Arrival at the Iraqi Forward Base and Relief of the Mississippi Rifles

The arrival at the Iraqi forward operating base and relief of the Mississippi Rifles establishes the narrator’s unit in a new, sharply defined military environment: a sprawling base organized around a noisy, oil-burning power station, and a handover conducted without ceremony. The transition ends at Christmas, when the departing unit is gone and the newcomers are left to occupy the base and its risks themselves.

The Base and Its Geography

The forward operating base was built around a power station beside a river. The station’s noise and the petroleum it used were inescapable features of life there: oil hung in the air and covered the ground. The narrator’s company lived near the north entrance in a cluster called the Russian village, a handful of closely spaced concrete buildings that served as both sleeping quarters and the company’s daily home.

The base was divided across a much larger area. Delta Company was on the far side of the motor pool, with the aid station nearby, close to the landing zone. The rest of the battalion occupied a tent village east of the power station, beyond the local shops and toward the main entrance; the battalion’s tactical operations center stood in the same sector. The road along the base’s north wall ran west from the north entrance, with the river to one side and Route Martha cutting through fields and palm groves. This geography made the newcomers’ arrival more than a change of personnel: it placed separate companies, medical support, and command functions in distinct parts of a base that the power station dominated.

The Handover

The narrator’s unit arrived in December to take over from the Mississippi Rifles, whom the narrator also identifies as the Nasty Girls. The departing soldiers offered no formal welcome. They dismissed the newcomers as hapless, and their hostile attitude was made especially plain in a PowerPoint presentation assembled from photographs of people they had killed, with a title that crudely celebrated killing turban-wearing Iraqis. The presentation reduced the handover to a display of contempt and violence rather than a shared account of the ground the incoming unit was about to inherit.

The relief was gradual. Soldiers from the two units went out on motorized patrols in pairs, one from each unit, while the Mississippi Rifles withdrew a little at a time. That arrangement made the transition practical, if not cordial: the newcomers learned the area alongside the people leaving it, and the two forces overlapped until the outgoing unit was ready to depart.

Taking Over

By Christmas, the last of the Mississippi Rifles had gone home, and the narrator’s unit was alone at the base. The holiday marks the handover’s decisive endpoint: the incoming soldiers were no longer learning the position alongside their predecessors but were responsible for holding it themselves. The base’s noisy, oil-saturated setting and dispersed layout now formed the everyday conditions of their deployment, not merely the scenery of an arrival.

The immediate experience of the new assignment was not the action some soldiers had hoped for. The narrator served as the third section’s medical aide while that section was assigned to the battalion’s first quick-reaction force. When mortars struck the tactical operations center and wounded three people, the section was only about two hundred meters away, but intervening buildings blocked the view. The narrator recalls the missed action as disappointing, a contrast between the unit’s early desire to be at the center of events and the unseen, constrained reality of its new position.