I’ve mentioned the Tin Hut quite a bit, so maybe now would be the appropriate time to give a little more attention to it.
There were three showers available for the men, as mentioned—three showers for over 30 of us. The showers had flimsy curtains held in place by a curtain rod. Depending on your point of view, the curtains were either three inches too short or the rods were mounted three inches too high. Water would spray out onto the floor through the gap between the shower curtain and the floor of every shower stall. Sometimes the water collected an inch or so deep on the floor outside the showers. There was a squeegee conveniently placed inside the room in order to mop out the shower after using it, to try and keep the water down to somewhat manageable levels. At least there wasn’t a life preserver hanging on the wall. The Tin Hut had acquired the nickname of ‘Camp Swampy’, very likely based on the showers and the practices of the Iraqi janitors, who poured their buckets of soapy water all over the place every day.
Privacy in the three toilets inside the shower room was non-existent. There were folding plastic doors, which had runner guides mounted on the top of the stall opening. These doors were barely hanging from a single hinge on one side of the opening. One door had no hinges at all, it would simply lay up against you as you sat there, thinking deep thoughts. Sometimes while you were seated doing your business, the door would come loose and end up dropping into your lap.
On the tank above the toilet, the janitors would place three rolls of toilet paper every day. The rolls were small compared to American standards, and we only got three in each stall for over 30 men, making just nine rolls total each day. And this definitely wasn’t the kind of toilet paper we were accustomed to in America. It was not made for comfort. It was thicker paper and it rolled around the cardboard core only a couple of dozen times. Some of us liked to pamper our butts, but this paper was thick and coarse. Because of the thickness and quality of the paper, there was even less than it appeared, so each roll didn’t go nearly as far as we were used to, a critical problem with so many men using so few rolls. Something had to be done about this situation.
As mentioned, some instructors at the academy had family members who sent them care packages from home. Some of these would be filled with toilet rolls, so these lucky few would bring their own rolls with them when they went to use the toilet, and take them away when they left. By noon each day, the nine rolls left by the Iraqi janitors would be long gone, leaving nothing for any evening visits to the toilet.
The search for a roll of toilet paper was therefore a constant battle. People would often grab one of the rolls and hang onto it, bringing it with them to and from the toilet, which often left others to do without. While all of us endured hardships and did our best to work together and share things, when it came to toilet paper it was every man for himself. Life in the Tin Hut definitely had its challenges.
On one end of the main hallway of the hut, there was a small table which held the boxes for our cable TV and internet service. We were able to receive several channels of Armed Forces Television on the small TVs provided in each of our rooms. Each room also had two internet connections as well with Ethernet cables. This alone made life a little bit more bearable—being able to surf the net and stay in touch with loved ones was important to all of us.
Of course, the internet didn’t always work, but it was fairly reliable. We had to take precautions, though, by covering the components on the small table with plastic trash bags, as the Iraqi janitors didn’t mind where they threw their buckets of water when mopping the floor. If the electronics had been shorted out there would be no telling how long it might take to get replacements—we would be without television and the means to contact loved ones back home if that had happened.
On one occasion, one of the instructors from the Blue Lagoon was seen leaving the Tin Hut with our internet router concealed beneath his clothes. Apparently, the router that covered the Blue Lagoon barracks wasn’t as reliable as ours, so he’d decided to just take it upon himself to make a switch, taking ours and leaving their router in its place.
On the exterior of the shower rooms, on each side of the Tin Hut but contained within the high concrete blast walls, were two large water tanks, each holding probably a thousand gallons of water. One of these tanks was there to collect waste water and the other held potable water for use in the showers. The tanks had to be filled and emptied on a regular basis by trucks inspected and cleared to enter the compound. I always worried that the waste water tank would take a direct hit from a mortar round and spray crap all over the compound, and anyone walking, standing, or sitting around the campfire outside would have been covered in it. It was a common joke among us that we would be right next to one of the ‘shit trucks’ when it took a direct hit from a mortar, and we would end up dying covered in the stuff. Someone would have to be called in to identify our bodies and their first response would be, “I never liked him, he was a piece of shit anyway.”
The Tin Hut sat in the middle of a fairly large parking area, with numerous military Humvees and other tactical vehicles parked all around in neat rows. As already mentioned, the Tin Hut was surrounded by very high concrete blast walls, maybe 15 or 20 feet tall, so the ‘scenery’ outside the window of your room was pretty much limited to a view of concrete. Made out of flimsy metal, the hut needed these walls around it to afford some protection. Without them, even a near miss by a mortar round would have destroyed it. Of course, a direct hit by a round coming from above would still have been the end of the hut, and everyone inside of it.
One evening, while I was inside my room, I suddenly heard a loud yelp from across the hallway. Wallie had been sitting in his room with his legs crossed on his lower bunk, watching television. An AK-47 round had pierced the ceiling of the Tin Hut and lodged itself in the calf of his leg. Somewhere in Baghdad, an Iraqi had fired his weapon into the air and, as the old saying goes, ‘What goes up must come down’. Whether it was ‘happy fire’ or something more serious, we couldn’t know. Either way, Wallie ended up with a unique souvenir.
He let out a loud wail, which got an immediate response from me. As I entered his room, I saw him looking down and pointing at this bullet sticking out of his lower leg. He then reached down and plucked it out. There was a small amount of blood, as it had actually pierced his flesh, along with the small depression made by the round as it impacted his leg. He wasn’t seriously injured but within a few days a nasty infection set in, which gave him some problems for quite a while. That was the second time Wallie had been ‘wounded’. He was able to keep the bullet and I suggested he have a hole drilled through it so he could wear it on a chain around his neck as a good luck charm. Oftentimes, as we walked across the compound, we would find spent rounds on the ground, but this was the first one that came down from above and actually hit one of us.
One way we dealt with the monotony of living and working at the academy was to try to find diversions or create a little fun. Before long, many of the doors to the rooms inside the Tin Hut were decorated with ‘sandbag art’, which I was responsible for thanks to my minor talent as an artist. Jimmy Two Dogs and Baghdad Boob wanted a sandbag hanging on the outside of their door with ‘Mortar-Ritaville’ drawn on it, so I went to work. They thought the name was perfect since mortars were dropped into our compound fairly often, and it did seem rather fitting.
I used a black marker pen and drew some palm trees amid explosions, and included Jimmy’s and Bob’s monikers as well. It became a hit and the next thing I knew, I was doing the same thing for other occupants. This kind of got carried to the extreme later on, once we moved into the new barracks and had individual rooms. Jimmy asked me to do one for him that depicted two dogs having sex ‘doggy style’, which went along with his nickname. It usually only took me a few minutes to conceive an idea and then draw it onto the sandbag.
Ted and I then put one on our door, and I soon had orders for sandbag art that kept me busy for at least a day or two. We always did what we could to make the rooms feel a little more like home, to brighten things up. Since the Tin Hut was going to be our home for quite a while, we tried to add our own little touches to bring some ‘class’ to the place. It was maybe not particularly wise from an OPSEC standpoint, but since I was only using nicknames, and not real names, I didn’t think it mattered too much.