Reflections...

I thought I would take a minute to reflect upon all the little aspects of life that you take for granted until you have to live without them.

Running Water- You can’t drink the water in Iraq so everything is in bottles. You brush your teeth out of a bottle, you wash your hands with purell, you clean things with bottled water (like when you use your pocket knife to cut up a piece of fruit and need to get it clean).

Indoor Plumbing- While there are quite a few hard stand bathrooms, they are not located where you live or work. To go to the bathroom at night I have to get out of my room, put on shoes and a reflective belt and walk 100 meters to the bathroom and then 100 meters back to my room. Just to give you a mental picture, imagine how nice those porta-johns are after a couple hundred Soldiers use them in 100 degree heat.

Your Own Food – Every day you go to the Dining Facility to see what is for dinner. You have no control over what they serve you. Some days there are a couple choices that seem okay, other days you have to decide what sucks the least. Either way, you can’t decide you are going to have Chinese or Mexican food, you are stuck with what they serve you. The other great part of the dinning facility is when the group of guys who suck out the porta-potties sits down right next to you and asks you to explain why you think American football is better than their football. Also sometimes you have meetings during the two hours they are open for dinner. You can’t just go back and make something, you have to wait until midnight chow or you need to go to the Shopette and buy a candy bar or a bag of chips.

Alone Time- While I am not a solitary person, I would like a couple minutes to myself each day. I wake up in a room with a roommate, I take community showers, the bathrooms are community, I eat in a dinning facility with hundreds of people, I work out in a community gym, I can’t even get in a car and just drive because we don’t have vehicles. I do get alone time on my way to and from work, but in the two mile walk I end up having to salute close to 300 people. Unless that person is a Captain, I out rank them and they salute me, or I have to salute them because they outrank me. I end up having to salute them and say, “Good Morning” a couple hundred times or if I can see their patch I reply with “blood on the ax or steel tigers lead the way or never quit or always ready or rise above it”. That gets annoying after a couple hundred times in a row.

Having a Vehicle – Walking everywhere really makes you appreciate how nice it is to be able to drive somewhere in the heat of the day. It doesn’t happen very often, but when you forget your id card inside your computer (all computers have an id login required) and walk the half mile to the dining facility and can’t get in, you wish you had a car to make the trip back and forth. I haven’t seen the statistics, but I think that the dining facility guards probably turn away 100 Soldiers a day and 0 terrorists.