Bored and Sick of Getting Mortared.

Time started to go by pretty fast...days were slow but weeks flew by. Probably because we were use to our routine. After work we would usually take a nap, shower, go to the gym, go the PX, watch DVDs, clean (my roommate was obsessed with cleaning…it drove me crazy), decorate our walls with pictures from home and posters, and we would eat. I’m vegetarian so I lived on cheese sandwiches, french fries, ice cream, rice and beans. For one of my articles I wrote about how the Dining Facilities (DFACs) should have some sort of meat substitute and within a month or so, they offered two different microwavable dinners and this fake beef and rice thing…it was pretty good. We all started getting use to being attacked. We wouldn’t really go into the bunker when the alarmed sounded unless we heard the mortar hit. That was a bad habit but we just got numb to it. Two guys I worked with and I did a story on the Air Force gym and as we were walking there we heard a boom about 75 meters away from us. Nothing exploded so we kept on walking. Soon after the alarm went off and we found out it was a mortar round but it didn’t explode (the insurgents usually pack the mortars with so much explosives that they don’t go off). Thank God. One morning G and I heard the loudest fucking explosion. We were in the bunker before the alarm even went off. It turned out that a suicide bomber drove a car into a check point…he didn’t really make it past the first couple barriers but he did kill a couple Iraqi National Guard Soldiers. There were people from our unit at the gate when it happened and they took some pictures. Body parts were all over the ground.