Welcome to Balad

...and smell and hear.

When I was in college, I was read a bit of a fascinating book by Tim O'Brien called The Things They Carried. While I have nothing so profound to share, I thought it might be interesting to detail some of my surroundings, as well as the things we count to mark the passage of time.

Almost everything here is an assault on the senses. You can't escape the smell of burning refuse, a chronic necessary evil north of LSA Anaconda, particularly when the wind shifts. Most of the bathroom facilities are the portable type (Johnny-on-the-spots), that are cleaned twice a day, so you simply become accustomed to the aroma of a bathroom in need of cleaning or the stench of a "honeydew" truck (otherwise known as an SST*) in action. Immediately upon stepping into any chow hall, you smell human sweat mingled with grease and old fish (best diet plan in the world). And always, there's dust coating your nostrils.

* Shit Sucking Truck

You can't escape the drone of air conditioners, the rumble of heavy construction equipment, the deafening roar of F-16's coming and going, and always...there's the percussive BOOM of mortars to tighten your nerves.

We have eyelids to shut off our vision when we choose to. Why don't we have noselids and earlids, as well?

And so we count. Like prisoners counting the days and weeks and months with hashmarks on the walls, we count.

Everyone begins with days. If you're scheduled for a 122-day deployment, you count up or count down or both. It can be so depressing, though, until you're near the end. So you might count weeks instead.

But you find yourself counting everything you do on a semi-regular basis after a while. I have nine more half-mile treks to the laundry facility with a load of clothes, two more bars of soap, and three more cannisters of coffee creamer to go. I have at least 25 more blog entries, give or take. I note that my shampoo bottle will probably last the entire deployment--I watch it not because I think I'll have to replace it but because it is a visual reminder of how much time I have left. The same goes for my toothpaste, and my haircut.

I've almost finished my "Run to Baghdad." This is a fitness incentive hosted by our services department in which we can keep track of how many miles we run, and when we've done 100--which is actually to Baghdad and back from here--we get a t-shirt. I should be able to do one more run to Baghdad before I leave.

I have only five more paychecks before I'm home again.

The days are getting shorter and cooler. It's dark long before we go home at the end of the day now. Yesterday, something felt different and it took me a few minutes to realize what it was: the sky was overcast. I stopped and stared in disbelief. I haven't seen clouds since I got here--not like that, anyhow. We saw them one day in the distance, on the horizon, and we stared at them like we were retarded.

The advantage of shorter, cooler days--aside from the break from the heat and the fact that Portapotties don't smell as bad--is that the days seem to pass faster. Time's a funny critter. The days now are just as long and full as the days were when I arrived, but they seem to pass faster somehow. I'm more familiar with my job and have gone from a resource-sucker (how I always feel when I'm new) to a contributor, someone who knows who to talk to and what to do to make things happen. So I get (and take) more work. Nothing makes time pass like work.

It has ceased to matter to me that I don't get time off. Our commander has given us what amounts to flex hours, to ensure we have time to do personal things and sleep in if we need to, but I rarely do now. But it's nice to know I can if I need to. Even when I'm off, it isn't really like being off, because I can't get away from where I am and what's going on around me. I can't do anything off-duty that I can't and don't do while I'm on duty, so it doesn't matter whether it's my "day off" or not anymore, until I get home.

Life in the AOR is a soul-crushing grind, if you let it be. We survive it by leaning on one another. In an odd way that only another deployed person would understand, my squadron here is my family until I leave.

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