Tuesday, October 11, 2011

First Day In

December 20, 2007

Today is the official start of the Iraq holiday called EID, pronounced “ead”. The ICOs take a few days off and the prison runs on a skeleton crew. While the other half of the team go to the range today the rest of us who shot yesterday have to go inside for a health and welfare check. This was my first trip inside the prison’s walls where inmates are housed. (Remember that I’ve only been in the “Academy”) So we suited up and drove over in 4 vehicles. I went with the team that’s assigned to the tent portion of the prison. This is an area outside the main facility that was created for extra housing. I believe there are 13 tent complexes and each one can hold about 750 people. You do the math if you want…but I’ll make it easy and tell you that the whole Rasafa prison houses roughly 9000 inmates inside and out in the tents. Yes, I said 9000. I have found out that I’m going to be assigned to the tents when I get to work full time next week. So once we arrive it was not the dirt and mortar walls, or make-shift mini-tent facilities, or mounds and mounds of trash everywhere that struck me awe. It was the Iraq population living and working there that blew my mind. The first thing I see is a huge group of men, women, and children in civilian clothing all waiting inside this giant cage with a tin roof on it. This is the visiting area for the tents. There were probably 350 of them all piled into this space which is roughly the size of a large sized restaurant. And then from around the corner comes this herd of inmates walking in sloppy formation to the visiting area. There had to be 350 of them too and they were being shepherded by maybe 10 ICOs. And then as they got closer to their visitors the din of excitement began to rise and pretty soon it was so loud that that we had to change locations because we couldn’t hear ourselves talk…and we were probably 100 yards away. It was frenzy…like goldfish swarming food when it gets dropped into their tank. They put them all in this cage together with a chain link partition fence between the visitors and inmates. It was a wild site. Iraq’s are loud and multi-task oriented by nature…by that I mean they can carry on several different conversations at once without missing a beat. It’s just their social nature. But I have no idea how they conducted “visits”, like I think of it, under those circumstances. So then we go start our tours of each tent area. They are numbered…Rasafa 1, Rasafa 2, etc. Rasafa 7 was the tent area that got hit by a rocket 2 weeks ago that you might have heard or read about on the news. The rocket was intended for the Green Zone but fell way-way short. I saw the area that it hit, the broken concrete now patched, the shrapnel holes in the nearby tents, the blood stains still in the areas where men died. It wasn’t as big of an area as I’d imagined it would be, (the damaged area that is.) But it was still sobering. We finished up our tours and were done for the day. I have 2 days off now and go back to work Sunday, and then will get time off again for Christmas. Not a bad gig.


I found a poker game tonight, by the way. I was wondering how long it would take me to find the game. This bunch of guys holds a weekly game that’s been moved all over the FOB over the past year or so. They play out near the FOB’s helicopter pad in a small building that people waiting for a ride on a chopper hang out in. There were a few sailors, a soldier, and some contractors and we were all wearing guns because here everyone carries a weapon just about all the time. It was very old fashioned, but in a Corporal Klinger, MASHish kind of way. (Not Doc Holidayish) As we played a Blackhawk came in to pick someone up and the damn walls rattled and windows shook something fierce. But no one missed a beat, the cards took priority over all else. I laughed inside while it was happening. 10 people played and I won. I was desperate to make a good first impression. Hope I did.


-Jim Franks

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