I caught a ride on a convoy to Mosul last week and took my first real trip outside the wire.  I was really nothing more than a tourist but seeing the country, even through a small armored window, is enlightening.  All I have seen otherwise are the few square miles of Anaconda.  Something that really surprised me was the long lines of cars at every gas station we passed.  And nothing was moving at them.  It looked like people were camped out for days waiting to get fuel.  I haven’t read anything about the gas situation here but I expected that it would be more available.  Driving through various villages and cities you could also see a striking unevenness in living standards.  Tikrit, for instance, looked modern.  Some of the small villages we passed appeared to be in the stone-age.  I finally got a first hand look at how Sadaam took care of his favored people.

Starting out on a convoy you can sense the tension.  Everyone is at least a little anxious wondering what may come, if anything.  In my case I had no idea what to expect.  While it dissipated a bit as the hours passed I still felt a bit nervous every time we passed stalled cars along the roadside or saw vehicles in the median waiting to make a u-turn.  At one point, a vehicle that passed our convoy outside Mosul by driving the wrong way on a divided highway was suddenly stopped on the right side of the road.  As we passed it, the vehicle pulled out and began following the convoy.  We kept a careful eye and a large machine gun on it.

Iraqi’s have a habit of driving on the wrong side of the road at high speed from what I’ve been told and I saw several monuments to this behavior littering the roadside.  The collisions are quite spectacular I’m sure.  I would have suspected the wrecks were VBIED’s had I not seen what little remains after one of them go off.

Anaconda is a tropical oasis compared to most of Iraq.  North of Tikrit the land is almost completely barren.  The landscape has a surreal mystique with stark contrasts.  I saw a few lonesome trees occasionally but very little groundcover of any sort.  Nothing but gray dust.  Close to Mosul the ground had a faint tint of green, like someone spray painted the dirt, but nothing substantial.  

We made an overnight in Mosul and hit the road back the next day.  The FOB in Mosul made Anaconda look like a paragon of order by comparison but it had a pulse I haven’t felt anywhere else.  The war is happening there and you can feel the urgency, the excitement of a combat arms operation.

We were lucky and didn’t find any excitement ourselves that day but we passed a convoy that was hit by an IED.  Two tractor-trailers had flat tires and a few small holes in body panels.  I have no idea if there were any injures or not.  It was one of the large supply convoys comprised mostly of civilian trucks.  As we approached the entrance to Anaconda we passed throngs of kids anticipating candy that troops on convoys often toss out to them.  One enterprising teen was trying to sell porn but didn’t get any takers.  I’m glad I had the opportunity to go.