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

Meet my buddy the assistant camera boy…aka the Ali Baba kid. He’s the boy I was talking to in the vid “Conversing With Kids“. In a previous post, I mentioned how certain kids will attach to certain soldiers in an attempt to gain additional candy. When we rolled into Beverly Hills, this is the little fellow that I looked for and he’d always be looking for me. After a bit Ali took over my picture taking so I could concentrate on more important things, like pulling security.

I first met Ali way back in March. He was hopping around looking for some goodies from the soldiers. Not much of a candy kid, he always wanted some of the neat gear we wore. When he came to me he kept asking over and over for one of my d-clips. For some reason almost every kid I saw wanted a d-clip. Who knows why. As usual, I kept saying “la” which is no in Arabic. Most kids just continue to beg however Ali wised up and began to barter. He eventually offered Chai Tea and boy am I sucker for it. Best tasting tea I’ve ever had and its safe to drink since they boil the water.

I agreed and little Ali took off running. Head tucked, arms pumping, and dust trail in his wake. That little boy really wanted my d-clip. Twenty minutes later I was sipping my tea and Ali had d-clip in hand with the biggest grin on his face. Of course he didn’t stop there. He wanted to continue trading Chai for items. For my second glass, I gave him a plastic bag full of 20 pens. I would have traded for more but by then we were mounting up for RTB (Return to Base). End of mission for us.

Ever since then, Ali always came a looking for me and after a bit I decide to entrust him with my camera. He LOVED it! All the other boys would get jealous. As I walked around doing my soldier thing, Ali would be my shadow snapping away. After a while, I didn’t think anything of it. I’d just hand the camera off and not even worry if he ran off for a bit. He’d always came back smiling with my camera in hand and a horde of envious boys following.

In only a couple hours, Ali would snap close to 200 photos. Sometimes I’d find 30 some 1 second video clips. He probably got confused and accidentally switch to video mode. A lot of the kids had trouble understanding “video”. At the end of mission, it was always a joy to cycle through all the pictures he took. Half of them I had to delete though. They were either way to blurry or were just odd shots. IE, he’d love to put the camera smack up to peoples faces and snap photos of their eyeballs or nose. Haha. Even so, thanks to Ali I have well over 200 photos which I kept. Bet you can’t tell which ones were done him. :)

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These pictures are from a donation distribution mission. We had a ton of donated items to hand out that day. Everything from soccer balls from Kick For Nick to toys and clothing from family back home. We hit two towns that day, one of which was Choyoul. The other I have no idea how to spell. For some reason Combat Camera just labeled all the pics from Choyoul.

The Army has been occasionally embedding Combat Camera in our missions. Photos were taken by Petty Officer 2nd Class Robert Whelan. I linked each pic to its free downloadable high res copy. There’s a total of 12 pics. Click here to see them all.

The DVIDS mission is to serve as a turnkey operation that facilitates requests for Public Affairs video, audio, still imagery and print products; coordinates interviews with soldiers and commanders in a combat zone and provides an archive for ongoing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

Basically, DVIDs is where the military official posts audio, video, images, news, etc relating to any current combat operation. Everything is DOD authorized to be released to the public.

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Over the course of the last few months, I’ve been handing out soccer balls from the organization Kick For Nick. With their help, over 200 balls and 100 some pairs of socks have gone to various teams and kids in my units AO. I received their information from my brother who utilized them in his previous tour here in Iraq.

Kick For Nick was started by the family of Private Nicholas Madaras. While Nick was on leave from Iraq in July 2006, he rounded up as many soccer balls as possible to bring back to the children. Being a passionate soccer player, he wanted to give the balls to the children as a gesture of good will. Unfortunately, Nick was killed by an IED on September 3, 2006 and was never able to distribute the balls himself. His family decided to take up the crusade to help fulfill his dream.

ESPN did a report about Kick For Nick which you can watch here. I specifically picked this video (there are a bunch) because it shows my brother’s unit handing out the balls.

I received the first shipment in March and like clock work, every 2 or 3 weeks I received another. I initially thought I’d only get a box or two, but Kick For Nick just kept them coming. Each box contained a variable amount of deflated balls (20-50), a pump, sometimes some socks, and a sheet of every person/organization that donated said content. Each soccer ball also had PFC Nick Madaras written on it.

My LT put me in charge of where and who the balls went to. There were three soccer teams in our AO. Equivalent to a grade school, middle school, and high school aged teams. I decided to give them the first few rounds of balls. Unfortunately the entire teams were never able to show up at the same time. The coaches all demonstrated the same philosophy. Not to let the players hold the balls. I attempted this for picture purposes but got strong resistance. This is part of the Iraqi’s different mindset I guess. The coaches (and sheikhs present) feared the children would run off with the balls assuming it was theirs.

With the soccer teams saturated in supplies, I decided to have most the other remaining balls be handed out selectively among the rest of the platoon. With our AO predominately being rural and farm land this seemed like a good course of action. For ever mission I’d hand out 2-3 balls to each of the squads and let them decide what children received them. Usually they reserved them for well behaved children during a dismounted patrol or especially poor looking kids. This had its pros and cons. On the plus side, the kids flocked to us and enjoyed our presence more. Typically when kids are around, you’re generally less likely to be attacked. On the down side, I couldn’t get many pictures and WAY too many kids flocked to us. Iraqi kids are to soccer balls like cats are to catnip. They go WILD! We often times had to be careful with passing out the soccer balls else we’d literally be over run by kids.

The last way I handed out some balls was via town specific. We’d roll into a town and at the end hand out a box to all the children that gathered around us. One town in specific, I picked because it was a rather bad neighborhood where attacks had occurred. I was hoping to help combat that in a hearts and mind kinda way. That mission later made it on DVIDS, though they got the town name wrong. Handing massive balls in towns was probably the most risky with the overwhelming number of kids showing up. I swear they could sniff those balls a mile away.

Over all, I feel handing out these soccer balls from Kick For Nick was a great success, though I didn’t get as many pics as I’d like. I think everyone in my platoon began to look forward to handing out the balls and watching the kids prance in glee. Of all the missions my platoon has run, I feel we’ve accomplishment the most with Kick For Nick.

You can see all my soccer ball pictures taken here. There’s about 90 of them.

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July was incredible! I hit an all time record of over 5000 hits in one month…..5000!! Never imagined bringing in such traffic. Just look at that graph below. The line is sky rocketing. Lol. I’m averaging almost 100 people per day to this site. Granted thats still small compared to most other popular blogs. Almost all my traffic now is Army related. My top post Alltunes is slowing being caught. Total hits to this blog is now just a hair above 46,000. With one more good month, I should be able to break 50,000 by the end of August.

1 July – 31 July 09 Visitors 2,976 visits 96 per day 5,358 pageviews 1.80 pages per visit 443 visits from PA 165 visits from CA 151 visits from NY Traffic Sources 61% from search engines 31% from referring sites 9% direct traffic Content 218 viewed “End Of Alltunes” 168 viewed “Photos Camp Liberty” 143 viewed “Photos Children Of Iraq 1” Most hits in a day: 264 on 7th followed by: 260 on 17th

1 Jun – 30 Jun 09 Visitors 2,351 visits 78.37 per day 3,996 pageviews 1.69 pages per visit 413 visits from PA 143 visits from CA 119 visits from NY Traffic Sources 54% from search engines 37% from referring sites 9% direct traffic Content 212 viewed “End Of Alltunes” 186 viewed “Clips Of Iraqi Children” 149 viewed “Playing The Smile Game” Most hits in a day: 256 on 8th followed by: 253 on 30th