COP DESTROYER

Like all high rollers, celebrities and famous athletes, Soldiers are accustomed to luxurious amenities and the red carpet treatment. So it should come as no surprise that we don’t limit our lifestyle to 160 square foot containers. Our MiTT team has a second home in the city of Tal Afar. Our Iraqi Army battalion lives and operates for the most part out of Combat Outpost (COP) Destroyer. We as their advisors spend approximately half of our time living with them in our house. COP Destroyer is on the outskirts of Tal Afar and consists of a bunch of abandoned houses which the IA has commandeered. It is protected on most sides by coils of concertina wire (razor wire) and concrete barriers. On one side it is open desert and on the other three sides the city of Tal Afar is close by. Our house sits on one side of the COP and overlooks both the desert and the city.
The house is fairly nice by Iraqi standards, substandard by American standards, it is constructed entirely of concrete, has concrete floors, and no indoor plumbing. There is one long room that runs the length of the house. It has three rooms off one side, two off the other and a courtyard out the back. We’ve converted one of the rooms into a kitchen with a microwave, deep freeze, toaster oven and a couple of hot plates. Another room serves as a “war room” where we store all of our gear (vests, helmets, weapons, and ammo) that we need to get out of the house in a hurry. The other rooms are sleeping rooms. The bathroom is a concrete structure in the back with a water tank on the roof. The “toilet” is an eastern style toilet which means it is a porcelain hole in the ground. The locals utilize it by squatting carefully over it (a comfortable position for them, as that is how they sit around a lot anyway), but we Americans are used to sitting not squatting, so we have a portable toilet chair, very similar to a training toilet for kids, we took out the pail and it now sits over the hole in the floor. After you do your business you simply pour about five gallons of water down the hole, and from there we really aren’t sure where it goes, though there is raw sewage flowing through the city and I guess some of that is ours. The other room outside has a shower head on the wall and a whole cut where the wall meets the floor, also there is a sink and a mirror for shaving etc.
Most Iraqi homes have flat roofs with a staircase to reach the top. Ours is no different. When the city power goes out or the AC isn’t working we typically spend the night on the roof. We have a machine gun mount up there and sandbagged bunkers at each corner “just in case.” It’s probably overkill but I guess you never know.
The biggest challenge to living in the house is the lack of consistent electricity. The TalAfar city power distribution substation rations the power to different neighborhoods throughout the day. Our house has power for about two hours at a time followed by two hours without power. In the past we had a large generator for backup power, but due to an incident the other night the generator caught on fire. Here’s what happened (names omitted to protect the innocent.) Late one night, a Captain and a Sergeant First Class were pulling guard duty. The generator was humming along happily but was running out of fuel. The CPT noticed that city power was on and decided to take the opportunity to refuel the sputtering generator, before he could make another move however the generator sputtered, coughed and died. No problem thought the Captain; I’ll just turn on the city power and go refuel the generator. So, he went to the back of the house and flipped a circuit breaker which allowed city power to once again power the house. This set into motion a series of events that ended our days of easy power. The normal sequence of events to switch from generator power to city power is to power down the generator; turn off the breaker which connects the generator to the house, and then and only then switch the city power on. By not disconnecting the generator from the house before turning on the city power, the CPT inadvertently sent city power the wrong way into the generator thereby causing it to catch fire. So, now we are without a method of backup power. And the SFC and CPT are now known affectionately as “The City Power Duo.”
Without electricity the house doesn’t cool off at all during the night, we have taken to sleeping on the roof where at least you can get a cool breeze to cool off. The problem with that is the noise, dogs barking and growling all night, donkeys braying loudly, and finally the mosque sounding its call to prayer. There is something mysterious, scary and yet peaceful and beautiful about waking up at 4 in the morning to a sky full of stars and hearing the slow, mournful call of “Allahu Akbar” a call which has been bastardized by the insurgents, Saddam Hussein, and the American Media. Alahu Akbar is often heard in the background on videos which show insurgents blowing up American convoys, it is also stitched into the Iraqi flag, and if you say it whole heartedly three times with the intention of becoming a Muslim, you are thereby a Muslim. Saddam Hussein ordered it to be sown onto the Iraqi flag not out of religious fervor, but to prevent he Shiite people from burning the Iraqi flag. No Muslim would be so brazen as to burn an item which has sown onto it Alahu Akbar or translated to English…”God is Great.”