coffee cup image

Nov 02 2007

The Grass is Greener in Tikrit

Posted by Dale @ 3:05 pm in Deployment,FOB Life Print This Post Print This Post

I’ve returned home to Mosul and FOB Diamondback. My coffee cup really missed me while I was gone. I ended up spending one and a half weeks in Tikrit at COB Speicher (pronounced Spiker). Part of the reality of deployed life is that you learn to tune things out. Mugs will tell you that I already have an innate ability to ignore sounds that don’t interest me. I grew up in a house where the TV was on 24 hours a day, so I learned to block out noise without much thought. It helps here in Iraq to ignore the various booms and bangs that are a routine part of our daily lives.

Anyway, while I was still in Tikrit last week, I was sitting in the conference room of the GRN headquarters downloading my email. For some reason, I noticed a peculiar noise coming from outside. After a couple of minutes I realized it was the sound of a lawnmower. Inside the USACE GRN compound in COB Speicher, there are a couple plots of grass. Here’s a shot of the contractor mowing the grass in the desert!

GRN Grass

4 Responses to “The Grass is Greener in Tikrit”

  1. On 02 Nov 07 at 5:33 pm,
    Tami (sis) said:

    :wink:
    Dale :) Thanks for your journeys…i love you.
    and i’m proud of you for doing your job and loving your family.
    i love the picture of the guy cutting the small lawn :)….

  2. On 29 Sep 09 at 4:10 pm,
    Jacob said:

    heh, keeping up the grass in the desert is hard work. I should know, I lived in one for years….

  3. On 02 Oct 09 at 3:56 pm,
    HINAYUPAKS said:

    Just like dubai. They can keep grass green in the middle of the desert. they have nice technology to keep grass and trees green.

  4. On 30 Aug 10 at 2:05 am,
    Henry said:

    Well it seems that we also had some down by the S-3 OPS office and everyone tried to kill it but a couple of us tried to keep it alive. We did have a pond but that died out around March or April 2009 the pump burned out and no one wanted to order a new one it seems.

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