Life on Patrol Base Deason

Sorry for the long delay; meant to get to this sooner, but I have been keeping busy, which is a good thing.

It’s a little cold here this morning—foggy and 47 degrees. Deason is named after a Staff Sergeant from the 101st Airborne Division who was killed in combat operations in 2005. It’s about the size of a football field. There are anywhere between 80 and 100 people who live and work here, most of which never leave the walls.

We live in CHUs (containerized housing units). Each CHU has three rooms, and there are two guys to a room. In the CHU you get a bed, a locker, and a nightstand. Mine currently still does not have power. We are waiting for a cable. Not sure what's so special about this cable, but we have been waiting for it for a while. Perhaps it holds the workings of world peace, and once connected we can all go home.

We have a new chow hall (as you may or may not recall, the old one burned down on 30 October), and it has a TV in it with Armed Forces Network (AFN). Unfortunately, this too has been down for the past couple of days. Sportscenter in the morning was nice to watch; hope they get it fixed. We get a hot dinner, and sometimes we get a hot breakfast. Lunch is either an MRE or scrounging on whatever is in there—breakfast cereal, peanut butter and jelly, chips, or whatever people send. There is also an internet café-type place that has a couple of phones and some computers that are specifically for recreational use (this is where I work on the blog—you can’t do blogs on Army systems due to bandwidth requirements).

We have toilets and showers, but we have found it difficult to sustain the infrastructure to maintain a complex system built by a bunch of hard working Indian guys. None of us are very good plumbers. First off, the materials they have available aren’t exactly great; and the craftsmanship is very creative, so you have to understand the mind of the guy who put it together before you can fix it. Power surges happen frequently, so surge protectors are a must, especially since everything is wired for 220 (and in some cases, 240…) We have a hot water heater, but it doesn’t work very well (80 dudes and one hot water heater = no hot water) so if you get a shower, it is not exactly warm. The gray water goes into the canal behind the compound and eventually runs into the Euphrades about 30 kilometers south of here. The black water (toilet waste) goes into a septic tank and we pay a guy to come and suck it out (and he probably goes and dumps it into the same canal our grey water goes into…). It’s sort of like one big RV.

Our office (we call it a team house) has a logistics office, and operations and intelligence office, and a big room we use for anything that doesn’t fit into those categories. IF we ever get our AFN antenna up, our TV will go in there, and we have a couple of refrigerators for munchies. There is also an Army computer we can check email on. I share an office with Doc; it has one of the two secure internet links we have for the team (only work stuff on these computers). I also currently have the only phone, but we are hoping the commo situation will improve soon.

Overall, it isn’t bad. I have lived in worse, others are living worse (but not many), and frankly I’d rather live here than on Disneyworld, which is our nickname for the huge bases that others live on. Too much traffic, and too many flagpoles and people who want to tell you how to do your job.

The other day I went to a big meeting with my Iraqi counterpart, Colonel Moshen. At the meeting were about 250 Sheiks and local leaders in the community. They discussed security (which isn’t bad in Mahmudiya, compared to other places) and the Sons of Iraq program, which the Iraqi government now owns. It was interesting to see how Iraqis get business done. The great part is that they were working through issues without trying to kill each other or blow each other up- at least not overtly, anyway.

Today’s travels take the team and some of the Iraqi staff to FOB Mahmudiya for a joint meeting, then I will attend another meeting with COL Moshen. I could write a book on him; More on that later.

Thanks for reading; I promise to get some pictures of Deason up soon. Take care.