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Thursday, September 29, 2005
Hurry up and wait
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Baghdad, Iraq — He stood. He sat. He stood again. He told jokes. He told old war stories. He went looking for matches.
Spc. Harvey Beecher did this week what tens of thousands of other soldiers do in Iraq. He waited and waited. It’s part of the military culture. Waiting for hours. Waiting for days.
Things take time in a war zone. There are situations, complications, delays.
This time, Beecher was waiting for something good: a flight home to Glennville for two weeks of leave. “I would rather be here and wait than be back at my tent,” said Beecher, 32, a state corrections officer. “I have to do something to break the monotony.”
There are lines everywhere in Iraq. At the airport. At the Subway restaurants. At the free Internet trailers. Some lines are fast. Some are deathly slow. Waiting for hours for something is not unusual in the military.
At the airport, waits can last several hours. Some soldiers read, some sleep and some watch movies in the Twinkie-shaped passenger waiting tent. Occasionally, distant explosions vibrate in their chests.
Beecher waited for more than a hour until someone announced over a loudspeaker that his flight had arrived.
“Finally,” he said as he put on his body armor. He was going home. But he must soon return to Iraq — and more waiting.
You like, uh, the sauce?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taji, Iraq — They are called “just-in-case letters.”
Soldiers leave them with their families before they go to war, telling them how much they love them. Some write about where they want to be buried. Some contain wills.
Photo by Louie Favorite/AJC — First Sgt. Bruce Oliver (left) shares a laugh with his son, Sgt. Jerome Register at Camp Taji.
First Sgt. Bruce Oliver prayed, double-checked his life insurance policy and left behind his super-secret barbecue sauce recipe.
The former restaurateur has been making the ketchup-based sauce since 1976. He wrote it down and tucked it away in his dresser at home for his son, Sgt. Jerome Register.
Oliver said he has never revealed all of the roughly 30 ingredients to anyone else. He will only say that it is a mild Georgia-South Carolina-style sauce. He makes it for yearly family reunions and turns batches of it into gifts for friends.
“I just kept adding to it and testing it,” said Oliver, 57, who lives in Reidsville and works as an internal affairs investigator for the state corrections department. “Hell, it hadn’t been written down until I wrote it down in this letter.”
Oliver serves with his son in the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment. The two talked about the sauce as they smoked cigars on the front step of Oliver’s hooch.
Register, 33, said when he returned home on leave in the fall, he fished the recipe out of his father’s dresser and made the sauce on his own for the annual Labor Day weekend family reunion. He brought some back for his father to try in Iraq.
“He did good,” said his father, a Vietnam veteran. “It tasted just like I made it.”
Then Register turned to visitor and joked: “Do you want me to walk around the corner so he can tell you the truth?”
Take your gun, soldier. No, leave it behind
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. soldiers must carry their weapons with them when they step off their posts in Kuwait.
Yes, in Kuwait, the country the United States helped liberate from Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1991.
Hussein is no longer in power. But there are still threats of all kinds from terrorists in the Middle East.
So the soldiers remain armed in Kuwait per U.S. military policy. And that is causing some headaches.
Consider this recent incident:
Lt. Col. Paul Williams and Capt. Paul Edwards were in uniform, stopping by a hotel outside Kuwait City. They were there to pick up some newspapers when a bunch of hotel security guards approached them at the main gate. Such a show of force is common at many hotels in Kuwait.
“Do you have any weapons?” asked one of the guards.
Williams revealed that both he and Edwards were carrying pistols. But they didn’t plan to bring them into the hotel. One would stay behind with the weapons in their burgundy Chevrolet Suburban. Soldiers travel around Kuwait in groups so one can guard their weapons while the others do business.
The guard at the hotel appeared nervous. He told them to stay put and went to get a supervisor. Then, a more official-looking man in a black cap appeared. He asked the same question: “Do you have any weapons?”
Williams repeated his answer.
There seemed to be some confusion. The guards weren’t budging.
Then a third man in plain clothes showed up and told Williams and Edwards no weapons were allowed in the hotel.
Yes, Williams knew that but he wasn’t planning to bring his pistol inside.
But the hotel employees still weren’t budging. They didn’t seem to want the Suburban anywhere near the hotel. So they diverted the soldiers’ vehicle over some metal security spikes in the road and into a side parking lot.
Unarmed, Williams went inside and got his newspapers.
When he returned, Edwards, of Hinesville, Ga., joked: “Sorry, sir. I can’t let you in this vehicle with a weapon.”
Williams, of Park City, Utah, shot back: “You must have looked suspicious.”
