Cindy in Iraq by Cynthia I. Morgan

Author:Cynthia I. Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

We were stuck in Anaconda for a while, and I was going stir-crazy—but my boredom was magnified by disability. I had hurt my left knee when I slipped while hooking up my air lines, which are part of the truck’s braking system It’s part of the routine drivers follow when they’re hooking up a trailer to move it. I lost my balance and fell on the corner of the truck frame. I had to be helped off the catwalk I was standing on because my leg was numb—I had landed squarely on my kneecap. I wound up with a cut and a pretty bad bruise on my kneecap, bad enough that I couldn’t drive for a couple of days. I still could serve as a CC, but I had to have a driver with me—actually, KBR wanted all CCs to have drivers now, but reefer CCs were the last holdouts. We hated the idea of having a driver. We were driving some of the most dangerous roads in the world. If a driver messed up and ran over a bomb, you were dead. If bullets started flying, a driver had to stay calm and listen to the CC’s orders; otherwise everybody would be at risk. Would you want somebody else driving you under those conditions? We wanted to drive ourselves.

After a couple of days, I brought some ice to a small camp six kilometers outside Anaconda. Because of my knee, I had a driver with me, a guy named Ted. We had a blast, in part because the troops were so grateful. They hadn’t ever gotten any edible ice before, and we made sure they had more than enough to last them for a while. Even so, we had four pallets of ice left over after we filled their ground unit, and I wasn’t about to take any ice back with me if it could be avoided. Word got around that we had ice, and more and more soldiers asked us for some. There were about a thousand troops in this camp, and we told them we’d make the rounds and hand out ice to anybody who wanted some. Ted and I spent the day hitting all the bunkers, tents, and medical units. One soldier told me that they had just gotten their freezer hooked up. Would I mind if they filled it up with ice? I told them to take all the ice they wanted.

It was fantastic—the kind of day that made my job worth it. It’s hard to grasp this, but a simple thing like ice put smiles on the faces of these soldiers. Put yourself in their places: You’re in a forward operating base in a desert, it’s a hundred and five degrees, but you can’t consume any of the little ice you have because it’s made from local water—and that water isn’t fit for consumption. Then along come Ted and me, and we’ve got all the ice you need and then some.

A couple of days later, we set out for a much larger camp near Taji, where about twelve thousand troops were based.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.