Oerdin's Iraq thread - Continued

[Hueij]

Thanks for the update

[Winston]

Thanks for letting us know. Glad to hear Oerdin is coping and that it's relatively secure in al-Kut.

[oerdin's sis]

To Oerdin -

Happy Birthday...

sis

[Az]

It is?

Happy B-day, Oerdin.

And Oerdin's sys, I didn't say it yet, but thank you for the updates. I am a constant lurker.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by Azazel
It is?

I guess it is already May 15 over there?

Happy Birthday

Hope its a good one whrever you are!

Any word lately sis?

[Winston]

Happy Birthday Oerdin!

We hope to hear from you again soon.

[Hueij]

Happy birthday Oerdin!

[The Mad Monk]

Appropriately titled birthday thread here.

[Dinner]

May 7, 2004
Today was supposed to be my day off but because there are so few Psyopers here in theater I had to work. Oh well, no rest for the wicked. Today we started doing town assessments for the different neighborhoods here in Al Kut and I’m pleasantly surprised at how friendly most of the people here are. I had expected the worst since nearly everyone in Al Kut is Shi’a but it appears that the people here suffered so much under Saddam that they consider anything to be an improvement. There are a fair number of Sadr supporters but they seem to draw the line at actually taking part in to much violence and the few that were predisposed to violence seem to have lost their nerve after the 2nd ACR moved into town.
The most interesting thing to happen today was that we arrested an 11-year-old boy for stealing gasoline. We had been talking to an Imam at one of the local mosques when we got a call to assist in finding a boy in a yellow shirt that was seen snatching and grabbing from the local gas station that was just a block away. We quickly drove over to the spot and saw a young Arab boy in a yellow shirt that was carrying a jerry can of gas. When he saw us he tossed the jerry can aside and began to run off. I jumped out of the humvee and ran after him; the boy ran like a rabbit on crack and I would never have caught him except he had trouble climbing over a brick wall and I grabbed his leg right before he pulled it over. I never knew how out of shape I’ve become until I had to race after that little ****er though it couldn’t have helped that I was wearing 40lbs of armor & bullets plus carrying a 10 pound rifle.
Any way, the MPs should up right after that and they handcuffed the boy and locked him in the back of their humvee. None of us really wanted to talk him to jail but we did want to scare the **** out of him so maybe he would stop stealing. At first he denied he’d stolen anything but after we’d recovered the gas can he’d stolen he started to cry and said he only did it because the older boys pay him to do it. Apparently the older boys then sell the gasoline to drivers along the roadside. So any way the boy’s father eventually showed up and we watched the dad smack the kid around a bit then we gave him a stern lecture about what would happen to him if he didn’t stop stealing. He swore I’d never do it again and so we released him into the care of his father. I’m not sure he’ll really stop but we did our best to scare him.

May 7, 2004 Part 2

Iraq is an excellent example of how to go wrong with socialism. Take gasoline for instance. A long line of Iraqi governments have tried to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis by subsidizing the price of gasoline so that instead of paying the $2 per gallon the market charges they instead pay around $0.20 per gallon. That means Iraqis get to drive large V-8 powered American cars which they other wise could never afford to fuel but it also means that any Iraqi with a gas can and a car can “invest” all of his money in gasoline and then drive across the border to Syria and then sell the gas for the market price of $2 per gallon. That’s good for them but it’s bad for Iraq because it results in mass shortages of gasoline as everyone black-markets gas to make a few extra bucks. The government has tried various schemes to stop the black market but the truth is that there is easy money to be made so there will always be people who will skim off large amounts of the available gasoline and so there will always be shortages.
Another example of socialism running a muck is how the government subsidizes the price of bread. Sure, it’s nice to have dirt-cheap bread but these subsidies result in strange economic behaviors. For instance few farmers even bother to harvest the hay that grows on their land and so there is a shortage of hay. Instead they find it is cheaper to feed animals bread because the bread is costs almost nothing. The end result is the government spends huge amounts of money subsidizing things but then the items subsidized always seem to have to be rationed due to black marketing.

May 9, 2004

I am amazed how peaceful Al Kut has been. I mean we see pictures of Sadr and Mahdi Militia propaganda everywhere but the people themselves don’t seem to be overly concerned with Maqtada Sadr’s edicts. I’m aware that appearances can sometimes be deceiving but I haven’t heard a single mortar fired or bullet fired in the entire time I’ve been here. I strongly suspect Al Kut’s peaceful surface has to do with the show of force the 2nd ACR made upon its arrival here. Whatever the reason I hope it keeps up.
Sadr’s Mahdi Militia has been making tremendous propaganda value out of the whole Abu Ghraib incident. He has newspapers and posters all over the city showing pictures of a few MPs abusing prisoners and he then says that all Americans are evil and that they want to murder Iraqi children in their sleep and other such nonsense. Still, the Iraqi people by and large are an uneducated lot and the Shi’a are the worst off out of any group here in Iraq. Over all 40% of the Iraqi population is illiterate but a full 55% of the Shi’a are illiterate so we have a large mass of entirely uneducated and unsophisticated people for whom seeing a picture tells the complete story. They never hear about how the Americans have arrested the people responsible and that they will now face trial; all they hear is what Maqtada Sadr and Al Jaziera want them to hear. We are trying to develop products to counter this but the American product approval process is so convoluted and slow that there is no way we can keep up. For the last three weeks we’ve been writing products about Abu Ghraib but not one of them has been approved for distribution because no one in the chain of command wants to take responsibility for dealing with this issue. So three weeks have passed yet the chain of command hasn’t let us make one radio script, one TV broadcast, or one newspaper article to respond. The result is groups like Al Jaziera and the Mahdi Militia are the only ones who are shaping public opinion. If the higher ups don’t get their collective heads out of their asses things could get worse in a hurry. Silence equals consent so if we don’t start responding then the people will believe the nay-sayers are telling the truth.

May 11, 2004

Well, the other shoe has dropped. Yet more incriminating pictures from the exact same MP company in Abu Ghraib prison have been released. These ones show male US soldiers having group sex with a seemingly very willing Iraqi woman and another clip shows Iraqi guards butt ****ing young Iraqi boys. :idiots: Apparently, these pictures were taking some time ago as some type of sick home video but the investigators have turned it up and now it is on all the major networks. Maqtada Sadr wasted no time and plaster southern Iraq and Sadr City with leaflets about the latest abuses of the evil Americans and a poll taken yesterday now shows a majority of Iraqis want Coalition Forces to leave Iraq. I suspect this is only a temporary jump due to the sensationalist nature of the criminal investigation but you never know. I suspect these people will want us here the next time Sadr’s militia tries a coupe so he can set himself up as dictator for life.
So far nothing has happened but we are bracing for protests and demonstrations of public outrage both real and feigned for political reasons. I have the first half of today off then I’m going to have a late night sitting in on the town council meeting. The council is supposed to be voting on road repair and sewer issues but I suspect they will be more interested in the new pictures out of Abu Ghraib.
The MPs we live with seem to be very angry at the MPs who worked at Abu Ghraib. They say those people at Abu Ghraib violated their oaths of service which all MPs must take and further more they violated the laws which they were supposed to enforce. The sad thing is we have no TV and no internet connections here so I have to get my news from Iraqi newspapers (which are of dubious quality and truthfulness) and the occasional military news brief. Getting information out to the troops just doesn’t seem to be the Bush administration’s priority especially when it is politically damaging to him.

May 12, 2004

We took the first half of today off because we were scheduled to go on a night patrol with Bull Troop of the 2nd ACR to the town of Numeniyan h. The last time we were in Numeniyah it was peaceful but obviously very pro-Sadr. The COL had decided to increase patrols there in order to do two things 1) Make sure they knew we were there with a lot of fire power; and 2) Respond to complaints that the Coalition wasn’t providing enough security for the Iraqi people.
That morning a daisy chain of IEDs (meaning five IEDs all set up in a line so that they would all explode at once damaging an entire convoy) was discovered along the road between Al Kut and Numaniyah. The engineers found it while doing a routine route clearing and the Explosive Ordinance Disposal team (EOD) was able to disarm the bombs without getting hurt. In any event we knew about the IEDs from the morning so we planned to be extra careful during the mission. At 1600 we linked up with Bull Troop and then we convoyed over to Numaniyah where we set up field checkpoints and took part I roving patrols with them until 2300. During that time most of the people seemed very friendly with people coming outside of their houses so they could wave to us plus the local high school teaches English to the students so several of the teenagers would come up to us trying to practice their English.
When we were passing out leaflets a few people brought up the Abu Ghraib incident but I think I got across that the US soldiers were disgusted by these events and that the persons responsible are now in Jail.

May 14, 2004

For the last two days we’ve working on what just might be our most important Psyop act to date. We have convinced the biggest most influential Imam in Numaniyah to renounce Maqtada Sadr. Not only that but he will do so publicly during his Friday prayer in the mosque while being filmed by and Iraqi Media Network (IMN) camera crew. Today, the Imam gave his speech in which he said that “some people” (meaning Sadr) have been urging the people to violence, that violence was not the way of Islam, that peaceful solutions have not been explored, and that true Muslims would not resort to violence unless all peaceful means of solving the situation become exhausted. Since this man is the most respected religious leader in all of Wasit Province I expect to see his views carrying a lot of weight amongst the people. To insure as many people see the speech as possible we’ve arranged to have IMN play the recording on their morning, noon, and nighttime news for both today and tomorrow plus we’ve forwarded the tape to Baghdad so they can put it on the national broadcast. Time will tell but I think this might be the start of an improving Psyop environment. I’m hoping that this condemnation might spark a few more Imams to renounce violence and then we would have a reinforcing message of nonviolence.
This next thing I had previously hoped not to bring up on an internet forum but seeings how it may effect my mission here I now feel I need to. For the last two weeks I’ve been seeing a young Iraqi girl who works as a translator for the MP company. She’s an Assyrian Christian and we quickly fell into each other’s arms. I guess that’s just the nature of this place; everything seems to happen fast. I can’t say I’m in love with her but I was certainly lonely and she helped to brighten my days. I never encouraged here to think of this as a long-term thing; in fact I have deliberately gone out of my way to discourage such thinking.
In any event Layla (as we shall call her) has had a cough for the last two weeks. At first I believed her when she said she just had a cold, however, by the second week it became increasingly obvious that this wasn’t just a run of the mill cold and I encouraged her to go see the medic. To make a long story short she now has T.B. and everyone in our hanger must be tested to see if they also have been infected. I, of course, am very likely to have been exposed do to my relationship with Layla. The army is currently short of the TB test kits and is having a bunch of them flown in from Germany so everyone who has worked or lived near Layla can be tested.
Layla has been put on medical leave and won’t be coming back until after the 6 month therapy is completed. I, for one, am rather pissed off (even if it is unreasonable to be so) and I’ve dumped Layla. I guess I figure that any girl who gives me a disease is not a girl I want to date. Not that it really matters. I’ve been reading up on the T.B. bacteria and it seems like a very large percentage of people who become carriers of the bacteria never develop the symptoms of the disease. A carrier has the bacteria in their body but they don’t have the disease and they cannot infect other people. The only way you can infect other people is if you become symptomatic and you are in close personal contact with someone else. Luckily, modern medicine has come up with a cure of this disease which is 100% effective. The downside is that the cure takes 6-9 months to run its course and during that time you can’t drink a drop of alcohol at all. If I am exposed (we won’t know until everyone is tested) then I will find that last bit very inconvenient because my leave is coming up and I had planned to spend my leave passed out in a drunken stupor in some Spanish gutter. Going to the Running of the Bulls just won’t be the same without the traditional drunken all night parties.
The good news in I have about six months left in Iraq (if they don’t extend our tour) so if I am positive I can complete the theropy before I ever get back home.

May 15, 2004

Well, today is my birthday. Celebrating your birthday while in Iraq and possibly infected with a major lung disease may not sound like the best of times but fate has conspired to make things better. You see today is also Armed Forces Day and the General in charge has ordered everyone to get the day off. This will be the first full day off I’ve had in nearly a month so it seems like a nice birthday present to me. They’ve arranged volleyball games and a small hajji bazaar here on post so there will be something to do and there is even a salsa dance tonight. Not that I salsa but it will still be fun to go.

[The Mad Monk]

Sorry to hear about the possible TB.

[Oerdin's Friend]

I've reading up on you...

Oerdin,

Happy Birthday again. It's your filipino friend from MMHS. I've been reading up on your journals. It's seem that you have gone through a lot. It's nice to know that you kept your chin up all this time. It's a bummer to think you might have caught TB on your Birthday. You can't even celebrate with booze. I hope to hear more from you.

[chequita guevara]

Happy B-day, Oerdin.

BTW, TB exposure's not so bad. certainly not a bad as having TB. If you test positive, you'll also have to give up cheese during the treatement period. Bunnygrrl got exposed many years ago from a foreign adopted kid she was babysitting. Of course the parents fired Bunnygrrl (she had to quit all her nanny jobs at that time), but they weren't very understand about the fact that their kid was the one who got BG infected, not the other way around.

Anyway, Bunnygrrl cheated a little during her treatment period, so while you can't get slobbering drunk, you may be able have a beer or a cheeseburger now and again.

I hope Layla gets better, even if you aren't seeing her.

[Ted Striker]

Happy birthday, sorry about the TB, but nice work from you and your group. Sounds like you are making progress with the Imams.

Sadr's days are numbered, Najaf wants him out of their town.

[Lonestar]

Happy B-Day Oerdin. From what I've read, we might expect one of the other Clerics to cap Sadr.

[Kropotkin]

Good news and bad news. Good that you didn't end up in one of the areas where fighting is going on as I feared earlier. But I guess it's better to use a psyop unit for preventative work after all. Bad news however, as it seems that the US is really slow and inflexible when it comes to the propaganda war. A side of the conflict that's vital in the efforts to 'win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people', so to speak. Hopefully the Imam's speech will have a positive effect. The sooner things calm down, the sooner the americans can leave, it's in everyone's (well, almost) interest.