I want my desert back

If I were to take a picture of this place right now I don't think many people would believe that I'm really in Iraq. It has rained for nearly three days straight and it looks more like a swamp around here than a desert. These up-armor humvees are great but I'm beginning to think canoes might be more appropriate. This place is miserable with this much mud and standing water around. It seems to turn the simplest activities (such as going to dinner) into a chore. A few days ago one of our platoons was on a patrol near a village when one of their trucks got stuck in the mud. They had to stay outside the wire all night until we could get to them the next morning. Outside the wire is not a god place to have car trouble. They were sure glad to see us when we rolled in the next morning to pull security as the vehicle was recovered. As we stood in our positions (I was the gunner that day so I manned the machine gun attached to the top of the truck) a dozen or so children from a nearby farm came to greet us. A few of the older boys were dead set on buying a watch from us and offered us a million different combinations of dollars and dinar (never amounting to more than four or five bucks). The younger kids continuously put their hands to their mouths which is always meant to let us know that they want candy. We handed out some snacks and chatted with them for a while. One little guy who couldn’t have been more than ten years old tried to sell us DVDs with who-knows-what on them. The picture sleeve that held them was usually a naked woman in some explicit pose. One soldier bought one for a dollar just to see what was really on it. Our Lieutenant grabbed a bunch of the pictures from the kid and tore them up, telling the boy that he was way too young to be hawking porn. The kid pretended to cry for a minute and then ran off to play as if nothing had happened. A cute little girl who was about three years old was trying to walk beside the other children but she couldn’t keep up. The ground was wet and muddy and with each step she took more mud built up on her tiny little shoes. Before long she looked like she was walking around with a cinder block strapped to each foot. She could barley lift her leg to take a step. It was pretty cute watching her totter around. When the humvee was finally pulled out we threw out the last of our candy to the kids and drove back to camp, finally escaping the mud and the cold.

The one bright side of this weather has once again been that the insurgent activity has been fairly mild. The bastards must have gotten tired of the inactivity though, because when the rain finally let up today they initiated a mortar attack. Sometimes when the mortars come in I can hear them impact somewhere off in the distance. But this time I actually felt the ground beneath me shake. I take it a bit personal when they land that close. Nothing was hit and no one was injured though. It was probably a long way off but it was still enough to make you think twice. Good thing the jerks have lousy aim.