Spring Ahead for Good?

It’s more complicated than you think

In the military, whenever you deploy to some far-away, exotic destination, you get inundated with all sorts of orientation briefs about the place, covering topics like the local culture, traditions, language, and demographics. If you’re headed to a conflict zone, you’re also brought up to speed on the tactics and techniques of any potentially armed groups in the neighborhood.

You even get a nifty handbook to reference in case the instructors leave anything out or if you just plain forget something.

In those long-ago instances, I used to enthusiastically absorb as much of that sort of information as I could because I knew it would make me better prepared to interact with the locals, which would —hopefully— increase the likelihood of success for any mission I was involved in.

I had plenty of time to prep for my 2003 deployment to Iraq, as my reserve battalion was stuck in Camp Lejeune, NC for a year before we headed to the Middle East. So, I got as smart as I could about the place.

At the time, learning about Iraq was relatively easy since, beginning with President Bush’s first use of the term “Axis of Evil,” in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, there was no shortage of news coverage about topics like Iraq’s (supposed) stockpile of WMDs, the tension between the Shia and Sunnis, and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Iran and North Korea.

By the time my unit arrived in Nasiriyah in April 2003, I knew my shit, though, admittedly, never got around to learning much Arabic. That wound up not being too much of an issue, however, because most of the men in the country spoke decent-enough English. (We were encouraged not to communicate directly with the women.)

I’m huge in Nasiriyah

One day, we were prepping for an operation in the city, and I was speaking with a local contact who was going to be involved in the mission. He’d already given me some valuable intel, but I needed to make sure that he was going to be along for the ride.

I told him, “I need you to be here tomorrow morning at 7 am.”

“Yes, yes. 7 am,” he dutifully replied. “Summer time or Saddam time?”

“Saddam time?” I asked, cluelessly. “What the f**k is Saddam time?!?”