by Derek Farwell
Columnist

Since I’ve been writing my articles I realized that I’ve been writing about a lot of stories that involve experiences of mine that are less then pleasant. I have many more than the ones I’ve already written about that I’m sure I’ll share with you in the future, and there are some things that I’ve seen and experienced that I’ll never repeat or tell anyone because they’re things that evoke memories and responses within myself that I’m not willing to dredge up for the sake of entertaining someone. I think I’ve written about some of my more unpleasant experiences because it feels good to get them off my chest, and most people have a natural curiosity about morbid things such as close quarters combat in war as well as peoples stories of killing people and seeing people die. But not everything about my deployment was terrible. It’s kind of tough for me to say that I miss anything from my deployment, but there are a couple of things that I actually do miss about it.

When I was in Iraq, sleep was a very rare commodity and it rarely came in the form of an entire night’s sleep, more so in the form of a couple naps in awkward spots when you had an hour or two of no other responsibilities. One of the things that I always liked to do was to be on radio guard duty in the very early mornings. We always had someone monitoring the radios because if another unit was on a mission and needed help the radio guard would wake everyone up to get ready to give some help, but the reason I always liked doing that between 3 and 7 in the morning is because in my opinion Iraq routinely had the most beautiful sunrises I’ve ever seen. Life during my deployment was chaotic, and very often deadly. Being able to sit on the ground while leaning up against the tire of my vehicle and listen to the radio humming while watching the sun come up and see the distorted light through the dust in the air was about as peaceful and beautiful of a thing as I have ever seen. I still have bad sleeping habits and I’m usually awake before 5am and I still watch sun rises, but I’m yet to see one at home that makes me feel as good as the many in Iraq did.

I’ve mentioned before that despite many people’s beliefs, citizens of Iraq are very good and friendly. The population of Iraq is over 34 million and 99.9% of them are wonderful people. More times than I can remember we would be invited into their homes for tea or to have dinner with them. The majority of the people who live there were happy that we were there to try to help stabilize their country and they showed us this by extending generous courtesies. For one thing, the food was incredibly delicious, but I always really enjoyed the manner in which they ate. They would cook the food and prepare great side dishes served on a big tray. Everyone ate off the same tray, just digging in and getting what you could before it was gone.

One time in particular that I thought was one of the coolest things I have ever seen is the day that Iraq won the Asia Cup soccer tournament. We happened to be in the middle of the city when this happened and were already done with the day’s activities and watching the soccer game with the family whose house we were in. After the Iraq team beat Saudi Arabia a celebration like I have never seen took place. I guess it’s customary for people to fire guns into the air to celebrate in that culture, but it didn’t end there. There was more gun fire than I’d ever heard, but it didn’t matter because none of it was directed at us. I guess fireworks were in short supply because people were actually throwing real grenades off their rooftops! There were parades in the streets and everyone in the town was together cheering and celebrating and it didn’t even matter that we were in the same area, and everyone on the streets knew it. They just wanted to party and celebrate, and it was something to see.

I wanted to use this article to just point out some of the positive experiences that I was lucky enough to take away from my deployment. I’m sad to say that the good experiences were far outnumbered by more violent and not so fun experiences but I still try to remember situations like the ones I mentioned before because it’s important to my sanity to at least try to take some positive memories out of that whole experience.

drfarwell@hotmail.com