Tour guide

Today we drove around the IZ for hours getting an unintended tour while attempting to do work. One of the locals I was with needed to be escorted different places and I have the authority to conduct such a mission, I therefore shuttled him around for several hours while taking in the sites (…and smells, not as nice as the sites) The local man explained to me during Saddams time people needed escorts for certain parts of the capital and a person from Tikrit, which was Saddams hometown, had the authority to escort anyone throughout the capital. If someone wanted to travel through the capital city all they needed was a resident or someone originally from Tikrit and all was well. So as we are driving around he concludes his story with an explanation of why he told it to begin with (remember the lengthy story syndrome), “Daoud is my friend from Tikrit…”. For those of you who don’t know the full Arabic name usually ends with where the individual is from; for example Saddam’s full name was Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti. We all laughed when my new name was unveiled, “Daoud Al-Tikriti”, at this rate I will have a lengthy name by this end of this deployment.
And yet another lesson in the Arabic language: Million in Arabic is pronounced “mill-e-on” and billion is pronounced “mill-e-r”, you must roll the “r”. We were sitting in a meeting trying to get financial totals from some locals and our linguist seemed to be having trouble figuring out what the total was. To compound the issue the Iraqi financial consultant was answering every third question our linguist asked in English saying “million” and “billion”. So the conversation went something like this “million, no mill-e-r, what? Billion, no bill-e-r, mill-e-r? No bill-e-r, what million?” and on and on it went for about 15 minutes. Finally our linguist said “its 24 million”, apparently our linguist and this want-to-be Merrill Lynch local were attempting to convert Iraqi dinar to U.S. dollars which annoyed my partner, “You spent the last 15 minutes doing that? I can do that with my converter…!” That was 15 minutes of my life I could never get back. Then after all was said and done the linguist said never mind it was 2 million…haha…it was material for Saturday Night Live (this is not a plug for SNL).
Aside from that I saw a bumper sticker on the septic tank truck (the one who sucks from the toilets) and it read “yesterdays meals on wheels”. I laughed but unfortunately I read it when the septic truck was parked right outside my door early this morning taking in its first load of the day. I had the privilege of awaking not to birds or brewing coffee but the sweet, intoxicating aroma of the base crap truck. If you have never experienced your first smell of the morning be this I recommend you try it…it will help us all appreciate what we have. Lastly, I want to say congrats to my little sister for making it to High School, love ya, and boys if you go near her you will wish you woke up to 100 septic trucks spraying you down rather than see me, are we clear?