Long time no type...

Wow, it's been a while since I put anything down here. Right now the mind's flooded with things to write. I guess I forget that what's inane or boring to me can be quite interesting to others. The repetiveness of the job here gets to you, but it's a type of boring I'm sure is hard for most to grasp. We've gotten to where we hear gunshots and shrug our shoulders...there was no crack or whiz, so why worry about it? Hear an explosion and think, "Wow, that was a big one...glad it wasn't us". I guess one would call that battlefield awareness. It's good to a point. It also breeds complacency. Complacency can lead to loss of life. So that creates a constant struggle of having to step back and remind yourself that yes, you ARE in a war zone still. I realized this the other night as I was walking from the bathroom back to my room. At night, with normal sounds of night (sans explosions, paladin launches or helicopters taking off), it's hard to think you're in a war zone. Peaceful. Quiet. Clear skies full of stars. You look around and mostly forget where you are...then the paladin fires. No mistaking it at that point.

The last month has been somewhat interesting I suppose. Not too bad for our platoon, almost tragic for our company. We've been extremely lucky as a company so far and really hope it continues. We had a few IEDs go off, a couple on my platoon. We lost one truck with no injuries but a concussion to the gunner (whose gun slammed into his head...a .50cal no less). Another platoon was attacked by an anti-tank grenade in my neighborhood. The grenade failed to detonate, bounced off the truck. They apprehended the guy who threw it, briefly. While they were waiting on EOD to come take care of the unexploded grenade and questioning the guy, they got attacked with a sniper. One round fired. Two guys hit. First guy got it in the head. Didn't penetrate his helmet, bounced off and into another guy's shoulder. Grenade thrower got away in the "chaos" that ensued. Just say...that platoon hasn't been under fire very often, so their reaction might not have been the best, and they let the bad guy get away.

Missions. What have we been doing? Right. Driving around. A lot. That doesn't seem to change. We did conduct the census on our mulhalla (neighborhood...see...now you know Arabic). That was productive. It got us to visit an area in our mulhalla we had never been because it's so hard to get to. Good visits and some interesting people there. Very poor section, though. And that's saying a lot in a country where the average salary is $1000. Per year. Now don't you feel better about your pay?

Things in our area are...shall we say...interesting right now. We're experiencing an influx of bad guys. Not so much involving direct attacks on us for the time being, but more terrorizing the populace kind of bad guys. It has a lot to do with the way things are going south of us. The "great wall of doura" is doing exactly what we thought it would, canalized the bad guys and forced them to flee. So they're coming to us. I equate what we're seeing to the mob, though. You have a handful of wanna be bad asses. They have what they have through use of force and terror on the people. They do a lot of telling the people they'll kill them if they talk to the Americans. They're watching them...listening to their phone calls (absurd I know...but an uneducated and scared populace falls for this). To prove a point, they recently killed 2 residents of our mulhalla. Right next to the mosque. One was a 17yo kid who ran a falafel stand. The other was the kid's 34yo brother who ran a store across the street. The bad guys had come by early in the day and told the locals they would be back to kill someone. No one called us. They came back, walked up the street with pistols in hand and shot the two guys in the head and left. Unfortunately, we can't be there 24hrs a day. The frustrating thing on our end was that the people did nothing. A large percentage of people have AKs there. But they did nothing. Either too scared or didn't care enough to help their fellow neighbors. So two men die.

The next day the insurgents returned. They shot and killed another man. This one from another mulhalla. We were called to pick up the body because no one knew the guy and were afraid he might be rigged with a bomb.

But sometimes it takes the deaths of others to infuriate some. Because of these actions, people are starting to open up. I assume they figure they'll be killd regardless, so why not give information that might capture/kill the bad guys? We've been geting more and more tips from locals. This is both good and bad. Good because we start having names to look for. Bad because we don't have pictures of these guys. You ask for descriptions, guess what they look like. About 5'8", brown skin, black hair, thin. Yeah. No kidding. Along with every guy we see every day in Iraq. But at least it's a step in the right direction. It's taken six months to get much out of these people, so we'll take whatever we can at this point. It encourages one of the missions I so hate, but know are necessary. The "block party". The get out and talk to the locals in their homes. Yay. Those that know me, know I don't like small talk. I'll expound for days on football. I'll engage in a political debate on the evils of liberals and big government. Want to talk about computers, weight lifting or Jeeps? Bring it on. But idle chit chat? Not so much. Being the quiet one that I am, it makes for some quick trips into homes as we stumble through trying to get a conversation started using a translator. Awkward to say the least. After a few "How ya doin?" and inferences to how they feel about how things are going, it's either over or they feel like going on about all the bad guys they've seen. And offer chai. Chai is always a good thing. Small glass of really sweet hot tea. Lipton. I was shocked, too.

But I digress. Overall things are going well and despite the influx of bad guys, getting better. Will take the overall quiet, but hopefully have good things to report with the next update. Hopefully a few less bad guys on the street among other things.