Friday, May 15, 2009
Precious water in Iraq (photo: Derek Gaines, U.S. Army)
Add water to the list of vital necessities that American soldiers have had to do without while fighting the war in arid Iraq. In addition to lacking sufficient body armor and explosive-proof vehicles, U.S. soldiers have at times gone without enough water to drink—in a country where temperatures can reach 130 degrees, and while humping a hundred pounds of equipment and fighting insurgents.
According to an Army training document, a soldier can lose 15 liters, or four gallons, of water a day in desert conditions. And yet in many instances soldiers were rationed to two bottles of water per day, equal to 1 to 1.5 liters. The shortage forced some soldiers to steal water from wherever they could find it.
“It really hit me the day I was with my commander and we’re stealing water,” Army Staff Sgt. Dustin Robey told Channel 11 News in Houston, describing how they raided supplies at the Baghdad International Airport, where they found pallets of water just sitting there, not being distributed to soldiers.
The U.S. military also was supposed to distribute water via large water trucks, or buffaloes as the men call them. But locating these trucks proved difficult for soldiers, and those who did could not drink the trucked water because it was so laden with chemicals.
Another soldier told how he and others in his unit resorted to drinking tap water inside an Iraqi home—water that was untreated and caused an outbreak of dysentery among as many as 60 men.
Still other soldiers told of having to shower using untreated water—at bases established by the Army. The responsibility for providing clean water to military personnel fell to contractor KBR, a one-time subsidiary of Halliburton that has been blasted by Washington officials for failing to meet the logistical needs of American soldiers in Iraq.
For example, at camp Ar Ramadi soldiers had no disinfectant for shower water that one former KBR employee described as being “two to three times as contaminated as the water out of the Euphrates River.” This meant soldiers were standing in “a sauna of microorganisms,” leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of pathogens.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Some US Soldiers Forced to Steal Water in Iraq (by Jeremy Rogalski, KHOU)
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