti” but that one is pretty hard to suss out. Languages are neat things. I made a pun once when I was taking a test. I needed to define nadaest, only I couldn’t remember what it meant. So I made a joke instead. Since nada means “needs to, is necessary” and est means “to eat”, I wrote in “when I am hungry, I need to eat.” Of course this was wrong, and I knew it, but was hoping to get some humor points. Didn’t work out that way. Nadaest means to get bored, by the way. Which is what happened to me and this topic. Bye now.

Muhammed got up early today. He was going to be busy, and wanted an early start.

At around 4:15 we got some incoming. Can’t say I heard it.

At 5:50, down near the gate we got around 14 or so. 1-8 were pretty consistent, but then I guess somebody got excited and messed up the rhythm. They stayed quiet, but even so I was unhappy to find them expending that number of rounds. Usually it’s just 1, maybe 2 so that we don’t forget they are out there. 5 or 6 makes a busy day for them. Apparently they coordinated with a hit on the airfield, who got 7 rounds of their own.

At 10:43 they gave the airfield some more loving, another 10 rounds, off the FOB.

At 2:55 PM it happened again. It was rather more interesting.

At #1, we look at it each other across the office, pretty sure it was no slamming container door. #s 2 and 3 confirm that, since nobody slams the doors quite that way, particularly that close together. #4 and 5 find us heading to the bunker. #6 finds us moving quickly there. #7 and 8 is when we run. I never run. They’re getting closer. On #9, Jeremy drops one of the radios. He stops and stares at it somewhat dumbly. He’s not dumb of course, it’s just that sometimes when you are distracted like that decisions take on a whole other level of necessary concentration. I focus in on it really hard, and I think if I make a superhuman effort I can snag it on the way past. It’s green, while the other radios are all black. I don’t know why this occurs to me. I can only imagine the idiotic look of deliberation that must be on my face. Jeremy realizes he should go, since I have focused on the radio and will probably simply run into him if he is still there. Somehow I manage to successfully acquire 1 each Turkish subcontractor radio without falling down. #10 is real close. #11, 12, and a few others we are too distracted to count are pretty damn close too. Apparently they are still sticking to the deal* – they only hit our camp within a camp when I am not there. That doesn’t mean they can’t hit next door I guess. I feel better in the bunker. Usually I find it an annoyance.

(* Ok, there’s no deal, but they have managed to miss our mini-camp so far while I have been here. They hit with a mortar round a few days before I got here the first time, and about two days after I went on R&R they got a rocket airburst in the backyard.)

There’s a big fire at one of the Turkish subcontractor camps. The shelling stops. We sit in the bunker, helping the Ops guy with accountability. Sometimes people call in too quickly, it can be hard to find the call signs on the paper. We come together as a team. We make the “that was scary, but I’m being cool about it” jokes. Nervous tension burns out. It’s usually obvious when the jackasses have stopped and run away, but we still need to finish the accountability. We are significantly more squared away than our Turkish subcontractors, of which there are three. Three companies that is, not 3 guys. They take significantly longer to account for their people, but at the same time you can be assured that they do not in fact know where everyone is, and that they are ok. In the end, they are, but it takes a while to verify that.

Can you identify where the rounds came from?

Check your answer!

Our security guy says 5 rounds hit the FOB. I don’t know how the hell Muhammed could have possibly missed with any rounds from that distance, much less the vast majority of them. I’m glad he’s not real good at this. I hope that he’s done for the day. I hope he’s done forever, really. I hear they “detained” a few guys over there. I doubt it’s all of them. They’ve been quite active since Ramadan started. I can’t remember if chucking 120mm mortar rounds at the invader is prohibited during the daylight time or not.

Of course, this closes the gate for a while. I stand up near our camp and just look around for a long time. Here you can see how a little ant kept people away from the gate. To separate him in your minds from Red Ant, and since he’s an Iraqi…I will call him Green Ant. Generally, Green Ant was able to get his point across without getting cranky, as near as I can tell. There was a time or two where a second car maybe couldn’t see as a first car was in the way. They’d get all honky, and Mr. Green Ant would gesture with his boomstick, and the point would get across. You can see a Stryker platoon in the background coming up the road, if you look closely. Farther up the left, out of this picture is a strange section of road that emits loud, scary rumbling noises on occasion.

Of course they weren’t done for the day. We get another 4 or 5 going to the DFAC. We were driving along, and I didn’t hear a thing, but Jeremy pulls over, pulls out his radio and we hear “seek hard shelter.” We both give the “didn’t hear anything” look but follow orders. A short bit later we hear a few. No biggie. Jeremy has to go back to send up a report. I go on to chow. I walk back. I take the back way, just in case.

Just now had a controlled blast. They warned us over the radio, it was going in 5 minutes. Jeez. They forgot to mention it was under my freaking container. At least that’s where it felt like it was, when my damn heart leapt out of my chest. The first and / or only one is scary if loud (therefore close, usually) because it’s like “hey, that’s one I certainly couldn’t have dodged.” We get a decent percentage of duds that have to be got rid of. Sometimes they let us know, sometimes they don’t. Like Ivanova says, there’s always a boom.

I’m getting tired of this.

Originally posted over at AGW.

These people are hopeless. They can’t “provide” travel except from Dubai. This project is very poorly run and the staff is not helpful. I find it’s best to distance yourself from relying on other people where possible. Nobody is going to look out for your interests like you are, and they may not bother to look out for you at all. Lucky for me I am resourceful. If I understood the hyper-fast speaking Indian (?) guy at the Uzbekistan Airways counter I called, I just show up and I got me a ticket. Gonna be a busy trip, but a good one. I go Mosul Palace back to Mosul Airfield, fly down to Baghdad, then later on to Dubai where I take custody of myself, arrange a few things and then on to Tashkent I go…

One week, and I am there!

So finally I made it down to Mosul Palace. It was a fairly short flight, of about 10 minutes. I was in a great spot for viewing, but in a bad spot to sit. I’d never flown a passenger-setup Black Hawk before. The wind really beat the crap out of me. As we sped along, not really nap o’ the earth, but certainly not at altitude (prolly 50m altitude or so) I notice many farming type areas, and grazing flocks. Just about everyone I see waves to us. As to whether or not it was a friendly wave, or I simply couldn’t see the finger and hear “hey you’re scaring away the sheep!” I can not be sure. I think it was more the former than the latter, though. It was quite fun popping up over the power lines and quickly dropping back down. When I flew on the other Black Hawks it was always much more sedate, flying racetracks in the sky, except for the single occurrence when the pilots decided to practice missile drills — that was a ride! Other than that, all the low level dodging around stuff was in Hueys, which are slower and less maneuverable.

We passed over some buildings that had been right blowed up, though when exactly I could not say. There are several Palaces in this particular cluster, 5 or 6 I think. As the bird landed, I grabbed my stuff and hopped out. We didn’t shoot at anybody, nobody shot at us, we didn’t crash, and nothing went flying outside the bird in impromptu fashion. It was a good flight.

This FOB is in a much hillier area than the airbase, which is flat. I see a lot more combat troops and vehicles than on the airbase. I start out in a tent, because they are short on living containers. Could be worse, but we are sleeping in the MWR Palace for the next week or so because it is a hard building, and because the military is doing that for their guys as well. Yaay! Floor! Everyone expects an interesting time through several days / a week after the changeover, but you never know when you might experience a Y2K-like ho-hum instead.

I don’t expect to have much to do here, so maybe I’ll write more often. I still have some pics to bring up of the airbase, that I took yesterday evening. I have not taken anything here yet.

Here are some random pictures from Mosul Airfield.

They’re international!

Couple of views of the airport, from the other side…

Here’s the prison. It probably sucks to be there.

Here are some…bunkers. Ahem. (Riiiight…)

I can’t control my fear of a The Mister Tom Flood…

…but I do my best.

Tommy and I worked together at K2 in Uzbekistan, like many other guys who are in Mosul now. A majority of guys are at the camp across the street from the airfield. I’ve somehow been veered off to the Palace site.

The view from KBR HQ…

The local mosque across from HQ…

Some friends of ours, never mind the bird poop…