Iraq, the second paragraph is the important one

I was just talking to an old college buddy who is currently serving in Iraq. I obviously wasn’t going to get into the politics of it with a person who has their neck on the line. I have respect for the men and women who are over there. He told me the name of the town he was near and the general location but then laughed as he said that he couldn’t tell me any more specific. Its a little outside of town in the desert, people know that there’s a military base, it’s not inconspicuous the helicopters taking off and landing are a bit of a giveaway. I was going to try to google earth the base but my comp at work is to old and wont run the program, oh well. He’s a mechanic, fixing humvee’s, so he is pretty much away from the combat. He was more concerned about finding the Cannonball bar in Wyoming NY. He had just read the Cannonball Run Book by Brock Yates, which is a great book by the way, as is A Race Against Time, another Yates book. So when he gets back in country we’re going to Wyoming to go to a bar and at some point we need to go see the Dropkick Murphy’s in Boston. That son of a bitch has seen them twice but that’s my problem not his. I asked him a bit about what its like over there but for the most part tried to talk about more upbeat things like other college friends and what we’ll do when he comes back.

There was one really interesting thing he did talk about and that’s his work with the Iraqi Army. He didn’t tell me exactly what he’s doing with them but my assumption is that he is training them on how to work on the Humvee’s. The statement that really stuck was when he said that they’re some funny motherfuckers. Besides the accent and the bad hygiene they are pretty much the same as us. I told him that if you travel a bit you’ll notice that everywhere. We then discussed the hygiene part, I said that I had heard running water was a bit of a problem there and that I must be tough to keep clean without water. He said yeah but the other major part is that there’s no toilet paper. He said its advised not to shake anyone’s left hand as the old rule of right hand for food left hand to wipe has come back into affect. That’s pretty nasty but at the same time if you were in their situation you would probably be wiping your ass with your left hand too, of course you probably forget not to eat with your left hand. But back to the good part of saying that yeah we have different customs and different languages but we all laugh and tell jokes and at the end of the day there’s not much that would make me happier than to hear a joke in a different accent every single day.