A long shortest day of the year

Last night, with the area reaction force, I spent the night at a forward location (Camp Yankee). I only got about three hours of sleep, since I got done running around 2200, then went straight to my guard shift until 2300, then spent about a half hour trying to communicate with some Egyptian workers who were smoking the narguile pipe. They didn't smoke the fruity strawberry and apple tobaccoes I usually saw in Iraq, but a straight tobacco of the brand "Burj," with a picture of the same birdhouse towers I see in farms sometimes. Not one of them spoke any english, which rather surprised me because most of them had been in Kuwait for several years, and english is widespread here.

We woke up at 0115 and took off to stage by the Navistar-Safwan border crossing. The drive through the desert was quite long, because a very thick fog kept visibility down to just a few meters. Once on the border, we did a few patrols, drove through the Northeastern farmlands, and reacted to some unauthorized activity. When our mission was done we returned to Camp Yankee at breakneck speed, and almost had a bad accident.

The roads are destroyed from the many soaking and drying cycles we have endured in the last few weeks. Any wet place we drive through that isn't paved quickly becomes deeply rutted, and as the ruts dry they turn concrete-hard. As we went over a particularly nasty series of potholes and a small wadi in the dirt road the humvee bucked and pitched like a rodeo bull. I was thrown into the M240B machine gun, and slammed back into the hatch cover. As the humvee landed, I was shaken back and forth with tremendous force and speed, crashing against the sides of the turret like the clapper knocking inside a bell. The truck commander tried to get a hold of me as per rollover procedures (the humvee almost did flip completely forward), but by the time he reached I was already out the hatch. I had no idea which way was up or down, so I was lucky to have ended back in the vehicle. The whole ordeal truly hurt, and I stayed by the radios while the OE254 antennae were getting broken down, even though I had set them up and I should have at least participated. Most of the equipment was fine, but my camera was broken, which is unfortunate but not too great a loss.

By the time we returned to base the heavy dew from the morning had evaporated and been replaced by sand, and I had to clean the weapons again. We stayed on watch until midnight, and then I couldn't go to sleep so I listened to the latest "This American Life" radio show, read the news, and wrote this. Tomorrow I have to re-re-re-re-re-qualify on crew-served weapons maintenance at 1000, right in the middle of my planned "night" of sleep.