Home > Georgians@War > Archives > 2007 > March > 03 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USTerrorized by mud
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Moni Basu
The mud takes on a life of its own, clinging to boots and anything else it can get its greedy hands on.
Imagine walking with 50 jars of Peter Pan peanut butter stuck to both your shoes. Well, that’s what it feels like in Iraq after an evening of rain turns the U.S. military bases into giant mud pits.
No amount of gravel can save us.
And so it was that I ventured out, nice and clean from the “female shower CHU” (that’s a containerized shipping unit) at the CPIC (Coordinated Press Information Center) offices in the Green Zone.
Photographer Louie Favorite and I were ready to make the long trek up to Forward Operating Base Sykes in Tal Afar. Distance wise, Tal Afar, about 60 miles west of Mosul, is not that far from Baghdad. But this is war and all embedded journalists travel by military transport.
That meant that after four days of sitting in a stuffy, smelly “media lounge” (no, there is no bar) with about 10 colleagues (in the end, they were all men I barely knew), I had to take the rhino (not the horned beast but an armored bus) back to Camp Striker.
The rain fell lightly all night. The ground was awakening like a sleeping monster.
A shuttle driven by a Bosnian man took us to BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) at 5 a.m. By then, we were sure to lose our battle with Mother Earth.
He dropped us and all our luggage off in the dark, smack in the middle of a pool full of sloshy goo that, as 2nd Lt. Shiloh Crane of Kennesaw pointed out, “not only will stick to anything it comes into contact with but cling to it.”
So much for being clean. Or walking to the terminal (a tent with a bunch of Air Force guys).
It was like trudging through quicksand carrying cement blocks on my back. By the time I finally got on the C-130, I looked like I had jumped into a vat brimming with creamy chocolate ice cream.
The soldiers have perfected their technique for removing mud from their desert combat boots. They kick jersey barriers, scrape wooden planks, wade through pools of muddy water and shuffle on gravel (all the while using language that cannot be repeated in this space).
The stuff still doesn’t come off.
At some bases like Sykes, the Army requires soldiers to carry an extra pair of boots if they want to use recreational facilities. They have to change into the clean boots before they can enter to use the computers or watch television.
Crane, a platoon leader with Company H, 121st Infantry, theorized that the mud was causing enough anger in Iraq to drive people to blow themselves up.
According to Crane, the answer to combating terrorism here was to send every Iraqi an extra pair of shoes. Until the two-shoe system is introduced, every rainfall will produce a terror cell and American soldiers will have to keep fighting.
At Sykes, the sun was dazzling at mid-day; not a single cloud in sight. I sure hope it stays that way.
Permalink | |
