The base we were taken to next was on the outskirts of Bagdad in an agriculture region. The base itself had been a "Petroleum University" or at least that was what it was called, and it had in fact been a university. It was evident that after the beginning of the war that the local people had begun to vandalize and strip the university buildings of anything of value. The U.S. had decided to make the university a base for a couple of reasons.  1st it provided several excellent buildings for housing troops, even though there were no dormitories the classrooms worked well as large bays. 2nd The building had air conditioning, running water, and sewage. And 3rd they wanted to preserve the university so that when we left it could once again be used as a university. In this case if the U.S. hadn't taken the university as a base it would certainly have been destroyed or ruined to the point of unusability and irreparability, as the locals had already burned one of the university's buildings down.  My team ended up being at this base for a mater of a few weeks, not quite a month even. The University base itself was relatively small, probably only about 10 acres, surrounded by farm land on all sides with one major road running right in front of the university and a small dirt farm road running along another side. When we arrived at the university base we were positioned right on the edge of the base with only a broken barbwire fence between my system and the local farmer’s fields. After we had set up our system and were providing communications I asked one of the lieutenants of the unit we were attached to about the security along this fence as I saw the other sides of the base being watched by guards, her response was "your on this fence, your guarding it". Hmm well fortunately my team had managed to hang onto and scrounge up a bit of concertina wire and I managed to set up a typical three strand stack around at least our little system and along a bit of the fence. It wouldn't stop bullets, hand grenades, RPG's, or thrown rocks but it made me a little more comfortable, knowing it would at least slow somebody coming through the fence down a bit. Not that that mattered so much because I could have spit farther then the fence. Just as we were getting content with our living conditions and the luxury of bathing water (cold only), flushing toilets, and sleeping in air-conditioned (85°-95°) buildings we were informed that it was time for us to move on and be reattached to yet another unit. We were given 3 hours to tear down and be ready to go, most disturbingly I was told this after I had pulled a night shift and then a morning duty and was about to head to my cot for a few hours of sleep. It was beginning to seem as though nobody wanted to keep us around, but one thing everyone had made obvious was that they didn't want to support us, they just wanted the benefits a satellite system could offer them. We packed our gear up, took our system down, prepped our vehicles and were on our way to the next base.

  This time when we moved it wasn't so much a convoy, it was just four vehicles, our two in the middle, one in front leading and one in back guarding. It didn't take us long to get to our next base; Martyrs Monument right in Baghdad city. Martyrs Monument is a large round building surrounded by manmade lakes and toped with a split offset sphere with an Iraqi flag draped in the center. The top of the building was constructed to be able to be driven on as well as support the sphere on its top, so it was made of concert several feet thick.  The walls were created equally as strong, and the building had been built with a protective berm level with the top of the building about 100 feet away from the walls. Altogether the building offered about as good a place as you get to defend and offered good protection from mortars particularly when you were inside the building. The top concrete slab of the building extended about 30 feet beyond the walls offering shade and had it even been necessary, a place to run should there be incoming mortars. Fortunately for me I never had to worry about that while I was there. The outside of the walls were covered with blocks that had all the names of all the soldiers that had died fighting for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. We lived, or rather slept in the base of the monument which was circular and very large; housing all the soldiers on the base, effectively in one large round room. I don't have any pictures of the inside of the building for a couple of reasons. First there were very few working lights, and those that were working were usually kept off. And second there would have been several soldiers that would be disgruntle with me had I used my flash while they were sleeping. Being as everybody on the base pulled different shifts you always had a hundred or two people sleeping at any given time. The inside of the monument was rather elegant with high ceilings, and gilded righting on the walls. In the center of the monument was a waterfall that flowed down from the flag in the center of the buildings roof and a partial glass ceiling that let in most of the light in the building. There were also two large glass entryways at opposite sides of the building that let in light, and as rule this was the only light in the building. There wasn't any running water, the lakes were so contaminated that you didn't want to go near them let alone get in them. We were rationed to two bottles of drinking water per day and four five gallon jugs per person per week of non drinking water for washing clothing and taking showers. There was most defiantly not any air-conditioning in the building, but during the day it was cooler inside than out, but at night the thick concrete walls and ceiling, along with the very little air movement kept the building uncomfortably warm. Some people had tried sleeping outside because it was actually much cooler outside at night, but the downside to that was that due to the lakes there were millions of hungry mosquitoes just looking for easy prey. I didn't really understand it, but for some reason the mosquitoes didn't seem to come in the building night or day so we had a place to take refuge. Because there was no running water and no showers we made our own shower over a drain that was near our system. I set up a tepee type of shelter using a tarp, and poles that were normally used for setting up camouflage netting, then suspending a 5 gallon jug from the top of the poles. This way you could set out the jug in the early morning and have nice warm water for a shower come evening. The unit we were attached to was an armor unit having several Abram tanks and other heavy armor vehicles. They took pretty good care of us making sure we had the supplies we needed; repairing our vehicles and even making sure we got hot chow when it was to be had. This was the last base I was stationed at in Baghdad. I had just woken up one late morning (we were working 12:00 to 12:00 shifts, and I had the noon to midnight shift) and lazily stumbled out to my system when my NCO informed me that she had gotten a call from our parent unit, they had finally  located us (because they hadn't always or most of the time known where we were, and we had no idea where they were) and they would be picking me up in two weeks to return me to the states as my time in the army was almost up. They said I needed to get back to Ft Huachuca in time to out-process. I also had to use up all the leave days that I had earned and not been able to use while in the army, which was 95 days. Truth be told I was rather surprised when two weeks later my commander and  first-sergeant showed up to pick me up and take me to the next base where I would be held until I could be put on a flight back to the U.S.