Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Get back in your fu@#%*g truck

The subject of my post is a pretty common phrase that I use around here. The damn third country nationals really seem to like to get out of their trucks when we are on a convoy. I have learned a couple phrases in arabic, mostly things that have to do with vehicles. Truck, engine, lights, fuel, air things like that. However nothing that comes close to "Get back in your fucking truck". The TCN trucks break down quite a bit so we are stopping all the time. I try to stay in the truck as much as possible, but my I am the rear gun truck commander so my vehicle has to stay at the rear of the convoy and make sure that the tail of the convoy is covered. So if something happens in my part of the convoy, my truck has to stay there while I go find out what is going on. So I dismount from time to time. Probably the most dangerous thing to do. When your in the truck you have all the armor of the truck, lots of comm and a big crew served weapon to take care of bussiness and are relatively safe. When your out of the truck its just you. While I would laugh at any haji bobby that tried to fuck with me its still a little intense running up to a broken down vehicle all exposed with nothing, but a M-4. The TCNs don't understand much english so you have to usually resort to yelling and pointing to get your point across. You would be surprised just how quickly people hop to work when you are yelling loud enough in the right tone of voice. Every time something has happened to me or something exciting, is a time that I dismounted the truck to find out what a stupid TCN was doing. They also try to take advantage of every stop to get out of their truck and go pee or get something to eat or some kind of other fucking around. We don't have time for that hence the phrase "Get back in your fucking truck!!" They look at you and say something in JATWASH language and scurry back to their truck. Well I don't really know how to end this story so BAM there its done.
Ben

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

The rest of the crew - City of the Rocks

This is the rest of the crew having a tasty adult beverage. This picture was taken on top of a rock very close to our campsite. One would not want to fall backwards!

Picture of Bryan at City of the Rocks

This is another picture of me standing on the rock formations really close to lookout rock.

Idaho City of the Rocks

We just got back from a AWESOME trip down to City of the Rocks in Southern Idaho. For the most amazing granite rock formations in the western united states, one MUST check this out. We arrived there on a Saturday afternoon. It looked like it was going to rain, but ended up being a fabulous night. After driving around to every camp site in the park, we finally decided on one and set up camp. There were hardly any other people there at the time, so we had the luxury of choosing the best spot. We hiked around all day, and the following day. We almost got lost (easy to do), but ended up finding the trail as the sun was going down. Below is a picture from our adventures there. This is a picture of Terry standing on the (almost) top of Lookout Rock.