Hollywood Ruined it.

Americans have always had a fondness for movies. Every year billions of dollars get spent and made in the film business. Like every American kid I grew up watching Tom Hanks save Private Ryan, Mel Gibson lay waste to the English (twice in fact), Robert Duval conducting air assault missions on Viet Cong villages to the operatic sound of “Ride of the Valkyries.” I saw Ewan MacGregor, Eric Bana, and numerous other stars storm the city of Mogadishu, and a cast of no names fight the Nazis from Normandy, to Holland, to Bastogne, and finally Germany. Just like many girls, who’s standard for men has been put hopelessly high by Disney and Nicholas Sparks, my expectations for my first combat mission were about on the level of Omaha Beach…well maybe not that insane, but I at least though I’d see someone shoot at something.

All I saw was trash, mud shacks, and an amazingly sucky country.

War is boring. Not like a weekend in Salem with nothing going on boring, more like “oh my gosh if no one shoots at us soon I’m going to lose my mind” boring. The fact that we do these convoys all through the night doesn’t help the situation. If you want to experience Iraq, go put on a bicycle helmet get in the biggest, heaviest, most awkward vehicle you can find, drive from Roanoke, to Harrisonburg, to Philidelphia, Pa all through the night. Sleep half the day, then the next night drive back. Welcome to my job.

To ease the boredom we found things to do. We shot pen flares at each other, and hit our own vehicle with star cluster rounds from our m203 grenade launcher, threw things at the Iraqi police checkpoint, threw phosphorescent chemlight juice at each other and the vehicles. We answered life’s most challenging questions such as “who is hotter, Jessica Alba, or Jessica Biel?” I heard there may have been a hood-surfing incident but that is just rumor and speculation. A certain gunner almost got a phone number from a local national while we were blocking traffic from going on a one lane bridge…too bad it was a male local national. I may or may not have seen a gun truck attempt to play chicken with an Iraqi tractor trailer. Your tax dollars at work.

The Counter IED training they gave us at Camp Shelby was a joke. EVERYTHING out there looks like an IED (improvised explosive device, basically a roadside bomb that has been the #1 killer of soldiers in Iraq.) The whole country is covered in trash, the roads are full of potholes, not to mention it’s dark so you can’t see anything more than 10 meters or so off the road. Saying I wasn’t ever nervous or scared would be a lie, there were a few mad sketch neighborhoods we drove through… luckily it was around 2 am, so you’d have to be one dedicated heathen savage to sit that long and wait to shoot at or blow up a convoy.

So thus begins the longest 10 months of my life. The most frustrating part is that these missions interrupt my workout schedule, they ALWAYS fall on salsa dancing night at the club, and I don’t get internet while we’re away from our base, but as they say, war is hell.