once upon a time, we lived about 15 minutes down the road, right in the middle of tikrit at a place called FOB Danger. life at danger was really nice in a lot of ways. it was a small base and very scenic. i could almost forget that i hated running there, because i was so caught up in the beauty of the place. great lakes to run around, some good hills to push yourself on... we lived in a house with marble floors, indoor showers and a kitchen with huge chandeliers and a tower that overlooked the river. great, great stuff. okay, so the bad part about it was that to do anything we had to drive to the base we live on now, and that was kinda hairy from time to time. an i.e.d. here, some small arms fire there...
now we live in the dustbowl. just a couple miles away is the difference between almost paradise (everything is relative. for iraq? that place was damned nice!) and an upper level of hell. there, you didn't notice the 130+ heat quite so much. here you feel every bit of it. the environment is just so different and depressing in some ways. so why'd we move? so we could turn danger over to the iraqis. we didn't want to seem like an occupying force. so the plan is, move all the americans to all the crappy places that are so bad, no iraqi will complain if we live there, and give them back the nice places. great plan. but they're not ready for it. from what i'm hearing, less than two weeks after we turned the other base over? everything of value was stripped from the base. and over here, we've got our soldiers either burning up or freezing in leaking tents with limited power.
what's funny about this is we knew the looting would happen. the locals knew the looting would happen. but the decision was still made. we do that alot around here. soldiers can't drink booze here. we don't want to offend the locals. yet the locals sell booze here, many of them partake. but we checked that cultural sensitivity box. we have locals who come on the base to do work. we don't make them come on the base on fridays, out of respect for their religious holy day (totally disregarding that fact that some of them are different religions) yet we make them come on sundays, and make soldiers miss church services to go guard them. part of the problem that we're having here, is a lack of religious tolerance. yet aren't we furthering that by not showing them that respect for religious practices needs to be mutual? i'm not 100% sure, but i think we're really sending some confusing and conflicting messages to the locals.
i'm also not 100% sure that we need to be a touchy-feely army in this thing.
1 comment:
Interesting take, I have argued this before on other forums. How can we pretend to be tolerant of religion, when we do not allow our troops to practice theirs? Is it the fact that we are an all volunteer army and demand our troops giving up their religous practice to serve? Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to water down religion in order to keep up with popular culture. Hard to say, great blog though.
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