The White Fluffy Dog, Mortars, and Rain

Emails from Iraq

Photography by Jayel Aheram.

Butts the Mangy Mutt was the unfor­tu­nate vic­tim of a pack wild dogs that roam the open desert around this base. At night, I could hear them howl and bay at the moon and some­times laugh and cackle like hye­nas. And while I was on post dur­ing the night, I would see their sil­hou­ettes against the night as they slink in and out of the shad­ows. But I have never really seen what they looked like until today.

One of them, a very white and fluffy mon­grel with a medium upturned and curled tail, seems to be the leader of his pack. He some­how led his pack through the wires unde­tected into a fairly large water reten­tion pool for a lit­tle bit of dip (in the entire his­tory of this base thus far, his pack would be the only locals that man­aged to repeat­edly enter the base unau­tho­rized and unde­tected). His pack con­sists of a gangly-looking Dalmatian, a very agi­tated brown dog, and a rather men­ac­ing look­ing giant rat (at least, I am ready to be con­vinced that it was a rat for it cer­tainly looked like it). I am assum­ing that this is just a small part of his pack, unless there are other packs of wild dogs. Anyway, his pack is known to occa­sion­ally ven­ture at night to feast on the MRE trash left unat­tended by Marines at the base of the guard tow­ers. But at this moment, they were hap­pily drink­ing and splash­ing in the water of the reten­tion pool. Of course, being the leader, White Fluffy Dog did not take part in the canine mer­ri­ment, but instead posted him­self guard on top of a sand dune over­look­ing the reten­tion pool. I stared at him and he stared right back. And then I real­ized what these filthy mutts were doing. “Great,” I sighed, “they are splash­ing around in what will be my shower water.”

Mortars, while not hit­ting the base, are a daily life here in this base. Every time I am on post, I would not fail to hear the Marine man­ning the radar sta­tion scream­ing “COUNTERFIRE! COUNTERFIRE!” from the radio. If this does not hap­pen at least three times in that eight-hour post, it is a slow day for insur­gency. Nearly most of the time, how­ever, the mor­tars are aimed at tar­gets within the city. While reg­u­lar, mor­tar attacks aimed at the base are infre­quent. Also, a few of the mor­tars are duds. They would fall harm­lessly into the desert sand and not explode. These we would find dur­ing our patrols (we actu­ally found one yes­ter­day) which we would con­tact EOD (explo­sives ord­nance department/division) about. They would come in and cart it off some­where for a con­trolled explo­sion. The only prob­lem with EOD is that they are lax about noti­fy­ing our com­pany about these con­trolled explo­sions and when they do a con­trolled explo­sion, many of us invari­ably swamp COC (com­mand oper­at­ing cen­ter) with excited reports about an explosion.

It has been rain­ing here for a while. And appar­ently, when it rains in the desert, it pours. There had been reports of flash floods occur­ing around and about. And the “empty river beds” that criss­cross the desert around the base are no longer empty and are hap­pily gur­gling along towards the Euphrates.