Living on the FOB

BOOM! I feel the concussion through the ground, and my walls shimmer a bit. This one feels different than the explosive reports I’ve been hearing almost every night since my arrival. Was it outgoing or incoming? I still haven’t had enough exposure to incoming (i.e. insurgent mortar and rocket fire hitting inside the base perimeter) to tell for sure.

I stop what I’m doing, and listen. BOOM! Another one, throatier than the first. Are they walking rounds onto us, trying to zero in? The radio at bedside crackles. “Lancer 4, confirm that was outgoing” says a female voice with a down-home Georgia accent. “Roger, that’s ours”, comes the laconic response followed by a sense of collective tension released across the airwaves.

About 10 days ago I rode in aboard a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, clattering through the night to my new home for awhile, one of the Coalition FOBs (forward operating bases) south of Baghdad. A FOB (pronounced like “watch fob”) can be anything from the giant “super FOB” near Balad with over 20,000 personnel, down to diminutive outposts with just a few hundred. The term is now inextricably part of the war’s lexicon.

The companion term, reserved for those who live on FOBs but never or rarely get outside the wire, is “fobbit” and I have to admit I’m in that category. On bigger bases, us fobbits outnumber the fighters, but here I’m in the minority. Every morning and evening, I see soldiers all kitted up either going out or returning from missions. And parked all around are the up-armored HumVees and other armored vehicles, bristling with weapons and antennae. BOOM! Oh, yeah, and then there’s the artillery.

Most everyone lives in containerized housing units, known as CHUs or “cans”. About 8 feet across, by 18 feet long, with one small window (almost always shuttered) they sure make you feel like a sardine sometimes. Each section of cans is surrounded by tall, concrete T-barriers, to minimize the danger of a shell falling amongst them. So, basically, we’re surrounded by a maze of concrete. Just finding your way to the showers can be a challenge.

We’re situated near the ‘southern belt’ outside Baghdad proper, and our location puts us right along the ethnic seam between Sunni areas and the Shia strongholds further south. To our north and west, there are Sunni districts where AQIZ (Al-Qaida in Iraq) still has a grip, but the countryside around our FOB is JAM country, and they let us know it.

The Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi in Arabic, or JAM) is the outgrowth of Moqtada al-Sadr and his organization, and is probably the most well-armed and radicalized of the Shiite militias. They’re also the most anti-U.S., and frequently stage attacks on Coalition troops and bases in this part of Iraq. They plant IEDs, including the all-too-deadly explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) that tellingly are called “Iranian bombs”.

The JAM also launches indirect fire attacks at our bases in this area, normally at night. Some FOBs have received a lot of fire – almost daily -- and this one got its fair share this spring. It’s been light recently, but everyone is saying we’re due for some more incoming. So, whenever our own guns open up, there’s a bit of nervousness as everyone wonders who’s shooting at who and if any rounds will hit nearby. Recently, I was sitting in the tent-and-plywood base chapel (protected by concrete walls mind you) when a large boom sounded outside. The chaplain stopped his sermon mid-sentence, shifted his eyes left and right, then resumed with a bit of a grin.

BOOM! There they go again.