Sensing Combat: Hearing

"(Author's note: Voting for the Best Military Blog begins today. Go here to vote.)

"So, what's Iraq like?"

For the number of times that question has been asked since I've come home from Iraq, it remains one of the great unanswered questions of my life (Why are we here? and Why did they cancel Arrested Development? are up there as well). I have to closely consider my audience before I answer. Most people pose the question to confirm their suspicions or bias about the war and the military. If they lean right, they want to hear how many Iraqis thanked me for their new found freedom, or they want to find out if Iraq is safer than the inherently evil media portrays it. If they lean left, they want to hear about how much it sucked being a tool in George Bush's war for oil. In nearly all cases it leads to the same place: getting a leg-up on their friends in a discussion of the war by saying, "I know a guy in Iraq who said..."

Thankfully some are genuinely interested in what it was like being in Iraq at the height of the surge. Yet I still find it difficult to describe it beyond seven words: It's hot and it smells like shit. A million little things need to be described before one thing is explained, especially to a civilian that knows very little about combat and the military. It is this disconnect where a good description of what actually goes on in Iraq fails. I intend to remedy this. For the next week I'm going to describe in detail the feeling of being in Iraq using the five senses as a guide. As rockumentary director Marty DiBergi might have put it, I want to capture the sights, the sounds...the smells of deployed life."
Army of Dude