We've been living in the building behind this out door movie theater for a month now (kind of like a drive in but you just walk and sit, the first few weeks were sort of rough. Days when it was over a hundred outside and we had no power. Sucked pretty bad, the base kept giving us these huge generators that looked nice and new but would break down after a day or so over heating, fuel leaks, slipped bearings. We went through three before they brought in an old rusty generator that looked like an engine that was pulled out of a farm tractor and put a large fuel bladder in the ground. Since then we've had no problems, just the first two weeks. Our new home isn't anywhere as cool personally as the bunker that I had all to my self but it's nice having people around. It did isolate me a bit down there. The new hooch is close to the BX, internet and haji shops. We actually have hangers now so our guys are out of the sun while their working on the birds.
The base has started Friday night boxing and the first night we had 6 people go up for it and they all won, the next Friday we were 5 out of 7. Our guys are kicking butt out there. I posted a picture of one of the shiners after a match, should have some good boxing shots too soon. It's grown into quite the event.
Days are mixing one into another, sorry I haven't been writing lately, I've found jumping back and fourth between days and nights seems to impose some sort of writing block on me. I'm walking around dazed most of the time. Plus it doesn't help any that I'm a reading fool and I have the new Stephen King novel Song of Susanna coming in the mail. Should be here any time. I think I've read more out here then I've ever done in any period in my life and to anybody that knows me, that's a lot. Yes war is making me into a slacker. It's much easier to just go and post pictures sometimes.
It's surprising how much wildlife we've ran into. Every night we find a bigger camel spider and the Marines gather around and say "Wow, that's the biggest one I've ever seen". They just keep getting bigger each day, really! Which leads to other sorts of fights, they'll catch scorpions and other bugs and toss them in. They're big and mean and they'll eat anything, they tossed a mouse in once and you could hear the cheering from hundreds of yards away. Face it Marines are just big kids, take them to a body of water and they'll be skipping stones for hours happy, give them a magnifying glass they'll find an ant hole, if they invade your country expect silly stuff to be written on all the walls. Anyhow, we've ran into snakes both venomous and non, I've taken pictures of a few of them. Glad I was the only one that spotted the non venomous one, took the picture and let it go on it's way. I'm not much into killing things. Things I've found out? Scorpions do glow under black light, camel spiders have ten legs and two eyes and not even related to true spiders and don't ever use a k bar alone to kill a venomous snake.
I'm beginning to master the art of taking pictures and movies through night vision goggles. Should have a camcorder in the mail any..day..now. Building a rack to mount it with a set of NVG's, sure to improve the quality of my movies.
One of our pass times is playing Unreal Tournament over a network with personal laptops. We've had 8 laptops hooked up to a hub in airframes, we had a day off a couple of weeks ago and I think we played for 12 hours. By the time it was over we were all burned out on video games for a little while.
We all did suffer from a bit of mid deployment blues, the place we're at does suck but it is relatively safe. We sent one of our guys to Baghdad for a medical appointment and he came back with tales of wonders, you can wander around out in town, there's places to shop, the locals actually have cool stuff to sell unlike the junk that we have out here and people seem to be pretty friendly. Myself, other then the people that work on base I haven't had an contact with the outside world. The change over of power is just a concept that's in the news, not something that's striking into everyday life. We're just living day to day.
No comments:
Post a Comment