Holiday in Iraq
My apologies for those of you who have been awaiting my next letter, I sincerely regret the delay. My excuse: I was briefly called back to action. My old friend Dick Cheney telephoned from a bunker somewhere in Montana and asked me to help out his old company in securing some oil wells in northern Iraq. Not one to turn down a mate or $400,000 for a few month’s work, I dutifully went.
Before I left I visited Dick D. Devlin's Cigar Emporium & House o' Love (located at 4211 Claude de Bernales Boulevard, US Minor Outlying Islands) and used my status as a correspondent for his fledgling on-line media empire to try and get some free cigars from the starlet he had working behind the counter. This turned out to be harder to do than securing northern Iraq, so I simply stuffed a box of Dick D. Devlin's new faux-Dunhill’s down my pants when she wasn’t looking.
Arriving in Dubai some hours later I was walking past the airport bar when I heard a drunken hollering of my name. Wandering over I saw three of my old army buddies downing some Johnnie Walker Blue before their flight home. I told them of my mission and they all fell about the room laughing. According to them I had under-estimated the enormity of my task and would surely find myself dressed in a nice orange boiler suit being beheaded on the evening news. I chose to ignore most of their advice, although I did take on board their suggestion that Basra was the safest part of the country because the Brits had done a splendid job securing it. I cancelled my flight to Baghdad, took delivery of my Zodiac, and off to Basra I went.
Whilst my cruise into Basra was uneventful, I did come under a hail of verbal fire from my manager who had driven to Basra to meet me. Apparently he had suffered about fifteen ambushes and attempted kidnappings on the way down and was extremely pissed about leaving Baghdad. I gave him half the box of faux-Dunhill cigars I had stolen from Dick D. Devlin's, however, and he calmed down.
Smoking them together I asked about the mission. The first thing any good soldier knows is your success or failure in the field depends on the man fighting next to you. I had asked him to get me every available ex-regiment man, British marines, any special forces people except for Americans. Whilst I do like our American friends, my experience of them in battle is that they either shoot at friendlies – namely myself – or stir up so much shit with the local population that even other allies want to bomb us. Just as I was enjoying the creamy, smooth taste of this wonderful faux-Dunhill cigar, he dropped me with the bad news. The sales guys had calculated the profit margin wrongly, the contract was fixed-price, and therefore the salaries of my team had been cut to almost nothing. They say you pay peanuts and get monkeys, but let me tell you I would have been happy with monkeys – he’d bloody well gone and got me Americans.
If I was pissed off then you should have seen me when I was introduced to my team. We had flown north to our base where I was faced with twenty-three guys all dripping in ammunition – so much ammunition that I was sure each of them would explode if one stray match was dropped in their direction. One idiot was carrying a bazooka around, and quite a few had machetes strapped to their legs. Talking to them I reassuredly found out all twenty-three had combat experience – if you call guarding malls in places like Alabama and West Virginia combat. I figured the safest thing I could do was disarm them all and leave them here.
As I was logging on to the Internet to book my airline tickets home, a friggin’ huge rocket came flying through the wall. In one of those surreal moments you seem to experience a lot in warfare, it kept on going through the other side of the building and blew a Humvee to smithereens. I grabbed my weapons and made me way to an observation point to figure out what we were dealing with.
It turned out that our headquarters had been surrounded by the enemy. There were hundreds of them and twenty-four of us. To use a military term, we were fucked. The mall boys had immediately swung into action, firing at anything that moved in whatever direction the recoil from their weapons caused them to lurch. My chances were grim outside, but if I stayed around these idiots any longer I was sure to die. Luckily, I quickly thought of a killer plan.
Well, surely someone would be killed. I got the boys together and made them stop shooting long enough to issue some commands. They wanted to drive a convoy of Humvees, loaded up with weaponry, out into the enemy and make a run for it. Fuck them, I thought. Who was I to stop such fine military planning? I endorsed their idea and off they went. As they were heading out, I jumped into an old BMW one of the local workers had left behind and drove to just inside the gates. Looking out I could see the entire enemy force bearing down on the mall boys. I think the explosions were accented by all the ammunition they had filled the Humvees with, but whatever the reason they went up with an almighty bang. As this distraction was happening I drove my beat up beamer out the gates and headed off down the road to blend in with the other locals.
I must have done something right in a previous life – because God knows I’ve done very little right in this life – for not far down the road I came across a group of heavily armed and well trained British soldiers. They had done so well in Basra the Americans had begged them to come north and fix things up. They were cleaning up a bomb site from the very early bombings into Iraq so it wouldn’t sit in the middle of the village like a festering wound of resenment. I sat down for a well earned rest and watched them, and as I did I saw one of the bombs they were lifting out. I have no idea how this got there, but on the side were the words “Smoke this Saddam. Courtesy of Dick D. Devlin's Cigar Emporium & House o' Love.” I lit up my faux-Dunhill in tribute.
Before I left I visited Dick D. Devlin's Cigar Emporium & House o' Love (located at 4211 Claude de Bernales Boulevard, US Minor Outlying Islands) and used my status as a correspondent for his fledgling on-line media empire to try and get some free cigars from the starlet he had working behind the counter. This turned out to be harder to do than securing northern Iraq, so I simply stuffed a box of Dick D. Devlin's new faux-Dunhill’s down my pants when she wasn’t looking.
Arriving in Dubai some hours later I was walking past the airport bar when I heard a drunken hollering of my name. Wandering over I saw three of my old army buddies downing some Johnnie Walker Blue before their flight home. I told them of my mission and they all fell about the room laughing. According to them I had under-estimated the enormity of my task and would surely find myself dressed in a nice orange boiler suit being beheaded on the evening news. I chose to ignore most of their advice, although I did take on board their suggestion that Basra was the safest part of the country because the Brits had done a splendid job securing it. I cancelled my flight to Baghdad, took delivery of my Zodiac, and off to Basra I went.
Whilst my cruise into Basra was uneventful, I did come under a hail of verbal fire from my manager who had driven to Basra to meet me. Apparently he had suffered about fifteen ambushes and attempted kidnappings on the way down and was extremely pissed about leaving Baghdad. I gave him half the box of faux-Dunhill cigars I had stolen from Dick D. Devlin's, however, and he calmed down.
Smoking them together I asked about the mission. The first thing any good soldier knows is your success or failure in the field depends on the man fighting next to you. I had asked him to get me every available ex-regiment man, British marines, any special forces people except for Americans. Whilst I do like our American friends, my experience of them in battle is that they either shoot at friendlies – namely myself – or stir up so much shit with the local population that even other allies want to bomb us. Just as I was enjoying the creamy, smooth taste of this wonderful faux-Dunhill cigar, he dropped me with the bad news. The sales guys had calculated the profit margin wrongly, the contract was fixed-price, and therefore the salaries of my team had been cut to almost nothing. They say you pay peanuts and get monkeys, but let me tell you I would have been happy with monkeys – he’d bloody well gone and got me Americans.
If I was pissed off then you should have seen me when I was introduced to my team. We had flown north to our base where I was faced with twenty-three guys all dripping in ammunition – so much ammunition that I was sure each of them would explode if one stray match was dropped in their direction. One idiot was carrying a bazooka around, and quite a few had machetes strapped to their legs. Talking to them I reassuredly found out all twenty-three had combat experience – if you call guarding malls in places like Alabama and West Virginia combat. I figured the safest thing I could do was disarm them all and leave them here.
As I was logging on to the Internet to book my airline tickets home, a friggin’ huge rocket came flying through the wall. In one of those surreal moments you seem to experience a lot in warfare, it kept on going through the other side of the building and blew a Humvee to smithereens. I grabbed my weapons and made me way to an observation point to figure out what we were dealing with.
It turned out that our headquarters had been surrounded by the enemy. There were hundreds of them and twenty-four of us. To use a military term, we were fucked. The mall boys had immediately swung into action, firing at anything that moved in whatever direction the recoil from their weapons caused them to lurch. My chances were grim outside, but if I stayed around these idiots any longer I was sure to die. Luckily, I quickly thought of a killer plan.
Well, surely someone would be killed. I got the boys together and made them stop shooting long enough to issue some commands. They wanted to drive a convoy of Humvees, loaded up with weaponry, out into the enemy and make a run for it. Fuck them, I thought. Who was I to stop such fine military planning? I endorsed their idea and off they went. As they were heading out, I jumped into an old BMW one of the local workers had left behind and drove to just inside the gates. Looking out I could see the entire enemy force bearing down on the mall boys. I think the explosions were accented by all the ammunition they had filled the Humvees with, but whatever the reason they went up with an almighty bang. As this distraction was happening I drove my beat up beamer out the gates and headed off down the road to blend in with the other locals.
I must have done something right in a previous life – because God knows I’ve done very little right in this life – for not far down the road I came across a group of heavily armed and well trained British soldiers. They had done so well in Basra the Americans had begged them to come north and fix things up. They were cleaning up a bomb site from the very early bombings into Iraq so it wouldn’t sit in the middle of the village like a festering wound of resenment. I sat down for a well earned rest and watched them, and as I did I saw one of the bombs they were lifting out. I have no idea how this got there, but on the side were the words “Smoke this Saddam. Courtesy of Dick D. Devlin's Cigar Emporium & House o' Love.” I lit up my faux-Dunhill in tribute.
posted by Major Curtis Garr (Ret.) at 09:17
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