Here We Go.

On November 22, we left for Iraq. We flew in on a C130. We had on our flack vest, kevlar, ammo, and M16. Everyone was squeezed together, pissed off, hot…no one wanted to be landing in Iraq…no one knew what the hell we were about to get into. I have to admit though, I was kind of excited. The flight crew told us we would be landing within 15 minutes and they would be shooting off flares and the pilot was going to do a combat landing. No one knew why they were shooting off flares but then we found out it was to distract insurgents. And a combat landing, basically the pilot swerves back and forth and drops fast. It sucks and people threw up. We finally landed and we are rushed onto buses. It looked normal…didn’t see any crazy Iraqis running around, we weren’t being shot at…was this really Iraq? We were then taken to some welcoming bullshit. Everyone just wanted to get to where we were staying. After a couple hours we arrived at our new home: a trailer park. I was so happy to see my white trailer. We were the “S Block”. There was about three rows of 7 trailers each…every trailer held six people…and everyone had a roommate. I ended up staying with “G“. A tiny little Dominican girl with a big mouth, a lot of attitude, and a good heart. She made me listen to reggaeton and I made her listen to Minor Threat. We were finally told we could get some sleep. We had planed not to wake up before 12 because we had the next couple of days off to relax and get orientated. We were idiots for thinking “yeah, just going to sleeping in…fuck the war going on.” The insurgents had other plans for us and at about 6am we hear boom…and the alarm goes off. (Every time our camp is attacked or threatened an alarm goes off and you have to get into a bunker or hard building.) G and I jumped out of bed, grabbed our gear, M16 and headed for the bunker. I never ran so fast in my life...thought it was the end of the world…we fucking tripped on rocks…we were a mess. Our whole unit is in the bunker like…what the fuck? We just wanted to sleep! Finally the all clear sounded and we went back to sleep. Within the first couple days we were attacked several times. Let me explain being attacked. The insurgents set up mortar tubes outside our camp and they place mortar rounds in them and they will come flying into the camp randomly. Sometimes they’ll place ice on the “trigger” and when it melts the mortar will go off. They really don’t have a method to their madness. They will also do drive-bys at entrance points. They set up IEDs along the roads and ambush convoys with small arms fire and RPGs. They will break through check points and set off car bombs. That’s basically what we experienced over there.