Pooh's "Blustery Blustery Day" has nothing on this place…

The one thing I figured I experience in the desert of Baghdad is hot dry sandy days. Well this is by far the coldest wettest windiest desert I've ever seen. Hell, if the Mojave got this much weather, we could start a rose garden between LA and Las Vegas. From the moment we landed at BIAP I've been cold or wet or both. And the sludge produced by all the rain sticks to your boots turning them into wide heavy bricks of Muck. No matter how much you try to knock it off you end up tracking it into your hooch. The mud is so thick it reminds me of the wet winter days during my childhood growing up the farm. It rained for days and the mud got so deep I sank up to my waist. As I look around this place I'm sure I see holes developed by half sunk soldiers. Is that a helmet floating over there?
And the wind storms – Now that's something to write home about. The winds get downright violent. Reaching 60 miles an hour it damn near picks up the trees. It stirs up so much dirt and debris that even when the hooch is shut up tight, a thick sheen of sand still finds a way to accumulate on everything in the hooch. We had one of these storms last night. I thought the roof was going to blow off. It was so loud I couldn't hear the typical helo's fly-over or the shelling and VBIEDs around town. Not sure how but it affects me, makes me really agitated. Perhaps it's all the electrostatic in the air. As my Shipmate points out "3000 yrs of Mesopotamia floating around… surely you're gonna feel something." I secretly wonder if we can package this stuff - silly Marketing guy. This morning I walked out of the hooch and everything was a sick hazy and orange. For a minute I thought there was something wrong with my eyes. I spose this is what hell looks like.