Another day

Someone asked what I'm actually doing over here, so I thought I should summarize it. Basically the government hires contractors to do most of the construction and manual labor on the base, things like cleaning the cadillacs (toilets), cleaning the runways, building new buildings and roads, emptying porta-potties, etc. Some of them are local Iraqis from the surrounding villages, others are flown in from other countries like Turkey, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, etc. The general idea is that if they pay Iraqis to earn a legitimate wage, then they are less likely to sell information on our troops to insurgents. It also injects money into the economy and gives some people employment. However, the threat of these people gathering intel on the base and selling it to various terrorist groups is still very real, so most of these contractors have to be escorted while on the base. The other people in my squadron and I are that escort. We follow them around on their routes or watch them while they are working in heavy machinery, etc to make sure that they aren't gathering intel on the base to sell to others. We make sure they don't have prohibited items like cameras or cell phones or anything that can be used to record or transmit information, make sure they don't attack the base, each other, try to sabotage the base, etc.

Today I tried to have a conversation with one of the Turkish heavy equipment operators. He can only speak extremely broken English but I was able to piece together enough to get the gist of what he was saying. He's apparently been working in Iraq for 5 years, on and off. He said he first came two or three months after we invaded and usually works for 6 - 8 months at a time and then goes home to Turkey to "sleep (mimicking sleeping with his hands)" for a month or two before returning home. He showed me pictures of his kids and tried to tell me about how much safer Iraq is now than it used to be but that all of the Iraqis outside the base are still "bitches" (his favorite term for anyone he doesn't like much, including his "big bosses") and very dangerous. He asked me questions about myself and home but I'd only answer in extremely vague terms or deflect the question and ask another one about him. Once you start up a conversation it can quickly turn into a very different type of conversation and they can start asking questions like "How many people are on base? Does everyone carry a weapon? How much ammunition do you carry?" which can of course all be sold and pieced together by the enemy to have a very clear picture of how we conduct operations on the base.

Other than that bit of interaction, I spent part of the rest of the day hanging out with a fly, who I found out was named Frank. He was flying around in my truck and landed on my shirt so I watched him for a while. He spent at least 5 minutes washing his hands and then rubbing his head like a cat. He didn't look any different from a normal house fly in the states, which is kind of boring. He flew down to my leg and I very very slowly (I had a lot of time to move slowly) moved my finger up and touched him and he didn't even fly away. He kind of turned around and looked at my finger at one point and moved towards it a little bit, I assume he was saying hello, introducing himself and shaking my hand. I was about to get out my camera and take a picture of him so that I could blog about him on the internet, but then he flew out my window and was gone, leaving me alone again, which was saddening.

After that, to entertain myself I spilled a little hand sanitizer on my uniform and then watched it dry, which was pretty interesting. I'm guessing it will evaporate a lot faster in a few months when it's a hundred degrees outside, maybe I should set up some sort of experiment.