New Year

January 5, 2008

New Year’s came and went with little fanfare. This year it carried about as much weight as Christmas did. Again, I’m not feeling like Scrooge or anything. It’s just that being here has changed the hue on the holidays. We spent a little time out by the fire pit, all sharing a bit of the good doctor’s medicine and having a generally nice time. But I turned in well before midnight and left ringing in the New Year to Dick Clark and the Hajis. We were told to stay under cover at midnight because of all the lead that falls from the sky. The Iraqis don’t really care that what goes up absolutely has to come down. (They celebrate New Year’s Eve just like the rest of the world does. Funny I have to mention that, but people from home have asked me.) And there was a young soldier last year who had it come down right through his ankle. That’s a quick way home I’m sure he’d of rather not had. So I was indoors well before it started raining lead. Those who stayed up late told me there was a lot of shooting going on at midnight but we haven’t heard of anyone getting hurt as a result.

So the New Year has brought a lot of activity at work. We’ve had a lot of high ranking people come to visit us this week. We have had a bunch of military intelligence, (No jokes please…), guys come to the prison this week. They were here to catalog all the foreign fighters that we have in custody. It was interesting for me because I wasn’t aware of the numbers until now. We horded them over to one spot and they did a retinal scan of every inmate with this cool little machine that fits in a briefcase. This cool little gadget then sends the ID info via satellite to some central database for safe keeping. It was very cool. And then every single guy had to be interviewed. I didn’t sit in on any of the interviews myself, but one of the guys rode back to the FOB with me and I asked him how things went. He said there are a lot of Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians and Egyptians locked up here. I didn’t want to grill him for specifics so I just let it go at knowing that we have about a 10% foreign fighter population. That’s good info to keep in the back of my mind I think. And then just 2 days ago we had the Operations Director of the FBI in Iraq come and visit us. Nice guy, but I have no idea what he was doing here other than getting a tour for tour’s sake. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but it’s above my pay grade so I don’t really care. And then yesterday we had the Army Colonel who runs the high profile prison over at BIAP come here to talk to one of the inmates who got hurt in the rocket attack that hit Rusafa 7 just before I got here. (I think I talked about that already? Rockets were fired at the IZ but one fell way short and hit the prison.) Anyway, people are saying that we are running a successful operation so we are getting a lot of attention. The Army wants to turn over the prisons they still run to the Iraqis, (and to us), and wants to see how a good place is run. That’s fine with me because it means job security and ultimately more openings. We have about 75 Advisers in country right now, but I’m hearing they want to get it up to over 100 soon.

I’ve had a cold for the last 3 or 4 days. It sucks because everywhere I go it’s dirty and dusty and germ filled. I have been gobbling vitamin C like candy hoping to knock this thing out. A cold I can handle, but if I were to get an infection of some kind I think it’d be a different story. I know now why Inmates put so much stock in good health, working out, taking vitamins, etc.

-Jim Franks