Nov 25, 2010
Nov 21, 2010
The Kombatica
They used to be hard to get, but most chaplains and chapels had some. Now they are available from Shaina Agami, whose brother SPC Danny Agami was killed in Iraq.
They are authorized under 670-1 1-7 b.(2)(a).
Sep 20, 2010
Sep 17, 2010
. . . and prisoners
Sep 15, 2010
Torahs for the military
Sep 1, 2010
In NY
Thanks for all your support over the year.
Iraqi Torah
Aug 31, 2010
Challah
Aug 27, 2010
Aug 15, 2010
In Kuwait City International Airport
Aug 14, 2010
Back at JBB
If only getting home didn't take so long.
Aug 4, 2010
Aug 1, 2010
The smell of the air and other random thoughts
The stars in the sky, and the wind are all rather prominent around here. The sky seems lower; the moon seems bigger here than anywhere else I have ever been. You always see Venus nearby too though I don't recognize most of the constellations, though I am not sure I'd recognize the one's I can see in NY either. Many FOBs have a blinking "star" that is on the blimp with the camera that floats high above the FOB watching the nearby city. The moon rises quickly. You can see why the heavens and the weather were so important to the ancient peoples here. They stick out, they are not just details that can be passively ignored. They physically touch you.
The very air is odd. Sometimes, especially around Tikrit, the air is orange or red or even brownish, sometimes it is a fog colored gray. It is always dust or sand and it limits visibility sometimes to a few feet. That weather always grounds the helicopters and sometimes airplanes too. It is painfully obvious why Arabs wear the head coverings they wear. It is certainly unhealthy to breathe without something filtering out the sand in this climate. In the right weather when you walk around your clothes accumulate a fine layer of sand after walking a mere few hundred feet.
Once in a while there is a whirlwind of sand that is maybe 20 feet in diameter and a kilometer high and you can see it coming right at you. I was once in a parked car and one of those came right at us, and for about 10 or 15 seconds completely engulfed the car in a mini tornado. It was quite a cool sight to behold. From the car, we just watched it slowly lumber toward us and engulf us, and then, seemingly uninterested in consuming us, just continued on its relatively benign way.
I am in Mosul this week. There are two FOBs on Mosul: Marez and Diamondback. Diamondback sucks. Everywhere had the smell that you experience when you are stuck driving behind a garbage truck in the summer and your car has no air conditioner. Marez is considerably better. The smell is far less perceptible, the DFAC is better, etc. Diamondback has one or two interesting shops, but that's all. One of the main Iraqi roads leading from the north to Baghdad runs between the FOBs and so a checkpoint separates them.
The foliage is uninteresting on FOBs, though Mosul has some lush mountains off in the distance and when you are up against the Tigris or Euphrates rivers there is a lot more green. Some scattered trees and bushes and things like that. But they are always covered in dust. Lots of desert and nothingness. I sometimes see tumbleweed just rolling across a field like in the old westerns. Once in a while a pretty weed manages to erupt from a crevice. On Marez there is so much dust that a truck drives around spraying water on the road so that the vehicles don't kick up too much dust.
There is the occasional hare that hops by and some foxes that I am getting used to seeing in the early morning and late night. There is a red fox that apparently lives near me and some mangy looking tan and gray ones too. This morning I woke up and there was a gecko on my bed. They are fairly common, but today was the first time one crawled into bed with me. There are the usual assortment of insects too and now it is bee season again. There was a long period when it was mosquito season - that sucked.
It is usually quiet on FOBs. Every place is different. On JBB you always hear the loudspeaker telling you something about "incoming" and "all clear"; you learn to more or less ignore that after a while. Some of the smaller bases like Warrior or Warhorse are dark and quiet at night and not much happens. Mosul too is quiet at night.
There are usually people going to and from somewhere at almost any time of day or night and it almost always feels safe when you have to leave your room at odd hours to go to the bathroom or something. We have no indoor plumbing in most rooms. You have to be pretty special to get that. But it usually is dark. Not all FOBs are well lit. Warhorse is not, neither is FOB Warrior. Flashlights are de riguer.
This place does present a stark contrast to everywhere else I've ever been.
Jul 30, 2010
Benjamin MeTudella in northern Iraq
Like "D" and I on our last trip through Spain, he passed through Barcelona and Gerona on the beginning of his journey.
Here is what he has to say about Irbil and Mosul:
[From the place where Noah's ark is, near the synagogue of Ezra where Jews come to pray on the 9th of Av,] it is two days to Mosul, which is Assur the Great, and here dwell about 7,000 Jews, at their head being R. Zakkai the Nasi of the seed of David, and R. Joseph surnamed Burhan-al-mulk, the astronomer to the King Sin-ed-din, the brother of Nured-din, King of Damascus. Mosul is the frontier town of the land of Persia. It is a very large and ancient city, situated on the river Hiddekel (Tigris), and is connected with Nineveh by means of a bridge. Nineveh is in ruins, but amid the ruins there are villages and hamlets, and the extent of the city may be determined by the walls, which extend forty parasangs to the city of Irbil. The city of Nineveh is on the river Hiddekel. In the city of Assur (Mosul) is the synagogue of Obadiah, built by Jonah; also the synagogue of Nahum the Elkoshite.The ruins of the city of Nineveh are now in the city of Mosul which you can see from the FOB.
Metudella stopped in scores of cities, where he enumerated the number of Jews in each one and the historical sites, artifacts and lore that each had. It is unclear what he was doing on his travels. Was he looking for Jewish havens? Was he looking for Jewish connections in other cities for trade? His motives are unknown, but it certainly must have been an exciting adventure.
Update: I am not the only one who has been reading Tudella's diary lately.
Jul 29, 2010
CH Goldstein
Jul 28, 2010
Canada's Jewish Chaplain
Jul 17, 2010
Jul 16, 2010
Life on FOBs - getting around on FOBs
Jul 15, 2010
Burglary in monticello
Jun 15, 2010
Qatar
Rumor has it that the temperature was in the high 130's yesterday, and this morning it was over 100 in the morning. I will try to report on what we do here. I only have 4 days before I have to get back.
May 28, 2010
May 27, 2010
May 25, 2010
Shavout in VBC
Future officers
May 18, 2010
May 7, 2010
Iraq demands. . . .
May 3, 2010
Food
Since I know how worried many of you are about my eating, I thought I would include a photo of a portion of my current kosher food stash here in COB Speicher - so you need not worry. Just keep it coming regularly and I'll be fine. (Thanks - to everyone who sends stuff!) I also put a picture of the box that kosher MREs come in. They are pretty hard to get though from the Army. You have to know someone. The food that I find most edible is the Meal Mart meals. I heat them in my microwave and viola, a hot meat meal. (The LaBriute and My Own Meals are OK, but not as good. But they mave the advantage of not needing a microwave.) I also have the soup often. They don't ship as well, but almost all of them make it OK. Anything that can be microwaved and eaten, or have boiled water poured in is great. I also have become a fan of the various kosher beef jerkeys on the market (I have seen three so far).
May 2, 2010
Rain
Apr 29, 2010
The Times finally got something right about the Army
Apr 19, 2010
When I look out of the helicopter this is what I saw
(Updated 4/20/10: Corrected a severe anachronism)
Apr 15, 2010
Apr 11, 2010
Yom Hashoa on COB Speicher
(I understand that there was some sort of ceremony on JBB as well.)
In Speicher
Apr 4, 2010
The 188th Crybaby Brigade - Book review
I read on the dust cover that Chasnoff is a comedian, so I am thinking his book will be funny, right? Wrong. It is bitter and cynical. But that's OK. Lots of good books can be bitter and cynical. But this book was bitter and cynical about an institution I like, y'know Israel, the Israeli Army, stuff like that, and that's fine too. It was still a good read. Not quite what I was looking for, but what I got. Joel Chasnoff's The 188th Crybaby Brigade is probably a pretty accurate description of what it is like to be a junior enlisted soldier going through tironut, basic training, in a combat unit of the Israeli Army.
I say that it was probably a fairly accurate description because I could have written that book myself and I recognize most of the details of Army life in his book, except for those here and there which are specific to Israel. Yes, I would have to change a few details, like I am in Iraq now with the US army and he was in Lebanon with the Israeli Army. He had some conversion issue in his family which I do not. But it is interesting to see how similar my military experience was to his. I mean, it is scary how similar our experiences really are. The same things that disappoint and frustrate me on a day to day basis about how things are run in the US Army are generally the same things that made his life miserable. Both of us apparently had long swathes of experience that made us wonder how we win wars given all we know about how things work (and we both came up with the same answer).
Interestingly, our experiences were similar both in terms of what we experienced in the Army, say about "guard duty", "duck walks", "initial reception", annoying leadership, and the like, but also on a personal level. Reading him talk about telling his family was pretty familiar. And listening to how many people asked him why he joined the Israeli Army and not the US Army was a mirror of my own experiences. I can't begin to recall how many people have asked me why I joined the US Army instead of the Israeli Army. (As if the point was just to join an army and then we flipped a coin about which one it was going to be.)
Of course I am willing to bet that both of our experiences are anomalous. Americans who are raised very Jewish do not typically join the IDF. Nor do they join the US Army. Some do, to be sure, but it is very rare. Those of us who do, come in to the Army completely unprepared. Whereas Israelis hear stories and get advice from their friends, brothers, sisters, parents, and teachers. They are raised knowing what is in store for them, whereas Americans do not. People who go to yeshiva for 20 years do not know what they are getting into when they join the American army either. So both can be pretty big culture shocks and one never knows what to expect. (One does not hear the same cynicism from, say, Haim Sabato who, like Chasnoff, was in the Armored Corps in the IDF and described the Yom Kippur war in his book Adjusting Sights.) It strikes me that if you don't know what you are doing, you are bound to be disappointed. Your assumptions about the kind of place you are in are dispelled one by one. You go in thinking that this is the greatest army in the world and that makes you think that it must be run by people with common sense and the training is logical and resources and positions are allocated in some way that is to the benefit of the Army. But none of this is true. Eventually you realize that the army is really now what you imagined it when you went in.
Seeing the similarities between the experiences he had in training and in Lebanon and my own here in Iraq made me think that it would be interesting to have American Jews in the US Army and American Jews in the Israeli Army trade stories or something. It would be informative to see how similar and different we really are.
The book read well and I am glad I read it. This is certainly a book I will plagiarize large sections of my own life story from.
Apr 1, 2010
Seders in Iraq
It was a bit sad not to be able to be with my family and friends this year on Passover, but we pulled together and had an experience that most of us will not soon forget.
Update: 3-MAY-2010 - I am told that COB Speicher's seder was planned out by a TCN who used to work in a South African Jewish retirement home and was able to prepare a whole bunch of traditional seder stuff. I also saw pictures of the Seder on one of our bases in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
New Location
Mar 28, 2010
I know what you are going to ask
I also wanted to share that as part of a now-that-I-think-of-it ill-conceived pre-R&R agreement with the Battalion XO I got a "high and tight" flat-top haircut yesterday. It looks amusing.
Now, the answer to the question I know you are all asking is: no, I will not send any pictures.
Mar 22, 2010
Mar 6, 2010
In transit to R&R
I will be in Brooklyn for the better part of my two weeks with some respite somewhere else. Call me if you want to get together. My usual number will not work until I return for good int he summer. So use the funny "Google Call" button on the side of this page to call me.
Feb 23, 2010
Life in JBB - IBA holders
No matter who you are, these things look weird when you first get here. They are all over and everyone thinks they are something else. I personally thought that they were memorial things for people who were killed. Some people thought they were religious items. Other people had no idea what to make of them. But really they are holders for your individual body armor (IBA) and Kevlar helmet. They look like little crucifixes and really are creepy at first. Most people keep their body armor on it. I usually just keep my knapsack and bicycle helmet on mine. I leave my body armor under my bed. Many people like to keep that stuff at work. It really depends on what you do and where you spend most of your time. But the truth is, it really doesn't matter where you keep your body armor since you hardly wear it here. But the holders are really odd. I asked our guy who makes them to make sure mine was the tallest one. It is actually almost lifesize. The two pictures show what the holders look like - the first is mine next to a regular one in my office. The next one is a picture of the holder being used properly with the IBA and Kevlar.
Feb 22, 2010
Feb 14, 2010
Life in JBB - Laundry
There must be many offices that do this, but I only know about the one near me.
There is also another laundry which (because we are special) we can use. Not everyone can use it and it is on the other side of the post, but you can turn in laundry and they will return it to you in 24 hours.
There is also a self-serve laundromat. Just bring in your stuff and use the machines to wash and dry your clothes. They have a lot of machines, but it is often full. You have to go at odd hours to get your laundry done.
I understand there is also a place where you can have your clothing pressed, but I have no idea why anyone would want to do that.