Sweltering

It got hot today. The sky was mostly clear and partly cloudy. I expected it to get a little hot. It’s almost like being back home. It just feels like summer has come early. At times I find the kids getting wet in the canals in the afternoons. The women are still, like always, picking crops. The men are mostly hanging around marketplaces or herding sheep.

Nothing really exciting happened today. We didn’t encounter any IEDs, Thank God. One of the Sergeants was betting that we’d hit two of them and that one of the vehicles would become disabled. It never happened. He would’ve lost if he bet. We did come upon some cordons where we had to wait for clearance when it was safe to pass. I think the Iraqis get frustrated with cordons too but they learn to deal with them. It’s better than getting killed. They’ll usually get out of their vehicles since most of them don’t have air conditioning and wait in the shade. I find that sometimes they begin to group together and just sit and socialize, right there on the road.

Relatively, for the day it seemed pretty calm. I heard no sporadic gunfire or IED explosions. Sometimes I think we’re just lucky though.