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SEAN COCKERHAM; The News Tribune
MOSUL, IRAQ – Sgt. 1st Class Gerardo Viera was thinking about Tacoma as his Stryker armored vehicle rolled through a rough part of this city, an area where a suicide car bomber had attacked Fort Lewis soldiers earlier this month.
He was reminiscing about the City of Destiny’s restaurants, to be specific.
Viera munched on peanut butter crackers while taking a short break, having been relieved from watching out the hatch with a machine gun.
He talked about how much he’d like to be eating at Le-Le or Vuelve a La Vida. Better yet, he wished he could head out and grab a hefeweizen beer at the Swiss tavern downtown.
Viera is scheduled to be in Iraq for eight more months after serving four already. It’s a place with no brew or spring rolls to come back to after dodging bullets and roadside bombs.
“Pretty much the only things to look forward to at the end of day are checking e-mail and going to work out,” said Sgt. Emmet Cullen, 24, a sniper in Viera’s scout platoon from Fort Lewis, the Lightning Platoon.
It doesn’t matter to these soldiers what day of the week it is. The common cliché, borrowed from the Bill Murray movie, is that every day in Iraq is Groundhog Day, basically the same day over and over for a year.
Weekends don’t change much. Scout platoon soldiers, when not on missions, have to clean weapons, inventory equipment or do whatever the Army decides is needed.
“You don’t have a lot of downtime,” said 22-year-old Jason Berg, the platoon’s medic. “When you do, it’s movie time or you just go to sleep.”
DVDs of movies and television programs, especially “The Simpsons,” probably are the most common entertainment for soldiers in Mosul. [...]