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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Top 10 ways to remember Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forward Operating Base Yusufiyah, Iraq — Soldiers stationed at this makeshift base are dreaming of major remodeling plans for their houses back in Georgia.
Louie Favorite/AJC
Sgt. Nicholas Greer of Jacksonville, Fla., (kneeling) and Sgt. Michael Flanagan of Detroit do their laundry at the former potato factory where some Georgia National Guard troops have been living. • More photos of life in the potato factory.
They want to make changes so they won’t feel too out of place moving back to their more traditional homes next year.
After all, for the past five months, they have been living in a cavernous industrial building that once housed a potato factory.
You have to have a good sense of humor to live in this Spartan place. The soldiers sleep in large, open bays where the potatoes were once stored. Their base is surrounded by concrete barriers and guard towers.
Insurgents occasionally fire mortars and rockets at the base. Civilian contract workers, according to the soldiers, are too afraid to come here.
In the coming days, Georgia National Guard soldiers will pull out of here and assume new missions at more substantial bases farther south. Their redeployment home is still scheduled for late May or early June 2006.
But they have already started dreaming about renovation plans for their own homes. So here is the top 10 list of “to-do” things provided by several soldiers for when they get back to Georgia. They are in no particular order.
(Don’t worry, spouses, they are only joking. I think.)
Level my house. And, in its place, build a sheet metal building with a single small air conditioning unit on top.
Rebuild my driveway into a serpentine-shaped entrance for security precautions.
Hire a bunch of Iraqi Army soldiers to guard my home because they will shoot at anything.
Have someone throw a stick of dynamite in my yard occasionally to help me sleep.
Disconnect the air conditioning system in my truck and drive around my neighborhood with the windows rolled up.
Add a garbage burn pit to my yard.
Throw out my mattress and sleep on lumpy piles of junk.
Surround my house with coils of barbed wire that has trash hanging on it.
Place one portable toilet in my yard and let all my neighbors and friends use it any time they want. Empty it only once a week.
Place 10 New York City sewer rats in my walls. And let them roam free.
Georgia soldier fights war on waste
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taji, Iraq — He might well be the only Georgia soldier in Iraq who’s armed with a spoon. Plastic at that.
Bita Honarvar/AJC
Capt. Lane carries his plastic Georgia Bulldogs cup, which he uses to cut down on waste.
In Capt. Andrew Lane’s right calf pocket are least four spoons — two white ones from the Camp Taji dining hall and two standard issue brown spoons that come with the Army’s Meals Ready to Eat. He carries them everywhere along with his flak jacket, helmet and M-16 rifle.
Lane, 32, assigned to the 118th Field Artillery Regiment’s 1st Battalion, arrived in Iraq in early June. Since then, he has been waging a personal war to conserve energy, limit waste and promote personal well-being at this camp north of Baghdad.
When he sees outside lights on during daylight hours, he rushes to switch them off. He turns off dripping faucets in the latrines.
Besides the spoons, which he reuses for his meals, Lane carries a 16-ounce Georgia Bulldogs plastic cup because the waxed paper cups at the dining halls are small and wasteful. He takes the salt and pepper packets from other soldiers’ MRE packets and adds them to what’s already on the tables.
The amount of food, plastic utensils and aluminum soda cans that ends up in the massive green trash bins are cause for sleepless nights for Lane. There’s no recycling at the military bases in Iraq.
“Just think,” he said. “By the end of my career, I will have saved the Army thousands of dollars in plasticware.”
“Most people in the military don’t think about these things,” he continued. “They should. And how great would it be to get the Iraqi people to start thinking about recycling.”
Efficiency is his business
Back home in Athens, Lane, a former police officer at the University of Georgia, works for a program jointly run by Southface Energy Institute and Jackson Electric Membership Corporation. His job is to inspect new homes for energy efficiency.
He childproofed the electrical outlets in his home even before son Christopher was born two years ago because the holes in the sockets allow cold air to seep in during the winter.
Bita Honarvar/AJC
Lane speaks with Maj. David Weis, 3rd Infantry Division Aviation Brigade public affairs officer, at a Camp Taji dining hall.
In Athens, Lane rarely drives his car; he bikes to most places and is chagrined to admit that his wife, Franchesca, drives a sport utility vehicle. He likes to listen to his dual-powered radio, which runs on a solar panel by day and a hand-cranked windup battery at night.
It’s easy to spot Lane in public places on the base. While other soldiers are in their gray Army T-shirts and black shorts, Lane is wearing 40 pounds of full body armor and his Kevlar helmet no matter how hot it gets.
Soldiers are not required to wear body armor or helmets inside the gates of large camps such as Taji, Liberty and Striker.
But the pragmatist in Lane dictates that safety comes first at all times, even when he’s taking his early morning walk.
“We’re in a war zone,” he said. “People are trying to kill us. I wear all this for the same reason you wear safety belts in a car.”
It’s also why Lane often eats lunch and dinner at odd hours, when the cafeteria is nearly empty.
“Why blow up 20 people when you can get 500?” he said.
A family man
Soldiers are perplexed by Lane. Some dismiss him as a “strange dude.” But most have come to embrace his self-professed oddities.
“He wears more body armor in [the dining facility] than we do when we’re out on patrol,” said 1st Lt. David Disi of a Rhode Island infantry company that is attached to the 118th.
The burly, blond Lane stands to win a $20 bet if he can go through the entire yearlong deployment in full armor. As one soldier pointed out, Lane has made it through the sweltering summer months in Iraq. The rest of the time should be a relative breeze.
Lane is first and foremost a family man — his son Christopher is the main reason he stayed in the Georgia Army National Guard. He wanted “to put food on the table” for his family.
But he also believes strongly in the war on terrorism.
“I stayed in so I could help make the bad people go away,” Lane said. “Iraq seems to be a magnet for bad people.”
But saving the planet for generations to come is Lane’s second passion.
He began small — collecting aluminum cans on campus and recycling them, earning about $150 a month. Later, at Fort Benning, he took extra food that would have been thrown away to a local battered women’s shelter. He collected recyclables and took the long way back to the barracks to dump them at the PX recycling center.
“To throw away packaged food when people are hungry, it’s crazy,” Lane said.
Lane admits his military career sometimes puts him at odds with environmentalists.
“Sometimes I have to tell them, ‘Hey, I’m on your side,’ ” Lane said. “Just because I’m in this uniform, doesn’t mean I’m some sort of Nazi.”
