The other side of Kosovo

Guten Tag all,

Life here in Virginia can get quite boring when your waiting for your class to pick up and all you get put on is working parties. HOWEVER! There is a place by which we call Counter Intelligence that goes through many field exercise and the Intelligence Specialists (ME) get to help out this exercise. We wake up at around 0515 and step it out about a mile and a half to the Counter Intel part of the base while wearing our civilian attire. In this exercise I got to play an Iraqi villager in a mock town in Iraq obviously. I can honestly say I have never had so much fun in my entire life. The day was extremely cold though making our exercise somewhat miserable at times. My buddy Sanders and I got to have our own little house. As you can see in the picture below we are proud of our Iraqi home especially my friend steve here who was angry because his girlfriend of 5 years cheated on him. After getting familiarized with our house which was actually pretty nicely set up and we heard stories about people having sexual relations inside the house. Those select stories made us look at the beds in our house in a whole new light. We had little a little Cafe', Jail, Church, Gas Station, Grave Yard, and City Hall all in this little mock village. The coolest part was working with these paid civilian actors for the whole exercise to make it as authentic as possible. I met some of the funniest people in my life doing this. We all talked in an Iraqi accent making everything even more funny than it possibly could have. Whenever we had free time we would BBQ and just stand around telling jokes which I had the privelage of taking a video of. Its kind of hard to understand but there are more videos further down of what we actually did as far as working with the Marines. One of the things I loved to do was go up to a marine and say "Why is Marine looking at Female? Is rude. You know this yes?" I would then tell our Constaple or City Cop and he actually got really into it at one point and was trying to address a Marine and the Marine would not respond. So the Constaple threw his sandwich at the Marine and we both started yelling at him telling him to get out of our country and stop looking at our women. The Marine almost lost his bearing and wanted to do physical harm to us. Sometimes the Cheif of the Navy who ran the whole exercise would come up to me and tell me to do random things like stand in the middle of the road with my AK-47 and just stare at the Marines. I loved saying things like "Go back to America with your Pornography and Rap music." Whenever a Marine came up to to socialize and get information from me I told them my name was Hac Jabar and I was a famous singer in Kosovo. We would do random patrols with the Marines and usually turned into us getting mad at them and telling them to get out of America which was more than fun to act out and made the 12 hour exercise go by so fast. We had some pretty cool scenarios for them for instance we had a News crew come in and Interview the Marines about all the gunshots they have been hearing. Some things were pretty intense and were actually well acted out. They have whole scripts for these exercises so its like being in a play where the Marines are the interactive audience. The most intense thing we did was we have a sheep herder get arrested for carrying hidden weapons in his house and got caught. We acted out him getting dragged to Jail and getting beaten to a pulp. None of the Marines did anything, they just listened. The instructors were very dissappointed in their Marines. But the best part of this all was sitting in the Cafe' waiting for our next plan of attack on the Marines. We had more than enough time to talk to all the different people. It's cool to see how all the people came together here in this fake Iraqi town in this fake Iraqi Cafe'. We learned about all their walks of life and all the mistakes they made and what we should and shouldnt do in order to be what one might call successful. It was a cool experience to hear what everyone had to say. We were all different and were all there for different reasons but it came down to us acting like Iraqis to help Marines. It seemes like we were the ones that needed most of the help considering it was like listening to an episode of Dr. Phil. All I can say is that learning about other peoples lives is a great way to find out about the human ego. Its also interesting to be playing an enemy of a brotherhood I am personally apart of. It makes you look at life in a different way. Sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the mirror and see who is looking through what. THUS...counter intelligence...thus LIFE.

THE Spencer Schultz

p.s. the videos will be up soon...the computer here is half man half bear half pig so it's hard to do much on it. But please taste the new pictures they are quite nice this time of year.