Well, we didn’t make it far. We made it to Scania.
Our trip to this point is uneventful. We left yesterday evening after evening chow. Our convoy got on the road with all its trucks. Usually our convoys are enormous and are made up of semi-tractor trailers hauling everything from fuel, milk, lumber, vehicle parts, and anything you can imagine. It is a long, long group when you string them out on the road. We passed one convoy that had nothing but flatbeds full of SUVs destined to ride the roads up north. They got a piggyback ride for this trip.
In this convoy I command one of the scout vehicles. We drive ahead of the convoy with our eyes and sensors trained on the road. Our job is to find the turns and get us safely from point A to point B. It is also our job to find trouble before the convoy gets to it. In this part of the world trouble is damaged roads and IEDs. Last night we found plenty of the former, none of the latter. It was a good trip.Point B for yesterday’s journey was a place called Scania. It is also our home for tonight.
Scania is the name of a military truck stop somewhere in south central Iraq. It’s a relatively small place. It is secure; surrounded by tall concrete walls and tough men with weapons in guard towers.
Scania has food, fuel, a few things for us to do, and it has my convoy. Dust storms stopped our forward progression. We hoped to push forward today but we already know our fate; sleep here again. We didn’t even get our wheels rolling. That’s how bad the weather is.
We geared up, got our vehicles ready, did our radio checks and coordinated for the move but nothing rolled. Other convoys are stuck here with us. Its like a convention of stranded tourists….much like people stuck at the airport during a snowstorm….everyone stuck in one small place together with one thing in common: they don’t want to be where they are.
Tomorrow we will try again but for tonight we stay here. What does the convoy-bound soldier do in Scania? Sleep, eat, pull maintenance on your vehicle, clean your weapon, watch movies, call home, sleep, eat…wait.
As soon as we learn we are stuck we don’t dare go to sleep…we save that rest so we can sleep right up until tomorrow’s move. We head off to the small movie rooms at the MWR building and find a movie we haven’t already seen a dozen times.
I’ll stay up, eat chow then go to bed. When we get up we will do a few things then start the routine all over again with another Operations and Intelligence update. We will do more pre-mission maintenance then get ready for the next leg of our journey and hopefully make it to Anaconda.
For now, we wait.
SABER 2,
out.
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