It’s a cool rain, literally, falling on Baghdad tonight.
It came in as a warm, whipping wind, stirring up dust and dirt but obscuring the usually flaming sunset. As the clouds moved in, the misting began, then the steady, light rain. The first effect was not in the temperature but in the soles of boots everywhere. Muddy season has arrived. Caked gravel and mud on the buses that shuttle soldiers and civilians around base, mud in the PX, mud in the dining hall. Stomping and scraping helps with big chunks, but it’s a season these soldiers know all too well from last fall and winter in Mosul and Rawah. And one they didn’t expect to have to see again. Still, the rain offers a reprieve from the heat that’s been soaking uniforms with sweat since they arrived. Not just a little sweat, but saturation. Enough so that when the shirt dries, it’s stiff as a board. Today I thought as I licked my lips, they haven’t tasted this salty since I last swam in the Atlantic at the Jersey shore.
Soldiers realize they will likely (hopefully) return to Fairbanks in the height of cold, snowy weather, weather many of them once thought annoying.
But now?
“No matter how you put it I’d settle for Alaska weather over Iraq weather any day,” said one today pondering, for only a split second, if he prefers mud-caked boots or snow-soaked ones.