26 June 2007: Dust Storms and Rockets

I forgot to mention that the latrines at Camp Liberty were remarkably clean. My radar was up constantly for juicy port-o-jon graffiti but I found none. It seems there is great effort being made to squash the voice of the little man these days. I find places where comments were written but then expunged or painted over. This was true in both the temporary port-o-jons and the more permanent containerized latrines. I know Joe’s got things on his mind. His message isn’t getting published at Camp Liberty. I was disappointed.

Regardless, I’m back at LSAA. I actually had a routine day. With that being said, it was mundane. Superficial to my mundane day were two events. The first was a dust storm that hit around lunchtime. With it came the normal spike in temperature, reduction of visibility, and increase of the suck factor for everyone. The second was another unnerving IDF that occurred around 1900. I had just returned from the gym and was standing butt-ass naked in my room when “pop! woooooossssshhh! BOOM!!” My whole trailer rocked. I shut down everything and listened for the alarm or an announcement. Nothing followed until about an hour later when the recorded message from the command post announced there had been an IDF attack. I found out later what had actually happened. It was a rocket attack. There were two or three random rockets. None of them caused any damage or injury but they did hit uncomfortably close.

The dust storm came back to haunt me. I was supposed to fly out to COB Speicher and was scheduled to report to Catfish around midnight. When I arrived it was immediately apparent things were on hold. After hauling my IBA and rucksack to the pax terminal I was greeted by the sight of soldiers and civilians laying around everywhere. There was, literally, no floor space. Every helicopter flight had either been cancelled or was on weather hold. Rather than staying, I checked to see the odds of my flight occurring. Odds were not in my favor. Therefore I walked right back to the Admiral and drove back to the hooch. I took the time to put everything up before crawling into bed. My bed was a lot more comfortable than the floor of the pax terminal. I made the right call. The flight never happened.

The meeting I was going to attend will be rescheduled. I guess I’ll be hanging out at LSAA for now.