Beginning of the End.

[This, and the following three posts were written in various places of the Middle East. They, and the fifth to follow, will be the last on this forum. I no longer know the words they contain, and I have no desire to read on to relive them. The year is over, and we are back in a place as close to normal as we will know in the Army.]

October. Back in Kuwait, so strange like a ghost of a memory charging past me and at me and forcing me to remember what seems so terribly long ago. So forever.

But back to Al Asad, the stories I swore I would write. L-Word and I showed up to the Al Asad (Arabic for The Lion) Air Base, a former Iraqi Army airfield. Husks of old and shot down airplanes littered every possible corner of storage – Saddam Hussein, not wanting a repeat of the annihilation of his Air Force in the first Gulf War, scattered his planes throughout the desert to present singular, but non-lucrative targets. Immobilized they remained, some here, some there, all riddled with rust and bullets and signs warning of possible unexploded ordinance. A bomb squads’ nightmare.

I know it now and unsure if I knew then, but I say with a present tensed bias, that L-Word seemed almost instantly more tolerable outside of the clutches of the his chain of command. No illogical orders, no asinine assignments, almost nothing derogatory. Almost. We arrived and the Marines took care of us. They showed up at the airport and showed us around, escorted us to temporary living – L-Word, myself, and The New Yorker shared a room of 20 beds while Two-Tone moved into a recently vacated room. Two-Tone would later move rooms, but for the time being she alone had a permanent residence. Well, as permanent as Iraq can offer.

Once established L-Word and I started our job. The first order of business was the source handovers. The Marines, and other Marines before them, had befriended, recruited, and milked various local individuals to obtain information from them. In a nutshell, they ran sources. Knowing that we only had 60 days left in the Middle East, we took our job lightheartedly, but seriously. L-Word and I scheduled an exact timeline of when we would meet our new sources, and when we would in turn hand them over to the new team of Counter Intelligence Agents to arrive. That wasn’t for another 45 days, so we spent the time until then preparing for a successful and smooth transition between the Marines and ourselves and ourselves and the Replacements.

Like the movie, the Replacements, the three individuals sent to us were special, frustrating, and generally losers in life. But weeks before they arrived, the Marines introduced me to the Jeweler and Big Head. The Jeweler, well, he sold jewelry. And Big Head, he had a big mailbox sized head. Both were very kind individuals. Both showed signs of aggressive anti-insurgency tendencies; Big Head formerly kidnapped terrorists and drove them to the American checkpoints while the Jeweler had been known to arrange purchasing meetings for smuggled weapons at the front gate of the American post only to set up the sellers for arrest. Both were great sources to work with – prompt, experienced, and able to provide information. What baffled me in the meetings however was a complete lack of friendliness and rapport building the Marines had established. They had pushed the necessity to establish a relationship to the way side and instead used veiled threats against the vendors on Al Asad. It worked, but in a different way. Establishing a comfortable and friendly atmosphere in our meetings was the first thing I really worked on with the Jeweler and Big Head.

This act of kindness would end up going a long way for me, both relative to work and personally; the Jeweler offered up chunk discounts to me on silver and gold while Big Head would often comp me with bootleg DVDs and free energy drinks. Not the greatest bonuses, but a signal big enough to let me know I was doing my job, for once.