Oerdin's Iraq thread.

[Theben]

Originally posted by Oerdin
The Sad thing is the place was very poorly layed out and archetually it looks very boring. I mean it's like Saddam never had an idea of how to build a palace other then just to make everything three times larger then in a normal house. I'm vaguely reminded of one of those old documentaries which explores the palaces Hitler had constructed for himself and other members of the Nazi party because it seems all dictators don't have any new ideas about what makes a good home or what is the most efficient lay out for a public building.

Typical fascist architecture.

Will look forward to your updates.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Spiffor

I think it would be useless, since it'll only open the thread to more useless spam. When Oerdin has something to add to this thread (basically, his Iraq blog), he will search for it on page 10, I'm sure.

I see -- I just thought topping this would be the mods' way of showing appreciation for Oerdin's sense of duty.

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Oerdin

---
It is an interesting thought that I may have **** in the same pot as Saddam but the reality is I live in a guest house a block away from his palace so I doubt he ever stopped by. ---

What stops you from walking over to the ruins and sit on his gold-plated "throne" ? Apart from army rules, off course.

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Oerdin

--- It was my first time taking part in a convoy opperation here in Iraq and the Army had filled our heads with dire warnings about the need for vigilence and the dangers of Improvised Explosive Device (I.E.D.) attacks. The result was my friends and I were very jumpy. The whole convoy arrived without incident but I still got edgy everytime an Iraqi car or truck tried to pass us on the road.

In the first week of the actual war, some military analysts hired by Swedish TV news commented on the lack of military skills by Iraq. There was not a single report on I.E.D attacks at the stage of the war where it would had been most efficient.

I wonder why they did not use them by then, but started to use it as a major strategy later?

[Chemical Ollie]

What are your days like Oerdin? Apart from satisfying your primary body functions - like eating, sleeping, dumping, masturbating, mandatory PT and posting on 'Poly?

I suppose you don't walk around the fence looking for targets to improve your marksman skills at?

[Oerdin]

So far we are still undergoing a unit hand over; meaning the out going unit is showing us what they've been doing for the last year, who the key communicators are, who the newspapermen are, who the policemen are, who the trouble makers are, etc...
I spent much of today inventorying equipment so that it could be taken off of the old unit's books and put on my units books. It seems they lost a fair amount of equipment over the last year and they are now trying to pull a fast one by trying to get us to sign for equipment which isn't there. Luckily, we're on to them and now EVERYTHING will be layed out before we sign.

[pchang]

Originally posted by Oerdin
So far we are still undergoing a unit hand over; meaning the out going unit is showing us what they've been doing for the last year, who the key communicators are, who the newspapermen are, who the policemen are, who the trouble makers are, etc...
I spent much of today inventorying equipment so that it could be taken off of the old unit's books and put on my units books. It seems they lost a fair amount of equipment over the last year and they are now trying to pull a fast one by trying to get us to sign for equipment which isn't there. Luckily, we're on to them and now EVERYTHING will be layed out before we sign.

Typical army BS. I am sure your unit will try to do the same thing to the next one.

[Barinthus]

Oerdin - Definitely will be reading. And about inventorizing, good! Make them sweat. They should be able to account for everything and if they lost some equipment due to a honest reason they have nothing to hide, right?

EDIT: By the way, MrFun, I agree. That's up to the Mods although. I'm very confident that we won't let this thread disappear should the Mods elect to not to top this one.

[Oerdin]

So I am now taking part in an age old game. You see immediately after the war freshly cooked food was a bit hard for a GI to find. Instead the army just kept giving people MREs which, while nutrious, are very bland and unappitizing especially since they'd been eatting MREs for the better part of two months.

To help fix this problem a few Psyopers went out and bought four hens, a roaster, and a Turkey. The idea was they'd raise chicks eat the Turkey and have the odd fresh egg. For a while all was well and the boys got to have a few meals of fresh chicken then, mysteriously, the Turkey disappeared. They thought the Turkey had just escaped until a few days later when one of the hens and then the roaster disappeared.

After that everyone thought other soldiers were raiding the hen house and stealing the chickend until one of the soldiers went out back one night and found a coyote tring to break into the chicken coupe. That was six months ago and now that I'm here I've found out that dispite the addition of five more hens the company's chicken flock is down to it's last two birds because no one can figure out how to keep the damn coyotes away from them.

So any way I was asleep last night at around 2am when I'm awaken by the sound of an M-16 rifle being fired on burst in the back yard. It appears one of the soldiers, we'll call him Joe, has been staying up late waiting in ambush for a Coyote to come raid the chicken coupe. After 6 months of off and on trying Joe finally got his first kill last night but the problem is he saw not one but three coyotes and now we've decided we will not rest until both of the surviving canine chicken thieves have been put to rest.

Tonight we're rotating watch and we're taking bets to see who will bag the coyotes. I expected to pull guard duty while in Iraq but I never thought I'd be guarding chickens from a couple of coyotes.

Any way the chow hall now has losts of fresh food so I'm inclined to just forget about the chickens, however, several of the others are saying it's a point of honor that we must hunt down the muruading carnivores. Since it took 6 months to get the first coyote I suspect it will take a bit of time to kill the rest of the pack but I guess time will tell.

[Oerdin]

I also thought I'd take the time to better discribe my living conditions. I'm living in a four bedroom, four bath (only two showers) house which was originally designed to be a guest house for VIPs visiting Saddam's Palace in Tikrit. The house is located directly next to a medium sized lake (the lake is about 2 miles around) and the back porch is literally right in the water with a small boat launch and everything. On the sides of the house Saddam kept large grassy areas which have now been turned into vehicle parking (though I'm going to be planting an herb/vegitable garden on part of it). The big problem is that Iraqis seem to have no idea about grading land so as to channel run of water and as a result everytime it rains the house becomes flood with rain water because there is high ground on three sides and a lake on the fourth side. I'd like to install so French drains so the water can be channeled around the house instead of flowing through the house but we'll wait and see if the Army coughs up with the cash to fix this problem before the next rain.

As long as we're talking about water I'd like to bring up another observation. Arabs seem to have no idea how to install plumbing because the toilets clog up with the slightest amount of toilet paper. To top it off there is no sewer system in Tikrit (they simply dump the raw sewage into the Tigris river from a thousand nasty little pipes which run out of each house); the house I live in is to far from the river to simply dump it there so instead the front patio is really just a covering for an unlined brick sump where all of the raw sewage is stored until it can be pumped out and disposed of. Not a problem right? Wrong, it's been rather hot lately and so the smell of raw sewage has become quite noticable.

If Saddam was spring with so much cash that he had to build hundreds of marble lined buildings then why couldn't he at least put in a modern sewer system to service his palace? I think that more then anything shows just how close this country is to being 3rd world.

[Oerdin]

The only other news is that we've adopted a stray dog which looks to be no more then a few months old. We've named him Roscoe and he's a little brown and white mutt who seems very eager to please and he's willing to eat just about everything in sight. One of the guys in the unit feed Roscoe a bunch of people food yesterday so the dog spent most of today with the runs. I'm going to look into buying some bog food from Petco.com and see if that doesn't agree with his system a bit more. Hopefully, once he's feeling better I will be able to train him to follow simple commands in English such as "sit", "lay down", "come here", etc...

[Oerdin]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
What are your days like Oerdin? Apart from satisfying your primary body functions - like eating, sleeping, dumping, masturbating, mandatory PT and posting on 'Poly?

I suppose you don't walk around the fence looking for targets to improve your marksman skills at?

First off sorry about the posts being entirely unedited but I have to sign into a computer and then I only get 15 minutes to use it so that means I'm typing like made and the results aren't always that well organized. I plan on editing and rewriting everything once I have my own blog up so it should make a better story then.

CO: So far I haven't started really doing my job but normally I wake up at 6am, do PT, eat chow, then I go to work. Like I said so far it's been alot of paper work but soon I'll be settling in and trying to design Psyop products and signing contracts with Iraqi companies in order to get them to distribute them.

[Lonestar]

I love the coyote story Oerdin. Definately something to go into the memoirs.

[Mercator]

Very interesting! Good luck too, with the um... coyotes, sewage and Roscoe.

(subscribe)

[Eli]

Those terrorist coyotes!

(subscribe, of course)

[Lancer]

Set up a few claymores around the chicken coup and call it a night.

Love the story. Get a bunch of guys together like that, armed to the teeth, and funny things tend to happen.

[Barinthus]

subscribe me!

[Tattila the Hun]

I can imagine, a bunch of G.I's hiding around the henhouse, with them claymore triggers. Just like in Platoon.

Of course, a tripwire could be more efficient.

I wonder, are nw gogles usefull in coyote hunt?

[Bloody Monk]

With the Palaces and its compound so poorly constructed, the rest of the population must have it bad.

Glad to see the old GI sense of humor at work. Be well.

Monk

[Sirotnikov]

Wow, our own Iraq blog *sits down waiting for more*

[DAVOUT]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I spent much of today inventorying equipment so that it could be taken off of the old unit's books and put on my units books. It seems they lost a fair amount of equipment over the last year and they are now trying to pull a fast one by trying to get us to sign for equipment which isn't there. Luckily, we're on to them and now EVERYTHING will be layed out before we sign.

Every time, everywhere the same !!

[Chemical Ollie]

What will you call your soldiers' mess, "Chicken Ranch" or " Coyote Ugly" ?

[Barinthus]

Yeah! They ought mount a head of a coyote over the entrance of their mess.

[Chemical Ollie]

That Coyote store reminds my of my own military service, when my platoon spent a whole night waiting in the trenches instead of sleeping, because a deer set off a trip wire.

[Chemical Ollie]

This sequence is kinda disturbing when taken out of context:

and he's willing to eat just about everything in sight. One of the guys in the unit feed Roscoe a bunch of people

[Skanky Burns]

[Cruddy]

Originally posted by Oerdin


As long as we're talking about water I'd like to bring up another observation. Arabs seem to have no idea how to install plumbing because the toilets clog up with the slightest amount of toilet paper...

Can't comment on the lack of sewage treatment plants in Tikrit (I've heard there is a (small) one in Basra but...

... while staying in Egypt there was no sign of toilet paper in the "native" toilets. Instead there was a hosepipe for sluicing down the area...

... seems strange to westerners BUT it's actually more freshening in a desert environment... at least, I thought so.

[Oerdin]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
What will you call your soldiers' mess, "Chicken Ranch" or " Coyote Ugly" ?

Hehe, those sound like excellent suggestions.

[Ted Striker]

This thread is cool as hell

[Oerdin]

Now seems like a good time to mention General Order #1. General Order #1 covers all American service members in Iraq and really reflects how anal and puritanical the American military establishment can be. General Order #1 prohibites Alcohol, Sex (by any service member with another service member or with a civilian), gambling (of any sorts), buying anything on the local economy (they want to control what you buy and where you buy it), possessing local currency, possessing any cell phones or personal radios (again they don't want you to be able to call or act without their permission), and the possession of any pornographic material.

Luckily, General Order #1 is widely ignored but it illistraites how ****ing stupid staff officers can be with their fears of losing control. Remember that all soldiers are in Iraq for at least one year and many are hear even longer so parts of this order are seen as highly unreasonable amoung service men.

Here is a list of banned items which the commanding General has order to be displayed in every porta potty:

General Order #1 Prohibited Items

Privately owned firearms, ammo, ordnance, or explosives

Captured or found firearms (I'd say about 50% of the soldiers I know have broken this rule mainly because they have fire arms taken from the Iraqi Army)

Unexploded ordance of any kind (This one isn't a problem because EVERYONE already has more munitions issued to them then they know what to do with. In my house my friends and I have 2 AT-4s, 40 grenades, 5 claymores, and 10 pounds of plastic explosives with 10 blasting caps and timers)

Alcohol, any amount (surprisingly this one seems to be followed by and large)

Controlled substances (prescription drugs must be in the original container or accompanied by the original prescription label)

Drug paraphernalia - including hooka pipes (smoking tabbacco in hookas is extremely common in the middle east and so this rule about hookas is largely ignored)

Phsyical performance enhancing dietary suppliments containing ma huang, creatine, ephedra, yohimbine, or androstenedione. (Not sure why they'd ban legal suppliments but they have)

Pornographic or sexually explicite photos, video tapes, movies, drawings, books, magazines, or similiar representations. (Your teenage daughters harliquin romance books probably break this rule because they have declared Maxium and FHM to be sexually explicit)

Cellular telephones, two way pagers, and two way personal data assistants not specifically authorized by the Commanding General on an individual bases. (They claim this is needed for Operation Security reasons but the real reason is they want complete control over what soldiers are allowed to know)

Unauthorized individual souvenirs or trophies (items of former enemy property)
-Items purchased at AAFES, bazaars, Iraqi merchants, etc, are not war souvenirs or trophies.
-Specifically authorized war trophies/souvenirs are: 1) Helmets and head coverings; 2) uniforms and uniform items such as insignia and patches; 3) canteens, compasses, rucksacks, pouches, and load bearing equipment; 4) flags; 5) military training manuals, books, and pamphlets; 6) posters, placards, and post cards
- Other items that clearly pose no safety or health risk and are not prohibited by law. Soldiers may bring items to their servicing judge advocate to determine whether the item is allowed. Knives, bayonets, etc are specifically prohibited as war trophies.