Living Conditions, Independence Day, and Activities

From Michael:

A recent excerpt from a personal note to me describing his living environment:

My shower consists of 2 water bottles dumped over my head. My toilet is an oil drum cut in half with a wooden outhouse over the top of it. When I brush my teeth, I spit onto a pile of rocks on the ground. We do laundry with buckets of dirty water and no detergent.

July 4, 2008

Yesterday was the 232 anniversary of America ’s independence from the British crown. We celebrated in typical American fashion. The Commanding Officer ordered that all junior Marines would be permitted to sleep in late (7am), and that shorts and t-shirts were acceptable attire for the day. Both the shorts and the shirt had to be Marine Corps green, of course. At 9 am, a rather elaborate flag football tournament began. I was surprised at how many teams, 10 in all, entered the tournament. With temperatures reaching over 110 degrees by around 10:30am, I wasn’t sure that playing in a flag football tournament was my idea of a good time. I had already awoke earlier in the morning to run 6.5 miles, so my legs were already pretty tired, and I knew that I would need to drink lots of water to replenish what I had lost on the run. So I decided not to play. Instead, I taught 2 Marines how to throw a Frisbee. One was a young black Marine who thought that the Frisbee was an odd contraption, but had always wanted to know how to throw it. So I taught him. He asked, “is learning to throw a Frisbee something they require you to learn in college?” His observation had been that college kids love to throw Frisbee. An astute observation. The second Marine I taught was an older Mexican-American from New Jersey . He is a good-natured, happy-go-lucky, blue-collar Marine whom I like. He is a Staff Sergeant, so it is somewhat more acceptable for him to “hang out” with me. So I spent the 4th of July morning teaching a young black man and a Mexican-American how to toss a Frisbee. What could be more American than that?

We began our food-induced coma at around 2pm. On the 3rd, we had steaks, burgers, hot dogs, chicken, and spare ribs flown in. We took big oil drums (empty of course) and cut them in half to use as barbecue grills, and the entire morning of the 4th was spent grilling them. We also had such American staples as baked beans, corn on the cob, and Baskin Robbins ice cream. The grand irony in all of this is that we shared our meal with our British brethren. 232 years is not that long in terms of history. Yet here we sat, 232 years after declaring our independence from the tyranny and injustices of the British Crown, eating steaks, burgers and hot dogs with men and women who have sworn an oath of allegiance to that very same crown.

As the day drew to a close, I thought about that irony, and then thought, and hoped, that maybe it wasn’t so ironic after all. Maybe 232 years from now, my descendants will be celebrating with Iraqi or Afghan soldiers their independence. Not independence from America , but independence from terror and tyranny. That would be nice. I have learned that nobody on earth wants peace more than a soldier at war.

June 30, 2008

Things have been pretty slow lately from the legal side, which is usually a good thing. I have been tasked with various other odd jobs, which I don’t mind too much as they tend to help the day go by faster. They key to being in the desert, where it is unbearably hot, and without easy access to electricity, which can make it unbearably boring, is to find things to do to pass the time. I have enjoyed reading and working out, which are two things I like to do wherever I happen to be. When I am not doing either of those, I just try to find ways to pass the time. I try to read up on the news and find out what is happening in the world, and sometimes I just try to nap, although that can be difficult in this heat.

One of my tasks is to provide legal guidance to our Civil Military Operations Center (CMOC). The CMOC is where we consolidate all of the issues that need to be dealt with in the area that are not directly combat-related. Basically, it means that the locals have a central place to go whenever they have a grievance with us. If we blew up their house or their livestock, or both, they come and file a claim and we pay them. They have to provide identification, paperwork proving that they were the rightful owners, etc. We record everything and, if it all looks legitimate, we pay them. Payment is not an admission of guilt or wrongdoing, but merely an expression of our humanity and sympathy. In combat, people get killed and things get blown up. Sometimes, the person killed or the building blown up was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. We are here to help this nation back on its feet, so we do no good if we just shrug our shoulders and tell them to deal with it. This side of war seems to bring out the best in us as Americans, as we have this innate sense of obligation to help those who can’t seem to help themselves. My job in all of this is to examine the claims and make sure what we are doing is legal and justified. Sometimes, people try to take advantage of American taxpayer largess (yes, American taxpayers foot the bill). One on occasion, a man said that one of our units shot up his minivan. He gave some details such as where he was, the color of his van, how much the damages cost to repair (he was very sure to give us that number!), etc. So I got sent out to do an investigation to verify the details. Turns out that the unit in question did indeed shoot up a vehicle, except that it was not a white minivan with three occupants, it was a black pickup truck with one occupant! Needless to say, we did not pay that claim. And the hits just keep on coming.