You’ll go down in hisssstoooooryyyy…
In case your wondering, the title comes from the last line of the “Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer” song. Didn’t know how to really type that out!
Well today was the day that I was scheduled to talk with the historian that I mentioned. I was origionally scheduled to meet with him at 230pm. I had stayed up late (since its worked out for me to have quite a few days off in a row) and so I was a little worried about getting up in time. I told others to make sure I was up and my buddy ended up staying up until 10am today, so he woke me up when he went to bed. I ended up getting up and running by the Hajji shop (Iraqi run shop) and bought a couple movies, a web cam and a microphone/earpiece things so I can make calls over the internet. One thing that is cool is that movies here only cost $1 or $2. And they have all the new movies on DVD pretty much as soon as they come out in the theater. The only thing is sometimes they are horrible, like some guy took a video camera into the theater. Dead serious. But usually they are good and cheep as shit.
Well when everything was all said and done I was rolling back to my room around, oh, 1130am, and everyone starts telling me that my platoon sergent was looking for me. And I mean everyone. I didn’t find him, but one guy said that he said I needed to be at the TOC (Tactical Operations Center… i think). So I headed on over there wondering why because my interview still wasnt for a while. When I got there, no one there had any clue why I was there and they couldn’t get ahold of anyone on the radios. I waited around for a while, and nothing so I decided to leave. Right as I was leaving the call came up that my 1SG wanted me to see him in his room, so I walked on over there. He just wanted to talk to me a little bit about this interview. He basically told me that this was an official Army thing, to basically record the Armys history here and that, as I figured, he picked me because of my blog and that I’ve been keeping a pretty accurate account of things here. He just wanted to make sure I understood that is was a factual thing and not an opinion opportunity. I totally understand, and was pretty excited to be picked.
I ended up just chilling out until my time to go, and at the last minute they said for me to be there right away, which was right around 2pm. I headed up there and went in to our conference room to talk with the historian. He was a pretty cool guy, with the 90th Military History unit or something like that. Sorry I can’t remeber. He explained to me that their job is basically to travel around from Brigade to Brigade and they are alloted so much time that they have to split up amungst the batallions in each Brigade. Well, now he was on mine. He would conduct a few interviews, go out on a couple patrols and take some pictures, and then when it was all said and done, it would be compilied in the official Army documents and, as he said “used years down the road for history books and TV such as the History Channel” etc. Wow, this is really awesome I thought. How cool is it that I will have a part in writing the official history for my unit over here!
Continue reading more (Eighty Deuce on the Loose)
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