Ukrainian military officer and journalist Dmitri Timchuk spent more then a year in Iraq with the Ukrainian troops stationed there. RT is the first to publish his observations of daily life in the Middle Eastern country in English. (Part VII)

Things to do in Iraq (Part I)

Not the right desert (Part II)

Americans happy to sleep with bugs (Part III)

Building the future: brick-by-brick (Part IV)

Don’t worry, they won’t shoot! (Part V)

The vampire gets stung (Part VI)

The everyday life of Ukrainian soldiers in Iraq is exotic compared to life at home. The dining facilities are what strike our guys first.

It’s well known that the Ukrainian canteens don’t offer a lot of variety, you eat what they give you, and there’s no choice of dishes. Here, on the contrary, the choice is rich and varied. The dining facility at the Delta base camp, just as at any other coalition forces camp in Iraq, is American, funded by a company call ESS. And there’s another monopoly, KBR, which handles the supplies. They say both companies belong to the not-unknown Dick Cheney.

It’s impossible to find the dining facility at Delta if you don’t know its exact location. From the outside, it looks just like a three-meter-tall wall made of massive concrete blocks. And, only after going through a labyrinth of other concrete walls do you enter a huge hangar. All this acts as a precautionary measure – what better place to destroy the whole contingent than here, when everyone’s having lunch?

There is a long queue at the entrance, just like in our Soviet-era canteens. You take a plastic tray divided into sectors and just point at what you want to Philippine cooks at the food counter. Normally, there is a choice of six or seven dishes, there’s a lot of meat: mostly chicken and beef. Americans do not like pork much, though pork is sometimes served, too.

The helping is standard size, but you may get more. The staff learn Ukrainian fast – and not only at the dining facility. I’ve once seen a Ukrainian who tried to explain that he wanted a small helping, and he used the ‘international’ language – English – but the Asian asked back in Ukrainian with a heavy accent.

You take salads, fruit and bread yourself. There are big refrigerators with Coke, Fanta, and Sprite along the walls. And there are rows of tables for everyone. Americans have one dining facility for both soldiers and officers, unlike the canteens in Europe and Ukraine, so a colonel and a soldier can sit down at one table. And it’s the same for all other nations at the Delta Camp: Ukrainians, Americans, Kazakhs, and Poles all eat together. Sometimes they are joined by other representatives of the Coalition Forces who stop here for a rest during trips – in fact, I once got to talk to some Kurds who have decided to join the Coalition.

Nostalgia for borscht

Americans do not have strict norms for food supplies – they eat as much as they want, but try to stay physically fit. At the same time, the food is rich in calories. Various steaks and rissoles from other countries’ cuisines (Tatar steaks, Turkish cutlets, etc.), ham, cheese, lots of fruit, including some which are exotic for us, like nectarines (a cross between a plum, a peach and God knows what). You really get confused by all the variety. What’s more, apart from beverages and drinking water from Kuwait everything else is brought from the US. Newcomers are easily spotted here: they stuff their trays full, and then are unable to eat it all up in the first place. By the way, there are signs in different languages at the dining facility entrance: ‘Do not take the food away from the canteen’. It’s done for the purpose of sanitation. However, you can take away canned food and beverages.

But there is one thing that’s bad. Abundance is fine, but all this food is quite special, to say the least. At first, American food really fails to impress. It’s interesting that different people – Ukrainians, Poles, Kazakhs – all have the same opinion when they try this food for the first time: it’s amazing that America is so rich and they can’t even make better food! Maybe it’s because the food is brought here frozen, and when it’s warmed up it looses some of its qualities, maybe it’s something else, but, in any case, American food cannot be called tasty. However, soldiers get used to it, although they confess that they dream of Ukrainian borscht at night. Soldiers from the 6th brigade, unable to take it anymore, bought a lamb from the local Arabs for forty bucks and cooked something similar to borscht – fortunately, they’ve found some cabbage in the canteen. That was a real feast! The guys were rolling their eyes and licking their lips when they told me how delicious it was.

Still, there are some edible dishes in the canteen. The guys detect them and pass the word. Really, until friends among the old-timers show you what’s good, you’ll never guess. English descriptions like ‘Malaysian Chicken in pineapple sauce’ won’t say anything to you, even if you know the classic recipe. Judging by my own experience – once I had a chance to eat a delicious-looking pizza – having tried it, Italians would have cut diplomatic ties with the US.

One more problem is that there is no rye-bread, only wheat-bread. Before the flight to Iraq, the more experienced guys advised us to take along a few loafs of ‘Borodinsky’ rye-bread. Frankly, I never expected I would miss it. But I did! The guys who eat wheat buns which we only use for hot-dogs, took their time to smell the rye-bread with pleasure before eating it.

We won’t be left without water

Local Arabs, who have been drinking from the dirty Tigris river for ages, have never seriously thought of its sanitary state. What's more, doctors say that eating fish caught in it (and fishing is one of the sources of income for the inhabitants of Vasit province) could be bad for your health. At the same time, water in Iraq is worth its weight in gold, water is life!

Drinking water for coalition forces is delivered from Kuwait in standard plastic packages – 9 liters per person each day, though this is more appropriate for a horse than a man. The washing water is specially brought to the shower-wagons near the barracks. The shower is very important, given the fact that in this climate, one needs at least two showers a day, otherwise, a skunk would envy the way you smell. The amount of water is not limited – you just use as much as you wish. The water in the shower cabins is called ‘process water’. I’ve marked this word in quotation marks, and it’s no accident. This water is delivered to the camp by Ukrainian specialists together with Kazakh engineers from the Kazabat battalion’s minesweeping squad. The squad is part of the Ukrainian brigade, and is deployed on the Delta base camp territory, and is under the command of our Brigade Commander.

This is what major Nurlan Shashtybaev, commander of the Kazakh field engineers, says (by the way, he is a graduate of an engineering college in Kamenets-Podolsky, Ukraine): “The water we’re supplying is used for technical purposes, but I wouldn’t call it ‘process water’. Although it’s taken from the dirty Tigris river, the Soviet-made military filtering stations VFS-10 (by the way, these installations are also used by the Ukrainian army) are doing a great job. At least, the samples taken by our and American specialists show that this water is perfectly suitable for drinking.”

So, even if for some reason the supplies of bottled water from Kuwait don’t last, no-one will die of thirst.

The Ukrainian camp, just as the others, sports banners reminding the military men to drink at least 3 litres of liquid per day, in order to avoid dehydration. It’s interesting that all these banners are in English, that is, they’re for the Americans. It seems like the Americans can only live according to a guide or a manual, while others are capable of feeling thirst on their own.

Do Ukrainians use guns in shops?

At the entry point of any coalition forces camp or base, just as at the doors to various stores and shops, there’s always a sign with a message in various languages which reads: ‘Unload your weapons!’ It’s interesting, though, that the PX store (the American counterpart of the Russian and Ukrainian ‘Voyentorg’ – there is one in every camp, irrespective of the contingent) located in ‘Delta’ only has a sign in Ukrainian. It’s as if the Americans know well that you can’t enter the shop with a loaded rifle which has a round in the clip (a careless movement may trigger an ‘accidental’ shot), but our boys are the ones who like to go shooting there once in a while. Still, American saleswomen who work at the PX say they’ve never seen any such accidents.

A visit to the PX is one of the few amusements for a military person in Iraq. The fun is not only in making purchases (the Ukrainians start spending massively just before they head back home, when it’s time to buy souvenirs), it’s all about looking at the stock. And it’s quite a motley mix, from military uniform and accessories, video cameras and laptops, t-shirts and binoculars, to chips and Coca-Cola.

Our guys don’t understand why you should buy food when you can get as much as you want of the same in the dining facility – for free. Watching Americans buying Fanta for $1.5 a can, our mayor tells me: ‘Man, we gotta set up our own kiosk near the exit, and sell canteen Fanta to these suckers for one dollar a can – and watch the cash start flowing in!’

Story courtesy of Dmitri Timchuk

T-shirts for Americans only (Part VIII)