March 27, 2003
On the morning of the 27th, it was clear, and after three days of dust and more than a week on the road, it was cleaning day. They hauled up a 500-gallon water buffalo full of rotten-smelling treated water … all the water anyone wanted.
The Air Force tactical air controllers set up a tarp for privacy by their 113. Most of the others weren’t so modest.
Sgt. Gibson described his routine: “I strip down butt-naked by the side of the tank, take a 5-gallon water can and do my whole body.”
Sgt. Edwin Leon explained, “The typical soldier will wear undergarments at least seven days. But in the process he will take a ‘bitch shower’ or a ‘whore bath.’ A trickle of water on a washcloth. Soap it up. Lather your body down. Another trickle of water, rinse it out, and wipe that soap and dirt down as best you can. Nuts, ass, pits and feet. Those are the four main things.”
Soldiers swept the dust out of their tanks. They rearranged gear to make more room, and tossed out trash and buried it.
I started my own cleanup by blowing clumps of mud out of my nose and wiping the waxy grime out of my ears. We had to be careful cleaning the crust of dirt around our eyes, or they’d become red and inflamed. The dust was fine-grained, like talcum powder. As clean as it was out here in the desert, sometimes I felt like this dust coating my nostrils and throat and lungs was the dust of dead civilizations. Specifically, hundreds of thousands of dead Sumerians. GI blogger Teflon Don had the same thought four years later. It had an ancient, exotic taste to it. It was sterile stuff, but sometimes felt like corpse ashes in my mouth.
Stripping down, I realized had lost weight. My torso was pale white, but my hands, face and neck were a deep ruddy brown. Whitish gray dust was trapped in the scales and cracks of my dried-out hands, leaving them ashen in places. I thought it was just dirt at first but I couldn’t wash it off. Skin was sluffing off my feet, which hadn’t been out of their boots in more than a week except for a couple of sock changes. There was dust in everything, no matter how well wrapped it was. I washed some underwear, socks and t-shirts in a bucket and strung up a clothesline of parachute cord across the back of the Bradley.
We had been the most-forward placed conventional unit in Iraq for most of the past week. Beyond our line of tanks was the open desert, and beyond that, Karbala, the Republican Guard and the approaches to Baghdad.
Iraqi raiders had hit units on our flanks and to our rear, invariably with disastrous results for the Iraqis – 40 dead one day, 150 dead another day – but our company had yet to see direct action. We were now poised to fight through the so-called Karbala Gap for a strike on the Republican Guard south Baghdad, but we were being held back awaiting “situational development.’’ The terms of that were not defined for us. We are all tired of waiting. Capt. Wolford said we should be careful what we wished for.
On the afternoon of the 27th, we picked up and moved a few kilometers north, startling a wild ass that bounded away from the tanks. The animal stopped to look back as our behemoth tanks took up defensive positions in this new piece of desert.
“Hey, where did that fucking donkey come from?” Baxter said. “That must be Hajji’s MLRS, a donkey with a couple of RPGs strapped to it. Or maybe he’s spying for Saddam. He got air-dropped in … ‘Go on, donkey! Tell us what you see!’ ”
After dark, the cavalry scouts spotted what they took to be a BRDM, an Iraqi armored scout vehicle. Two platoons were ordered forward. We listened to the chatter on the company net as the tanks maneuvered to hunt it down. The eight tanks of Red and White platoons raced forward to head off the reported vehicle, but never made contact.
“It’s the recon donkey!” Baxter said.
There was a bunker up ahead that Attack, the mech infantry company, had cleared during the day. Hidden under the ruins of an oil pumping station, the grunts had found an Iraqi military radio, maps and radio logs in Arabic, which were passed on to intelligence analysts to determine what the Iraqis knew about our force here. It was interesting, this idea that they had been watching us.
Lustig reported seeing two men bolt across the desert on his thermal-imaging device. They disappeared into the ruined building where the hidden observation post was. Lustig and Middleton fired four tank rounds into it.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:16 am on Tuesday, March 27, 2007
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March 27th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.03.27
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March 27th, 2007 at 2:52 am
March 27, 2003
March 27, 2003 Critter Crittenden On the morning of the 27th, it was clear, and after three days of dust and more than a week on the road, it was cleaning day. They hauled up a 500-gallon water buffalo full