Due to numerous requests for details about life in Balad, today begins the first of a series of posts wherein I shall describe in great detail my life here in JBB.
I can start by telling you that I live in a CHU, not a sneeze-like cavern, or a modified shoe, but a Containerized Housing Unit. Like everything in the Army it is given an acronym instead of a name - CHU. Like its name, it is pretty small; it is very roughly a cube, or some government approximation: I'd guess about 13' x 13' x 10'. I have one "ghost roommate". He is also a LT in my unit, fairly considerate, and not around much. So it is not that bad a place to live.
My CHU, by the way is in a pod. There are about 60 CHUs to a pod. The pod is in an "H". There are seven Hs, I think. Each "H" has a bunch of pods. There is no I Pod, I assume that was deliberate. They go up to about S Pod. So for example someone may live in H-5, N pod, CHU 30. (I have no idea who this is.)
There are CHUs that are bigger, but I got a small one. It is pretty spartan with a touch of dingy. The CHU came with a bed, a small wall locker, a garbage can, a table lamp, and a night table for each of us. There is also a fire extinguisher and an air conditioner that more or less works and they say also doubles as a heater for when the weather cools down. We'll see. The walls are made of fairly ugly paneling and they are very thin, so you can generally hear everything that goes on in the attached rooms, though I am not sure anyone would really want to. Attached to my room, on both sides, there are young privates who have the oddest schedule and constantly have people coming in and out. They wake up at 4 AM every morning. So I wake up at 4 AM every morning. But they are gone by about 430, so I can usually get back to sleep easily.
The wall lockers are pretty small too. They are beige industrial metal and fit all they stuff that I have now, but most of my stuff has yet to arrive. It is scheduled to get here soon. So once that gets here I will have nowhere to hold everything. Frankly I am not sure where I will put the huge foot locker itself. I'll figure it out. There are broken blinds on my window that face T-Walls, so there is nothing much to look at. (I will talk about T-walls later.) The floor is generally covered with dust (I'll talk about that later too.) I sweep a lot. I have to invest in a mop or something too.
I want to start putting some homey touches in the room. I got a refrigerator magnet in the mail with a picture of the Manhattan bridge. (THANKS D!) On my wall locker it looks like a tiny window facing outside to Brooklyn. It's a start. I was also given a small television from someone who just left Iraq for Kuwait and will not likely return. I have not tested it out yet. But I think all the rooms come wired for cable. So the room is actually starting to have that college dorm room feel.
The picture you see was taken on a pretty messy day before I straightened out. I usually live a bit neater than that.
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