It looked like those early Iraq war videos

with all the tracer rounds being shot into the night sky. It was crazy. It all started around 2200 hours. I was sitting in the entertainment tent, browsing the internet. Then, all of a sudden I heard gunfire go off to the north. My first thought was that some stupid unit is doing night-fire on the range. It was weird though; the shots weren’t coordinated. Usually when a unit is on the range the firing is coordinated and it all stops about the same time. This was gunfire after gunfire, after gunfire. Holzer then came into the tent yelling, “SGT Puebla, you have to come check this out!” I was thinking to myself, what’s there to check out, but the gunfire seemed to come from everywhere. Were we being attacked? I guess it would be kind of crazy and funny since everyone is required to carry a weapon and ammo at all times anyways. Shoot, I wouldn’t want to walk into someone’s home when everyone inside was carrying a weapon and I didn’t know the layout of the place. It’s just calling for suicide. No way could we be getting attacked so I got that thought out of my head.

I went ahead and got up to go outside. To my amazement I saw tracer rounds fired up into the night sky. The fire was coming from all directions. It was everywhere and I was assuming that it was just at the borders of the camp. Is the military testing its air defenses? What the heck was that? I knew they were tracer rounds and I was assuming there were ball rounds too but where was it coming from? It was all around the camp. One guy had mentioned that they usually fire their guns up into the air during a wedding. Who got married? This gunfire was coming from everywhere. I figured it had to be something big to be happening. Were the people happy because of the elections? Was it something about Saddam that I didn’t know about? Everyone was outside checking out the fireworks show. Groups of soldiers would get together and start discussing all sorts of stuff and ideas for reasoning. It sure brought us together, out in the night to start socializing with each other.

Finally, a Joe came up with a reason that made some sort of sense. I assumed that he was right too. It sounded like a good answer. He told us that Iraq had just won some soccer game against Syria. Boy, people go crazy for their soccer here. I had to get back indoors because I didn’t want to get hit by some falling lead. If I had a time elapse camera I would’ve been able to capture the moment. Oh well. It was an amazing site to see. It’s also crazy to see that there are a lot of Iraqis that have guns out here.

I guess you could check this lady’s website out too, While Away. I presume she’s somewhere in Iraq and must have seen the same thing. Actually I think she’s in the International Zone.


This was at the nightfire range back at Yakima. I'll have some photos from Iraq pretty soon.