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Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Television brightens spartan quarters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forward Operating Base Row, Iraq � They patrol one of the most hostile regions of Iraq and must endure some of the most primitive living conditions of any American soldiers in this war-torn country.
But thanks to some clever bureaucratic maneuvering, soldiers who so far have been given the worst of everything scored one luxury â€â€? a 42-inch plasma TV, which they weren’t supposed to get.
But 1st Sgt. Delston Branch, a normally upright member of the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor Regiment’s Bravo Company, was able to convince staff officers that the $4,000 TV had been promised to his soldiers.
“I told them that the sergeant major gave us the TV,” said Branch, a Georgia State Patrol trooper in Washington County in civilian life. “Then I saw the sergeant major and told him we ought to have it, and he went along.”
A few days later, the battalion operations center where the TV would have been placed burned.
At Row, the TV holds an altarlike position at the center of the base’s main building â€â€? one of the few with an intact roof.
The TV has an audience nearly around the clock, and most soldiers watch from five overstuffed leather chairs on a raised wooden platform.
When a particularly popular movie is playing, up to five more soldiers sit on the platform itself â€â€? a configuration they mockingly call “stadium seating.” On a recent afternoon, soldiers saw a triple feature â€â€? “Spiderman II,” “Van Helsing” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” â€â€? between combat patrols through a restive Sunni area south of Baghdad.
Hostile area
The soldiers here are allowed just one shower every three days and 20 minutes of weekly telephone calls at a base so vulnerable to rockets, mortars and small arms fire that they wear helmets and body armor any time they step outside. But they say they’re making the best of the bad circumstances and actually prefer their situation to more comfortable, yet mundane, living conditions at larger, more established bases.
“The thing we like about this place is that there’s no busywork,” said Staff Sgt. James Dunkle, 37, of Phenix City, a member of Alabama Army National Guard’s 167th Infantry Regiment. “We do our missions, and then we come back and relax. The things we do serve a purpose.”
The infantry soldiers from Alabama and the Georgia Abrams tank operators based here also train and perform daily missions with Iraqi army soldiers at an adjoining military compound. They operate road checkpoints and conduct raids throughout a mostly rural area lined by canals, palm trees and farm fields.
The bucolic setting is deceptive, though.
The soldiers have encountered multiple roadside bombs and they get shot at and mortared regularly.
Instead of complaining about their austere conditions and exhausting schedule, they seem to take pride in having it tougher than anyone else in the 48th Brigade Combat Team.
“Two days before we left Kuwait we found out we were coming here,” said Sgt. Jeremy Birchfield, 27, of Leeds, Ala. “It might have been nice to live in one of the bigger FOBs but this is where I’d rather be. I came here to fight a war and there’s no doubt living here that we’re in a war.”
Unlike some of the larger, more established U.S. bases where soldiers eat catered meals, work out in air-conditioned weight rooms and sleep in one- or two-person trailers, soldiers here sleep on cots in dusty, bombedout buildings with no plumbing.
Their cafeteria is a small, plywood-enclosed room that reeks of foul drainage water.
There’s only one sink and it has no faucet or running water.
The tile floor is broken in so many places that it’s more concrete than tile.
But they have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of DVDs � and the best TV in the region. Do they ever argue about what to watch?
“No way,” said 1st Lt. Leo Deason, 39, a firefighter from Trussville, Ala. “Whoever shows enough initiative to get up out of their chair and put a DVD in can watch whatever they want.”
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