The following journal entry comes from a young soldier deployed in the Persian Gulf. He has shared it, anonymously, so that others will know something of what young men and women in the military are facing.

We did not have to see the combat that came before us to know what happened in An-Nasiriyah. We could see it in the faces of the people who walked these war torn streets. I remember hearing a story about Ernest Hemingway. They say when he was a correspondent, and researching his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls during the Spanish Civil War, he spent his days in a bar. He would listen to the stories of travelers and soldiers as they took refuge there. Although he rarely saw the real combat the stories came to him.

So it was, for the most part, with us. I had a room that I lived in with two other guys, and people would come to visit and tell the stories of all that was happening beyond our small section of patrol. The room was founded after an extreme distaste and stand off about the way things were being run.

We dubbed it the village. Our building for the company was across the soccer fields from Saddam Hospital. It was the agricultural building for that area of Iraq. The building had a fairly open first floor, and the second floor rooms were open as well, and the five floors above that were offices. We lived on the left hand side of the second floor.

As you entered the large room it was darker than the rest. There was a small window at the end of the rectangular room, and on the sides there were small diamond shaped windows. As you entered the room to the left there was a bathroom. Iraqis don’t use toilets. They have porcelain holes in the floor. We could never get used to not having a seat.

The room just past the bathroom was a room within the big room. It had two doors on either side as well as small windows. It was completely tile. When the platoon moved in we shoved all the broken glass into the room along with radiators that had been broken off the walls by looters.

For the first couple of days I slept in the middle of the big room. Things were getting ridiculous. People were up all night talking. Patrols would come in late at night and wake us up as they took off their gear. The people around me were beginning to annoy me. We would wake up at 5:30 when our patrols weren’t until 8:30 or 9:00. I was getting tired of waking up just to eat breakfast then go back to sleep.

The attachments lived in the back corner by themselves. They were a close group of guys who didn’t listen to the reveille call. They were the machine gunners and demolition guys that had been attached to us from weapons platoon.

I got to know the machine gunners in a unique way. First they were all country boys that discussed fishing and hunting all day. I don't know much about fishing and hunting, but I do know how to relax and tell stories about the woods. I stopped by their machine gun nest one evening and stayed up with them.

We talked about the situation in the town. We talked about the platoon and the problems that would go unspoken forever. We talked about the mountains back home. It became a daily routine. Every evening I would get tired of the same voices so I would climb the steps to the gunners nest. I was the only one in the platoon who kept them company and they respected that.

Eventually Bell asked me why I just didn’t move in with them if I didn’t like the guys I was living with, “Or why don’t you just move into the bat cave?” The next morning they woke me up at 5:30 and Hamilton started in on me. He was joking around, but I was ready for a change.

I spent the whole morning cleaning the room out. I put a bookshelf in the door to block the view from the big room and hung an old torn Iraqi Flag from the window. One of the Machine Gunners took notice and told me he was moving in. Before long we had a table in the middle. Pictures of places and things that reminded us of home hanging on the wall. We had shelves for everything we needed. We made seats out of the radiators. We cut holes in an old paint can and laid chicken wire over the top to make a stove.

Corporal Barr came in to see our progress. He was a demolitions guy from Stafford, VA. Five minutes later he had moved in to and we were boiling eggs and heating water for our coffee. “You know what I want for dinner. I want an omelet.” I said sipping my coffee. Bonds smiled, “Doc I can make a good omelet.”

The rest of the day we spent shopping. We were trading MRE's for pots and pans. We bought oil lamps, potatoes, eggs, onions, garlic, chi, incense, candles, cooking oil, and cokes (all the cokes were either Pepsi, Seven Up, or orange soda). They came in glass bottles that looked like something from the fifties. The kids would make you return the bottles so they could take them in to get refilled.

From that day on we were cooking. Everyday we would go out in town and buy and trade. A family finally took us in. We would make an order with them and they would make the bread for our meals. Bread was a big deal for these people. They cooked it in circles the size of pizza and thicker than Mexican tortillas. We used the bread as plates.

The family would give us chickens and goat meat. They had a little girl with crossed eyes, and two little boys. One was just reaching his teens and spoke excellent English. We were cooking pasta, Mac and Cheese (the cheese came from the MRE, and they also have spices like cayenne pepper in some of the meals), burritos with goat meat, rice, omelets, and the list goes on.

It wasn’t a matter of whether or not the food tasted good. The point is that we were surviving. We were making the best of our situation.
People were coming from all over the compound to our room just to visit.

They all said it was something out of Platoon. It was from the Vietnam era. Bunch of hippies. We were playing cards, dominos, and jeopardy until all hours in the morning and sleeping in. Every one in the “Village” had their job. One person would clean; the other would do the dishes. I would help our Mexican friend cook, and Bonds would collect the firewood.

We were improving the room. Bell made hooks to hang from the water pipes so we could hang the pots and pans. He also made a stirring spoon and spatula, seeing as how we had been cooking with K-Bars up until then. We were like a group of prisoners, and we were that close, too.

Eventually our leaders became irritated with the room. They thought we were separating ourselves from the platoon. They hated the attitude the room carried, so Staff Sergeant made us take the posters down and move out. I was mad but we moved out. It worked better. The room wasn’t so cluttered and we still cooked.

So that is how the stories came to us. They were stories on top of the ones we were living. We lived in the place where people would go to sit down, have a smoke and tell their stories. Now I will tell the stories to you, but there are too many to write in one sitting. They will come in waves, as soon as I can figure them out.