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

Yes I finally have videos to post! I wasn’t expecting to get these up till my return home however my step-mom was willing to help out. After several failed attempts and over a month delay in trying to get a flash drive mailed home, it arrived back in the states. I sent several gigs worth of videos so expect many more to follow. Thanx again to my step-mom!

Playing Basketball from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

Our strykers were in severe need of being repaired upon arriving to Camp Taji. So most days we found ourselves waiting in the motor pool for our vehicles to get fixed. The civilian mechanics had jimmied a basketball net together. Didn’t take long for us to find it and play to pass the time.

Playing Craps from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

A few of the guys got together and built a craps table to help pass the time. Gained a lot of attention and became a place to hang out at night. Note, no real money was ever used.

Laucks vs. Bauchman from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

In one corner we have short man “Brandon Lee” Bauchman weighing no more then 120lbs and only standing 5′4″. In the other corner we have big man boxer Laucks weighing in at least 175lbs and standing 5′8″. Who shall win this combative match?

Random Mooning from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

Just doing some random shooting. Plopped into Festa’s room and he ends up mooning the camera. Reese makes a cameo “silly man” appearance.

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Back in April President Obama decided to make a surprise visit to Victory Base which is right next door to my duty station, Camp Liberty. I remember this day quite clearly for two reasons. I failed my #2 fear and it set the record (at the time) for the longest mission.

All three of my company’s platoons headed out to run missions throughout our AO. Since we were out there for so long, one of the local sheikhs decided to cook food for all of us. It was a very nice gesture and considering we ate nothing but MREs all day, most took part. The food wasn’t bad, but I remember eating….some kind of something (vegetable) that tasted awful. Well the following next few days many of us fell ill. From what I hear, the commander got it the worst. It took 2 days, before I found myself consistently running to the bathrooms on a semi hourly basis. That day also marked the first mission I missed. It took another 2 weeks before my stomach equaled out. Not a fun experience at all.

A few weeks later Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, made a visit to VBC. Once again my entire company headed out to run missions. This one set the new mission record of 18 hours! It was just like Obama all over again. The entire battalion (and I’m sure others as well) were pushed outside the wire to conduct missions. Why? Increased security that’s why. A VIP is on post, we need to make sure NOTHING happens during their visit. So in essence we are pulling security for these VIPs. Their visit causes an added strain on the troops who leave the wire. Seeing that we have to conduct this with every VIP….I say stay the frak back home. Let us do our mission in peace (relative). Besides, the only troops they see are the higher ups and all the rear detachment soldiers cause everyone else is busy pulling their security.

As an added side note, soldiers could not have their weapons present when Obama was near. A contrast to when Bush showed up for he let the soldiers carry. Odd no?

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My intent with this post is to kinda catch everyone up on to what’s been happening and where exactly I’m going. Since I arrived in Iraq, my posts have been running way behind where I’m actually at. Mostly because I’m too busy and tired to keep up. With some of my posts jumping around, I hope I can clear things up.

Since the start of March, I’ve been running missions in my company’s AO. It originally started as one mission a day, 6 days week. How long the mission went was very dynamic. Anywhere from 4 hours to over 12. It was rough because our unit was still very new to handling combat missions. Battle rhythms needed to be developed and adjusting SOPs and so forth for smoother, easier operations.

Just as we were finally getting used to things, even more missions began to rain down on us. Before we knew it, conducting 2 missions a day was a normal occurrence. Not even our one day of rest to conduct maintenance was no longer a guarantee. The mission times didn’t help either. Sometimes our last mission didn’t end until past midnight and we’d have a following 0500 mission the next day. Sometimes we’d have a mission that went all night and we just rolled into the next days mission immediately after.

Of course this all forced our platoon to optimize everything we did. Whatever we could do that shaved off time for mission prep was done. We adapted and became very efficient in rolling out and conducting our missions in a timely as possible manor. We also started working with the other platoons to maximize our rest time. If one mission time frakked a platoon pretty bad, another platoon would cover down expecting the favor returned. Oh yeah, did I mention we picked up two other platoons? Yup, its like we’re a full infantry line company now.

I’m certainly busy as hell but it is making the time go fast. Which leads into the next topic. What’s going to happen from here? Well continuing to run missions is a no brainer. Come June/July, a new security agreement goes into affect which does many things to reduce Coalition involvement and increase Iraqi control. How much of that will affect my unit, I’m not sure. In essence, coalition forces are being squeezed into a smaller area to secure with no reduction of military numbers. So this basically means, the number of missions I’ll have will probably be dramatically reduced. I’m basically expecting an easier and less demanding schedule. I look forward to this because I know at the current pace, I will certainly burn out when September comes. Green Day reference anyone?

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Granted there have been numerous reports of this incident that occurred on 11 May 2009. Five soldiers were gunned down by another fellow soldier. Here’s one link that explains the whole event well. You’re probably thinking, blogger stationed at the very base this occurred….he can offer some great insight into the incident not found any where on the internet. Right? Well yes but not in the way you think.

Here’s the “great” news you probably won’t hear any where else….that my family and the world back home knew more about the situation then I or many of the soldiers here did. An hour after I received word about the incident, I found a bunch of emails from family/friends back at home wanting to know if I was alright. WTF!?!? I didn’t even contemplate writing home that something happened because I figured it was Op Sec. What’s worse, the news websites had more up to date information then what was being passed down my chain of command.

This isn’t the first time dissemination of information was slower then the media. There’s been quite a few times where attacks and killings that happened in my battalion’s AO was reported quicker on the news then what I heard on the ground. It seems absurd! Why does the military allow news to be reported so quickly? At the very least, I’d think they wait 24 hours. Hell, the enemy never needs to observe how much damage an attack of theirs did. They just have to visit the NY Times, find everything there, and never wait more then a few hours to get it.

Yet here I sit a blogger whose posts’ are probably more restricted and controlled then the reporters. Which makes no sense whatsoever. How true that statement is…I don’t, but it certainly feels like that.

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Wow! So its been…8 months since I last did this!!! Playing catch up on my records page took a bit but I’ve learned one thing. The number of records I break each month is slowing down. Perhaps I’m starting to finally plateau? I’m over 33,000 views so far! At my current growth I should reach 50,000 in 5 more months. Alltunes maintains king status of all my traffic. Despite it being out of date, I am still receiving comments. All my military posts have collectively brought a steady stream of hits that equals the Alltunes traffic. April received 3,118 hits. Visit my records page for more info.

For shits and giggles, I showed the last records table I did back in August 08. As you can see alot of my numbers increased. The only record set this month was the number of visitors: 2,032. Oddly this didn’t mean my pageview record was beat. Still maintaining number one viewed page is Alltunes. My Marvel Super Hero came as a surprise and no its not from spam. For some reason that page was returning top result in Google. All my Iraq posts are very close but the Farewell to 2nd Platoon Paladins came out on top.

Total blog hits: 33,564.

1 Apr 09 – 30 Apr 09 Visitors 2,032 visits 67.73 per day 3,118 page views 1.53 pages per visit 376 visits from PA 120 visits from NY 103 visits from CA Traffic Sources 63% from search engines 28% from referring sites 8% direct traffic Content 277 viewed “End Of Alltunes” 117 viewed “Marvel Super Hero” 115 viewed “Farewell 2nd Platoon” Most hits in a day: 165 on 15th & 20th followed by: 160 on 27th

1 Aug 08 – 31 Aug 08 Visitors 1,101 visits 35.5 per day 2,197 page views 2 pages per visit 116 visits from PA 83 visits from CA 60 visits from UK Traffic Sources 73% from search engines 23% from referring sites 4% direct traffic Content 639 viewed “End Of Alltunes” 67 viewed “YouTube Account Created” 63 viewed “Poop Fetish…Swinger” Most hits in a day: 269 on 28 Aug 08 Followed by: 227 on 31 Aug 08