Apparently while we were stumbling around at night in sandstorms, getting ambushed, the brass heard there was a thousand-vehicle strong Republican Guard element heading south to intercept the Marines, who were closing in on Baghdad. We were sent to intercept them, in a place called Karbala. Everyone in ACE squad was suddenly clamoring for more firepower, and Top finally relented and gave us all nice new M16A4s, never fired. We only got two mags and no tracers, but suddenly we all felt like Rambo. Back across the river we went South, then off into the desert once more. I was starting to wish I had joined the Marines. We drove for two days through absolutely nothing(thank God for GPS) and finally my ACE abruptly broke. Turned out the water-pump impeller disintegrated but all I knew is that I was stranded. Fortunately we were at a halt when it happened, and I was still able to limp the thing forward. I had heard all of the stories about what happened to soldiers who had been ordered to leave all their gear and jump into a passing vehicle and had determined that I would rather be demoted than left in Iraq for six months without any gear. If I had had faith in my immediate chain of command to give a damn about me things would have been different. I had also seen what had happened to the stranded US vehicles we passed. We had thought at the time that the Hadjiis had been stripping them, but we found out later that the US soldiers were actually the worst. My LT showed up and ordered me to hook up my ACE to another so it could be towed. I informed him that this would destroy the transmission. He ordered me to "fix it" and proceeded to scream at me while I spent the next hour crawling around under the ACE removing belly-pans to get a face-full of oil and unbolting the drive axles so it could be towed. Ah I miss the Army. When I was done I looked like I was Nigerian, I was so black. The LT told me to leave every thing but my Sensitive Items" and we'd get it later. I said "Sure thing, LT", and got every piece of my gear and piled it on top of his Humvee. I don't think he ever forgave me, but as soon as we were ready, a Cav Bradley showed and suggested that he would be faster towing the ACE than another slow ACE would be. What could we say? And that was the last I saw of my vehicle for 3 days. I rode into Karbala clutching my 16 in one hand, and my laptop case in the other.
In the Resupply depot in Karbala we picked up my vehicle. Everything inside the hatch had been picked clean, and the lock on the BII box had been bashed off. The German interior lock I had fashioned into place on the boxback in Bamberg hadn't given up the ghost, though, and all my tools were safe. Fuck you in the ass with a SAW, LT O'Hare. If I had listened to him, I would have lost everything but the clothes on my back and my weapons. I still lost a good amount of "TA-50"(the issued gear you have to clean and return to get out of the service). I later got fucked out of about $1100 because my idiot Plt Sgt didn't turn in the right paperwork for me to write off these items.
To give you an idea of why I was so concerned about my stuff, I later ran into my platoon-mate SPC Rudden, who told me about how he and SGT Vanderbeck had hit a mine or mortar(or fell asleep, I wonder) in their HEMTT(Think huge Semi-truck) and driven off the road. SGT V had dragged a dazed Rudden out of the cab and, carrying only their weapons, they had staggered up to a CAV Bradley. As soon as the CAV guys heard everyone was out of the truck, an M1 put a HE round into the demo packed on the truck's bed so the Hadji's couldn't loot it. Rudden & Sgt V spent the next two weeks with nothing but their rifles and one clip each. They didn't even have their BDU tops, as like all of us, they had been riding in their undershirts under flak vests. Sgt V had no socks. Upon hearing this story I gave Rudden a toothbrush, and he said he really appreciated it.
I was able to limp my ACE along for about 10 miles before it would overheat, so with the help of the civilian GPS I had bought before deploying I found the rest of my platoon. They were camped in the middle of the desert again, about 20 miles East of Lake Karbala and 30 miles South-West of Baghdad. This was our view of lovely Lake Karbala.
Life quickly settled into a routine. We'd wake up at like 10, then spend all day under tarps we had rigged. Nothing happened until after 1500, when you could almost stand to walk around without dying from the heat. I would wander through the spread-out convoy to see if there was any news. Thanks to my shortwave & the BBC, I had regular visitors. Cigarettes were going for $2 each or $25 a pack. A major event was when we got the new-style MREs, which we promptly fought over. I can't recall which books I read, which is amazing, since I read them all at least twice. I started paying a cigarette per book or magazine collected and received over 20. One day I dug a latrine ditch for our Cav neighbors and bartered a pack for a full case of the new MREs all for myself. An hour later their 1st Sergeant come screetching up and runs out of his Bradley towards me. "Oh no," I thought, "this is going to be bad." He explained that he had heard I was trading smokes for new MREs and would I care for 10 cases? I had to say No, but traded 3 packs for 4 extra magazines, lots of tracer rounds, a mag pouch, combat sling, etc etc. Amazing, the power of addiction.
At night we would stretch out on top of our tracks and watch the MLRS batteries light up the sky while listening to the A-10s buzz their 30mms against the hapless Republican Guard.
During this time I was able to call home on a CAV sat-phone. Picture a table and phone attached to a little fan-antenna in the middle of nowhere, with nothing else in sight in the desert but your far off vehicles. My Mom almost cried and my Dad told me he was proud of me. I must say I was too, at that point.
We got to blow up some abandoned Iraqi weapons.
Eventually, after the war quite seemed like a bad dream and I was starting to imagine becoming a Beduin, we got our orders and fired up for Baghdad.
We climbed up an enormous escarpment that stretched as far as the eye could see. I remember wondering how a geologist would explain it.
Along the way, we saw more weird shit, like one of our own AVLBs with the 18-ton bridge stuck in the up position for two weeks.

A few of us followed the highway North and met up with two other ACE-squad members who had apparently been having all kinds of fun. They had been fighting fires and clearing roads, raiding stores, basically NOT sitting in the desert for two weeks. They were at a Cav mortar platoon roadblock on HWY 18. Here is what the Cav did to motorists who didn't stop.


Jimenez & I caught up with the line vehicles just out of town, in an abandoned field. We all unloaded the ACEs, then he & I dug a big pit, pushed up a berm around it and helped them put all the ordinance in the hole and prep it with C4. This is how it looked when we were about half-way done, with Jimenez's ACE in the background.

After digging the trench, Jimenez & I watched the Line Dogs efficiently place the weapons, covering them with lots of C4 and rigging everything together with a "line main" of Det Cord. He & I got back on our ACEs, as we obviously weren't needed. I jumped down 10 minutes later to take a piss, when I suddenly heard a "WHOOOSH" and felt a great heat on the side of my face. Glancing in the direction on the pit, I saw twenty soldiers leaping in every direction and running at top speed, as behind them a huge wall of flame shot up. I turned my head back to see Jimenez in mid-jump off of his ACE, running in mid-air. I was normally a faster runner, but having to hold my pants up with one hand slowed me enough for him to overtake me. We ran about 50 yards then dived behind a little hump. After 5 minutes we carefully headed back.
Turned out that those funny donut-shaped "packing foam" things packaged with all those mortar rounds were actually booster charges that one could too into a mortar tube to give the mortar a little extra "oomph". They were NOT just trash, as we had supposed. Of the 25 guys there, at least half were smokers and a quarter actually were smoking, right outside of the pit. One of their ashes had ignited a pile of these booster charges. It was shown to me that one of the det-cord lines had had the green insulation actually burnt off to the point where you could see the white powder inside. We had all come less than a millimeter from certain death. One of the smokers, PFC Sinai(an Albanian, of all things, who only cared about beer and pussy and thus was much beloved by the platoon) was accused and made to were full-battle-rattle and do exercises across the enormous clearing. He denied it was his fault and I believe him. Whoever almost killed twenty-five of his best friends in the middle of a war zone certainly isn't going to fess up. Sgt Corner re-created the scene for the camera. We were all pretty happy to be alive. You can see the ring main staked around the pit. I'm standing to the left, looking relieved that I'm not going to die with my pants around my ankles.
1st Platoon called themselves The War Pimps.
I asked if they had an extra AK and they told me to go pick one out of the pile. Later, when I was transferred to 2nd Platoon, we very nearly had a mutiny because the NCOs were keeping most of the bottled water for themselves, while the regular Joes had to drink the horrible "treated" pondwater. 1st Platoon, on the other hand, had pallets of water that they had specially organized a "night-op" to steal from the Air Force.
Sgt Corner was so smooth, I dunno how he got away with it. As lowly engineers, we weren't issued Interceptor vests, just the useless flak vests that wouldn't stop a 9mil. Corner bought his own, personal Interceptor(they were over $600 each) and made whoever was on point in his platoon wear it. After the conex(shipping container) with most of 1st Platoon's personal gear somehow got lost on it's way to us from Kuwait, he made sure that everyone had what they needed. When our new company Commander, Captain ____(a sour little man with no sense of humor and a fondness for doing everything by the book) and I happened upon Sgt Corner out for a jog around the palace complex in Baghdad, Cpt ____ asked Sgt Corner if he shouldn't be wearing more than cut-off BDU pants, cut-off army boots and no shirt. "Probably", said Corner, and then continued his jog around the lake.
We blew up more arms caches and then slowly moved North.

A&O platoon re-formed and convoyed up the main highway into Baghdad and then into a huge palace complex. We first parked and lived on our vehicles in a huge field/parking lot away from the palaces.
Hussein's palace architecture could be described as "Neo-classical psuedo-Islamic fascade on pre-fab concrete"


We did a humanitarian mission out in town--we used our ACEs to clear a soccer field of huge piles of refuse. The smell of human feces was nightmarish. I later smelled the same thing back on the road and realized that many of the Iraqi roads had shitty water running on top of them. Lots of Iraqi kids came & played in the shit right next to my tank while I was working. I had to be careful not to run them over. They were always shouting "Mister, Mister!" and pointing to their mouths, but I never gave them anything. This day, though, one kid got my attention and pointed to where my tank's sprocket had picked up a huge amount of wire. By carefully backing up I was able to get it off, but it could have been bad. I called the kid over and threw him an MRE. Immediately a bigger kid came over, hit him in the face & took it away. I think there's a metaphor there somewhere.
We did some more arms caches, improved the roads and the walls around the complex and I bought some booze off an Iraqi through the wire. I hid it in my vehicle, next to the AKs and H&K MP5 I had saved from a cache. I later heard(I had spies everywhere) that our 1SGT was going to do a Health and Welfare inspection and so I hid everything elsewhere. Turned out my platoon sergeant inspected everything. He gave each vehicle a quick inspection but carefully searched mine for a half-hour. I got a little concerned, and so gave the bottle of booze to Hamidovic, the commander's driver. Turned out Ol' Ham, while a huge asset to the company for his ability to speak some Arabic and his experience in the Bosnian war, was also the worst kind of buddy-fucker and had actually turned me in himself. This was not the last time I saw him do this to someone. Just goes to show you never know about some people. Here I am standing in the bowl of my ACE with my very-own, super-neato AK. Note the taped-together glasses.

We started doing regular missions to round up arms caches. We would actually transport & store them, which was a change from blowing them up. We found some enormous caches.
Here we are "doing a cache". You can see where someone marked "UXO"(UneXploded Ordinance) on the side of the building. The rope is to lower the mortar & AA shells that were stored up top. You can see the AA gun to the right, lying upside-down where we threw it off the roof.

Next: Peace is Hell!