24 August 2007

Parallels

I’ve moved to Camp Taji, another FOB that’s closer to Baghdad. 5-20 was based out of here for a while before they moved to Baqubah, and now we’re back. We drove down in Strykers in the early morning and when I stepped out of the back the sun was still fairly low in the East. A little groggy from the ride, and trying restore the blood flow to my ass (interior seating is not as comfortable as one might want), I looked and walked around the area we live in. And that was when I was hit with some serious déjà vu – I could have been in some small old town in California’s central valley.

It was early enough in the morning that the heat hadn’t kicked up to what I think of as normal Iraq levels. It was dusty, but not sandy (like most of Iraq I’ve been in – Kuwait is sandy, but my Iraq experience has been limited to river valleys) and there was just enough scrub vegetation around and on the horizon to differentiate Taji from Warhorse. This part of Taji is much more wide open, where Warhorse was smaller and had a lot more internal barriers and other obstacles that obscured sightlines. I can see for more than a kilometer in many directions, and off to one side there is huge junkyard/trash dump filled with hundreds of vehicle carcasses and engine parts.

Warhorse was built on an abandoned airfield, but a fairly small one. Taji also has an airfield at its center, but it’s a much larger, more active one. Most of the buildings on Warhorse, left over from the original Iraqi construction were larger hanger-type buildings, and the rest of the construction was obviously newer and American. Taji is littered with smaller, single-story residential-looking buildings left by the Iraqis – buildings that are of fairly crappy construction and that were obviously neglected a bit. They’re still structurally sound, but they look a hell of a lot like some of the old motels on the less traveled parts of Route 66 in Arizona or off of Highway 5 in the central valley. There is this “abandoned by time, but still holding on” feel about the buildings – like someone lives here, but no one loves it.

It’s funny – the timing isn’t that far off. Last summer I was traveling all over the US in the middle of summer, driving through various parts of the US that look very similar to parts of Iraq. This is the beginning of the end of my time in Iraq. (To be fair, this is still Iraq – the enemy has the PX pretty well dialed in with their mortars – hits in the PX complex have killed half a dozen people in the past couple weeks, and the main gate was hit by two car bombs while I was at the phone center a few hundred meters away, but I’m safer than I was in Baqubah). I’m definitely still working down here, but I’m not going outside the wire, I have a good deal better accommodations and a lot more free time. This realization of how familiar this place looks is the final psychological confirmation.

If anything, this place reminds me a bit of my dad. The single best comparison I can make is the little general aviation airport somewhere in California where he made his first solo flight – it was hot, dusty and flat – and the fact of continually moving aircraft helps. That or the summer he and I, rather unsuccessfully, tried to get our remote controlled plane to fly.

posted by Interested Soldier @ 05:29