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Thoughts from the Firmbase
Sweat glistens on foreheads as eight young men packed into a 15’ x 15’ room eat, sleep, and otherwise pass the time in another local Iraqi home turned firmbase for 96 hours. It’s pretty warm today—the warmest it’s been yet. It’s only mid-April and Marines are already returning from foot-mobile cache sweeps looking as if they had a bucket of water dumped over their head. Their cammies soaked through from mid-thigh all the way to upper-arm, they hydrate constantly, and it’s barely enough to regain the fluids they loose on a single patrol.
Once again, I find myself sitting in an Arab home with about two platoons of Marines, waiting to go on patrol. Waiting at the firmbase to go out on patrol may be the worst part of my job. I love rolling around in the HMMWV hunting insurgents. However, sitting inside the firmbase you feel equally as useless as you are back at Camp Fallujah, but you have none of the amenities of Camp Fallujah. Until you go out on patrol you are reduced to sitting in an 80+ degree house with minimal ventilation, sweating even though you aren’t moving, and perform some combination of eating, reading, sleeping, and defecating.
We are attached to 2nd Recon Bn for this op, their first op alone since they relieved 1st Recon a few weeks ago. They’re not quite as comfortable running around in Zaydan as 1st Recon was, but that’s understandable at this point. Only months of operating in the area will give you the familiarity that we came to expect by dealing with 1st Recon near the end of their stint in country. The ride in was uneventful, as we hoped it would be. No errant IEDs or small arms fire impeded our progress.
Gear is strewn about the room, surrounding the sleeping pad and blankets of it’s owner. We sleep on blankets found in the house. They make a comfortable and convenient way to slumber, especially when you can’t always take your boots off to get into your sleeping bag. While on call everyone sleeps with his boots on, ready to respond to any threat at a moment’s notice. MRE wrappers lie on the floor near the Marine that consumed them, discarded temporarily to await the burn pit outside later tonight.
So as I sit here and wait wait wait my life away, I thought I might jot down my thoughts on an advertisement in one of my Time magazines I brought to read, the cleanest sheet of paper I could find. Tomorrow will bring another day and another patrol.
Sounds like that sucks! Hope you get to do something soon! Stay classy, Jeff Barnett. :)