Nov 02 2007
The Grass is Greener in Tikrit
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!
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 :)….
heh, keeping up the grass in the desert is hard work. I should know, I lived in one for years….
Just like dubai. They can keep grass green in the middle of the desert. they have nice technology to keep grass and trees green.
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.