Sour Swinger Predominantly follows my Army & Iraq Deployment. Also has some Geek, School, and other talk.

Well funny enough I’m not the only blogger within the 56th Brigade. Thanks to a dedicated reader, I was given these links. If anyone knows of any others be sure to let me know.

111th HHC Recon
C 1-111th Inf
A 1-111th Inf

Little FYI, the 1-111th is the battalion that I caused a big uproar with their Lt. Col about my blog. Hopefully these guys don’t have anything against me.

Wanna receive email updates to new Army postings? Register with my site.

My units AO (area of operation) is fairly small compared to most others however we still are in charge of a few towns. After visiting them all, I learned one thing. Poverty sucks! You know those adopt an african child commercials? That’s what I think of. Pictures and stories will give you an idea, but I truly didn’t realize until I saw first hand.

The best town (relative of course) has spotty electricity and is able to send their kids to school until the age of 12. The worst town hasn’t sent their kids to school since 2006! All the towns have no sewage or access to clean water. There’s no trash collection so it literally builds up in and around the towns. One village literally has heaps of trash instead of dirt yards. In regards to health, there is no nearby hospital. Almost regularly, Iraqi’s will come up to us requesting medical assistant. Many times, our medic will get mad as their clinic will give something like itching cream for an infected wound. Our American homeless live in wealth compared to most of the people here.

The smell in the air is horrendous! Its very distinct. Imagine the smell of death, mixed with feces and topped off a landfill. For the first few days I felt like I was gonna vomit. Took a bit but I’m starting to get used to it. There’s one bridge where are the dogs go to die. That place smells particularly bad. Btw, did I mention there are hundreds of feral dogs roaming about. To go a minute without seeing one is rare.

With the poor living conditions and war battered towns, in between it all are the kids. My heart truly goes out to them. Many wear clothing that you’d find in a dumbster. Others will just not smile. Their faces bear more pain and stress from an experience I can only imagine. Even down to the 4 yrs olds.

After my platoon sergeant witness a naked 5 year old chasing after our vehicles wanting food, we started a little campaign of passing out candy, food, water, pens, paper, and just about any supplies we could. For a while we used our own personal funds but as family and organizations back home sent us donated supplies, we turned around and used that instead. I’ll tell you this, the kids absolutely adore us! Like Santa on a fire truck, they’ll flock to our vehicles waving and jumping even if we are only driving by. If we start throwing candy they swarm like seagulls on a beach. In the severely poor towns we must be careful and strict as we hand out stuff. Its not uncommon to literally find 30 kids gathering up on a soldier. At those points it becomes a safety concern for everyone.

The future of Iraq or any country for that case is always in the hands of its children. No matter how the adults feel about us, we’ve certainly won the hearts and mind of the children. And in that regard, I feel we’ve succeeded with Iraq.

Wanna receive email updates to new Army postings? Register with my site.

From working with SGT Kepner and SGT Presto in Alpha company, they taught me the importance of the 3 rules of dismounting. Though comical, they do serve a serious purpose. They are:

1) Always look cool.

2) Always know where you are.

3) If you don’t know where you are, make sure you still look cool.

You might be thinking….wtf? Rest assured its good advice. Being cool basically means to present oneself as a hard target. When you walk around, make sure you look like a bad*ss. Some one whose on top of their game and knows their sh*t. The enemy is less likely to mess with you if you look like you know what your doing.

Its important to know where you are when conducting a dismounted operation. To have situational awareness. Know where and what your objective is. Know where your exit points are and avenues of approach. Keep track on what’s happening, whose around you, and your sectors of fire. Being on top of these things will aid in executing a successful and hopefully safe mission.

If you dismount and are completely lost as to what’s happening and what you’re suppose to be doing….don’t let the enemy visibly see! Just go back to looking like your from the special forces and the enemy will never be the wiser. The presentation of ones self can make all the difference.

Now that I’m regularly heading out of the wire and conducting missions, I discovered what my top 3 fears are.

1) Having to poop while on mission.

2) Becoming ill after eating Iraqi food.

3) Making a decision that gets one of my soldiers killed.

So far I failed number two (for another post) and had a close one with pooping. Boy was I pitching those butt cheeks. LoL. Though we’ve already had quite a few people poop out there. As far as I know, our LT was the first and even broadcasted it over the net.

Wanna receive email updates to new Army postings? Register with my site.

With the company reorganized, I found myself in a new platoon and new squad. I think I lucked out as I’ve known my squad leader, Beard, for several years now and we even did PLDC (Sergeant’s school) together. On top of that my fellow team leader, Reese, is a long time army friend. We not only did PLDC but deployed to Germany together. Back then, we were also in the same squad too.

So as the three NCOs of our squad, we know each other pretty well. Half of my new squad is made up of my old 2nd platoon members which works out pretty well. Also, now that we are formed more like a front line infantry unit, I actually have 3 guys under me. Yes thats right. I finally have a full fire team.

With that said, it didn’t take long for us to start running missions. In fact, we started way before our EOD fellows did. Of course we don’t all jump right in and begin missions. The army has us do something called left seat right seat. At first only the leadership goes out with the element we are replacing. This allows them to learn the AO (Area of Operation), their TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures), and get an overall feeling of how things are run.

Overtime, more and more of our guys go out with the replacing unit until we are the ones leading the mission and the replacing unit only sends a couple key people to oversee our operations. This process took about 2 weeks and really helped make the exchange of units very smooth.

The unit we replaced was actually just a platoon. They were broken off from their main company and since our company is only a platoon big….it worked out. I got to work along side with SGT Kepner and SGT Presto. Two very high speed individuals whose been over here in the past. As such, I made absolutely no assumptions and literally followed their TTPs to the letter. Its work out for me so far.

Now that we are in full swing conducting missions, I find my time short and my energy drained. Though on a positive note, time is flying! I’ll leave more of my mission experiences to another post.

Wanna receive email updates to new Army postings? Register with my site.

Milblog is the nick name given to my type of blog…..A Military Blog. Of course I also do other types of blogging, but with this deployment I really don’t have the time. A couple weeks ago, I went on a search for “advertising” my blog. With 7 months in, I’m still only receiving 40-50 hits a day. I wanted to garner more attention and bring in more readers. Well my searching brought me across MilBlogging.com.

Milblogging claims to be the worlds largest index of military blogs on the home front and over seas. From what I could find, that’s probably very true. They index over 2,256 military blogs from 43 different countries. I suggest checking them out. You can search for blogs from any country such as Iraq or Afghanistan.

Anyway, I went ahead and registered my website with them. I’ve noticed an increase in traffic since. If you glance to the bottom right of this website you’ll see my milblog profile link. They also run a top 100 blogs from each country and top blogs in total. I humbly request anyone who feels my blog is worth voting for to go and help bounce me up that list. Out of the 426 Iraq blogs, I’m ranked 66th. The top dog has 21 votes. If enough of my readers vote, I’ll easily beat that. To vote for me click here. You’ll be taken to a page describing my blog. Under the actions section, you’ll find a link that says ‘Add to favorites’. The more people who favorite my blog, the higher I’m ranked. The only catch is you have to register with the milblogging website first. No fear they don’t spam email.

I appreciate any votes and as always, I appreciate the following of dedicated readers I have already gained. It makes the time I put into writing and maintaining this website that more worth while. :D

Wanna receive email updates to new Army postings? Register with my site.

So one day, while I was just chillin on my bed a surprise visitor showed up at my door. It was a tiny little orange cat. See my roomy and I have a habit of keeping our door open to keep the room from getting stuffy. This cat just decided to hop up the steps and make itself welcome.

She ended up being quite friendly. Came right up to me and started to rub against my leg and purr. I immediately grabbed my camera and started snapping photos. I decided to name her Snarls for her…facial scar. Picture two face from The Dark Night. That’s Snarls. Something must have attacked and ripped apart the left side of her cheek. So even when her mouth was closed, all her teeth were exposed….giving a snarling type of look. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a good shot of the scar.

Though somewhat grotesque and very mangy looking, Snarls was extremely friendly. I grabbed some left over ham from the fridge and fed it too her. When my room mate showed up, he was a little peeved by our visitor. Didn’t help when I showed him pics of her exploring the inside of his locker. Hey he’s the one that left it open. Haha.

Eventually my roomy and I had to leave so out went Snarls. I am very curious to where she came from since she seemed very domesticated. She gave no qualm either to being held. I later learned that Snarls has been sighted by several other soldiers in my company. Where she lives is unknown to us.

I did try putting food out to see if she would return but alas no. This ended up being somewhat of a little experiment to answer “You know you’re in a desert when it takes BLANK days for food to be eaten.” The answer ended up being 4 days. Yup, it took that long before something finally came along and ate snarls food. Oh, in case your wondering, that something was ants.

Wanna receive email updates to new Army postings? Register with my site.

I returned from EOD to find my company had completely restructured to be more like a front line infantry company. Being AT (Anti-armor) we originally had an abnormal set up. We only have enough people to make a HQ platoon and one additional platoon. We jokingly refer to ourselves as Delta platoon now. This restructuring meant we would have some extra NCO’s and officers. Two of our platoon sergeants, and two of our platoon leaders were handed off to the battalion to fill in somewhere else.

This whole change was like a gift from god for some (old 1st platoon) and upsetting for others like my old platoon (2nd). My old platoon leader and platoon sergeant gathered us first one last meeting. We shared our experiences and joys with each other and passed our Paladin hammer on. Thanks to a 16 gig SD card, my camera was able to record it all uninterrupted. It turned out to be a really great vid and look forward to uploading it at the end of the deployment.

Everyone signed their names and nicknames on the hammer. LT Price took the one (positive) side of the hammer head and I the other (negative) side. A devout christian whose even married to a minister on one side and the Atheist on the other. Haha. Btw, The Atheist seems to be the new nickname that I’m called. Sour Swinger is all but gone. Honestly I’m sick of Sour Swinger and welcome the change.

I will certainly miss being with 2nd and working with them. We had the perfect setup. A PL and PS that complimented each other perfectly and soldiers who were very well rounded and can easily trust to execute any given mission. All us NCO’s worked well with each and accomplished what was needed. We suffered through Shelby and JRTC together and formed a strong cohesiveness. I will miss working with yous.

!!!!HOOK’EM HORNS!!!! (Inside thing)

Wanna receive email updates to new Army postings? Register with my site.