I can't recall everything we did at the Palace Complex. There were several in the area so I don't recall the name of the one we were in. Here is an article on the complexes, and another good article, with some pictures. Apparently they had been built for large numbers of important Sunni Baath Party members as vacation homes.

It was at this time that I was transferred to OPS(Operations) and had to say goodbye to my beloved ACE. I had been married to the ugly, 28-ton, always-broken bitch for four months, and would continue to pine for her. I had noticed a trend among soldiers who went to OPS; everyone hated it and couldn't wait to get out. No matter how little time they spent in the close proximity to the Captain & 1st Sergeant they were always treated badly by everyone else as soon as they escaped. I resolved to not spend much time in OPS and to try to get back to ACE squad, where I was the most experienced operator & knew my squadmates.

OPS did have it's perks, of course. The AC was fantastic, as was the view. The work was easy. The first few weeks our Captain did little but compile many of the pictures I have posted on this blog. I helped out his driver, SPC Hamidovic, and Top's driver, SPC Dash, who was the unit home-improvement guy. Everyone wanted to be friends with Dash. Unfortunately, my new home was spoiled by the fact that my dipshit A&O Platoon Sergeant, SFC LaVallay, followed me to OPS and became my immediate superior. I spent most of my time out of the building exploring the area. Anything to get away from that guy. I should say that Sergeant Lavallay was even more out of his element in OPS than I, and could have been worse. I found out later what worse really means. For the first time, we weren't required to carry our weapons everywhere and could actually relax in our PT clothing.

I noted that the complex wasn't guarded very well--sleepy tankers at the gates, no one at all watching the walls and most people walked around in PTs with no weapons. A disciplined group of 10 Iraqis could have killed hundreds of us.

Everywhere we went we found discarded, hidden weapons. Here we found an RPG and Dragonov sniper rifle in a ditch, close to half a rocket.


SPC Hamidovic initially seemed like a very lifeable guy, but it soon became obvious that he was untrustworthy. We went on a PX run to BIAP(Baghdad Int'l Airport) across the highway and he stole an Interceptor vest out of someone's Humvee. I later found out he was reading the commander's email and spying on everyone he could. I saw him get caught in several lies. Later, in Germany, he told me he could get me a pistol for $100, and I believe he could have.

One of the gates to the complex had a bazzar just outside of it. Groups of 2 or more soldiers were allowed to attend, until they closed it for security reasons. You can see the gate on Youtube here. The bazzar was in the open space to the right, just past the gate. The building just to the right of the building that gets hit by the arty was actually used as a whorehouse, with Iraqi women for the US Soldier customers. Someday I'll tell that story, but not today.

Being part of OPS, I was able to be a fly on the wall in the Cav's TOC. Here I began to get the idea that things were not progressing as well as I had thought they were. Apparently the war wasn't really over after all. I have scanned a report prepared in April 03 by some Cav commander that details what was going on--read it on the sidebar. In spite of this news, we were pretty insulated from outside events. I eventually created my own little "hooch" on top of the TOC building, where I could"get away from it all" and enjoy the view.


Donald Rumsfeld came to BIAP and we were allowed to go see him. I hated the guy for getting us into what I knew even at that stage to be another Vietnam and didn't go. I wish I had, I heard that a lot of soldiers asked some very pointed questions of him. I later read in Stars and Stripes that a colonel had raked him over the coals about why we didn't have enough Interceptor vests and up-armored humvees to go around. It turned into a major scandal.


Yet another example of how 1st platoon really were "War Pimps": A few weeks earlier word had gone around that we weren't allowed to keep souvenirs. Not even bayonets. The big piles of AKs and RPGs were gathered up and turned in to someone else. Everyone but 1st Platoon. They took all their illicit hardware out to a Special Forces range a few miles away and lit it all up. One of the guys later told me it was like 30 Rambos at a Fourth of July picnic. Fucking bastards. Then their weapons disappeared. No one's telling, but I'll bet some made their way back inside of vehicles. Anyway, the point is we weren't allowed to keep souveniers. So what does SFC Corner do? He takes a fucking huge Iraqi road sign saying "Baghdad" with an arrow on it to the airport, meets Donald Fucking Rumsfeld himself, had Ol' Don AUTOGRAPH the fucking thing, then takes it home! No one was going to argue about taking home something signed by the US SecDef! SFC Corner hung that sign on their palace wall, and when we got home it went on his platoon wall. Here are four of his soldiers holding his sign.


A month after joining OPS, we lost our fantastic commander, Captain Wilson, to another unit. He was replaced with Captain_____, who sucked balls. I won't go into details--everyone hated him. He especially sucked when compared to how great Captain W had been. I longed to leave and kept pestering the 1st Sarge to transfer me back. So, he did. But not back to A&O. He sent me to 2nd Platoon, where all the misfits landed. I was not warmly welcomed, until I opened my laptop case, when it was smiles all around. I should mention that I was the only enlisted soldier in our company who took his coputer to Iraq. Probably the only one in the Battalion, and it was only one of three laptops in the company that could play DVDs(and the 1st Sgt and Commander weren't about to host Movie Nite on their laptops). By the time we left a year later, I would say that 80% of our entire battalion had one.

The Hadjiis sold bootleg DVDs for $4 each. They were very good. Many of them were "collections", like all of the Indiana Jones titles or 3 James Bond films. I have searched the world over for this sort of deal and have not found it. I guess I need to go to China. Anyway, I bought a shit-load of movies.

The Second Platoon guys weren't bad, but the leadership was horrible. SFC Summers was loathed by everyone. Even our 1st Sergeant didn't like the guy. To give you an idea about him, he took 50% of the bottled water for the NCOs, even though there was only like 5 of them to the 25 enlisted soldiers. When the new commander took over, we all talked to him in a group and he fixed it. But he shouldn't have had to get involved. The NCOs had their own building, where the AC and lights worked. We were stuck in the hot dark. I spent the first few days fixing an abandoned fridge. The huge generator parked out front had gobs of excess capacity, even though it would randomly turn off by itself sometimes. I carefully fit the door back onto the friedge with new hinges, made a seal out of excess rubber and scavenged a super-long extension cord. It worked well and I was proud.


Now we could at least have cold water. Unfortunately, about 8 hours after I hooked up the fridge, the generator picked that night to stop working. Sgt Summers called for me post-haste and screamed up and down. My asshole squad leader, SSG Smith ordered me to completely disassemble the fridge and throw the pieces into the lake. When I asked about fixing the generator first he told me I was going to make it hard on myself. I won't lie--I cried when I took apart that fridge, and many of the other enlisted guys told me I had their sympathy. The next day, I grabbed another guy, our weapons and we climbed through a huge palace about 5 miles away. We pulled some circuit-breakers out of a big AC-unit on the roof. I wired in the higher-capacity breakers and fixed the generator. None of the NCOs ever thanked me, let alone apologized. Sometimes I really miss the Army.

2nd Platoon was useless for most things because our leadership was so useless. While OPS had showers, flush toilets, cool AC, etc etc and 1st Platoon had built a latrine and was running secret missions to steal water and buy Iraqi pizzas and booze, we sat around in our hovel and were shitting through an ammo box into little holes we dug with our e-tools in our front yard, waving at the vehicles and joggers passing by. Predictably, the whole platoon caught dysentery and we all spent a week in misery. My bowels have never been the same ever since.

There was a lot of weird shit around to check out. I tried to make friends with the Special Forces guys next door, but they weren't having it. Down the road were Civil Affairs, who hooked me up with pizza for everyone after I fixed their computer. I spent a lot of time looking for portable AC compressors but every one had already been swiped. I tried to get this huge man-made floating island working, but the diesel motors were beyond me.

I tried to talk to the Iraqis at the bazzar but they obviously just said what I wanted to hear.

What did we do next? I forget, and I'm running low on pictures so I'm gonna move forward faster.

We got portapotties the day before we left for Camp Dogwood outside the town of Bilad, which is about 60 miles North of Baghdad, on the way to Tikrit. There we re-joined the battalion. We all grumbled about leaving our, by then comfy palaces, and we knew that life with the whole battalion would be more regimented, but we went. We were ordered to leave our generators and AC where they were. 1st platoon took theirs. Guess who went without for the next three weeks.

I didn't take any pictures at Bilad, as it was a steamy shithole. A couple of gutted buildings in the middle of nowhere. It was good to meet up with some of the boys from the other companies, and within a week we had power again, but AC was always a problem. 1st platoon had brought theirs with, and built an ingenious system of taped-together insulated water-bottles to channel the cold air to every room. I could barely sleep in my room, it was so hot and wet. I had to put on my BDU top and bundle up when I went across the courtyard into the 1st platoon AO. They took apart their AC units to provide room to put their water bottles so they would be chilled. They build wooden dividers and closets and actually rounded up TVs and other goodies. They had fabricated an entire weight set to work out with that they brought too. Bastards.

During this time we actually had regular deliveries of foodstuffs and movies from the Hadjis. I bought large amounts of their local juice, in sealed boxes. I was pretty content. Each platoon took turns "guarding" the generator(the same huge one the AVLB squad had grabbed a month or so ago), which meant filling the diesel fuel every few hours. Then one of our dipshit NCOs forgot, it ran out, and then 2nd Platoon was permanently filling the fucking thing from then on.

The commander had us build outdoor showers out of plywood. We got our conexes and went through them. We went down the street to the PX, where we met Bulgarian soldiers(not a word of English, and they smelled horrible). I once saw a convoy of Spanish soldiers roar by. Half the men had beards and the gorgeous women had long, blowing hair. It looked to me like I had joined the wrong Army.

I learned a bit about how to take care of a 113 and carried a SAW for a while. Everyone started ordering laptops and so I wasn't a celebrity anymore. We started doing PT again, very early in the morning, before it got too hot. I don't think we actually did any missions while there.

This was about June(?) and it was horribly hot. We were all used to the heat by then, but it was still hard to sleep and even breath. If I didn't wear a hat the top of my head would sunburn. You couldn't touch any metal objects left outside in the sun. The shower water was in a black plastic tub on top of the plywood shower, and if you went in the late afternoon the water was so hot it felt like it would burn you.

Eventually word came down that I was to accompany a group that was going back the way we had came to pick up the vehicles we had left behind. We would take them South to Kuwait, where it was assumed the rest of the bttn would meet us so we could all leave.

That ride was horrible. We went in unarmored humvees and it was too fucking hot. How does anyone live there in the summer? We picked up the vehicles, including C43, PFC Floyd's ACE, and took them all down to Kuwait. The only good thing about that trip was that my buddy George had to come & suffer with me.

After the first few days, life in Kuwait settled into a regular routine. Since we were a small(30?) group, nobody cared what we did. Everyone decided unanimously that weapons would be left in the tent. For the entire month of June and half of July there was no AC in the tents, so there wasn't much incentive to stay there. I would wake about 10, take a shower, walk a couple miles to some command post, where I would plug in my laptop and surf the net in the nice cold AC. Around 1800 I would go to chow, and food there was quite good, in the big trailers Halliburton had set up, then take another shower and watch a movie on my computer. We had two huge metal coolers in the tent(called "Coffins"). in one went water bottles, in the other went towels. To sleep you would put one or two ice-cold wet towels on your chest or head. Around 2AM you had to get up and do it again.

Unfortunately, around two weeks after we got there, my laptop's On/Off switch broke. Don't buy HP! That switch was the least of my problems with that thing. I started reading a lot of books, and had to go to the internet tent with the rest of the proletarians.

We occasionally had to help guard the base, which wasn't too hard. Usually it meant riding around with the Hadjiis who filled the water tanks and pumped out the portapoties. Around this time I had received an invitation from my good Kuwaiti friend Bader's family to come & visit them in Kuwait City. Good thing I had disregarded the previous orders to leave cell phones at home. Now, if the whole battalion had been down there, there was no way I could have done it. Simple rule: The larger the military organization, the less freedom. As it was, Chief Warrant Officer Barnes was good enough to let me out four times. Each time, Bader or a family member would drive out to the base & pick me up.

I'll finish this blog when I've the time in a few weeks.