What a Valentines day! We had several thousand more Iraqis show up to join the army. We were prepared this time, however, since this was the day we told everyone to come back who had not been able to make it in on the 2^nd.

The plan this time was to move them all to the airfield a couple miles down the road. This way we keep all these people off the post until we can get them organized and exert some level of positive control over them. This also moved any danger from terrorist attacks away from the post proper and out onto the deserted airfield.

Out on the airfield we established various checkpoints where they were given a cursory physical, filled out paperwork, etc etc. This was a winnowing process for weeding out people who clearly were not fit to join the army, whether it be because of age, physical status, or some other reason. Eventually when they made it to the end of the airfield they were organized into groups and trucked into the post. Once on post we put them into temporary housing units (read: warehouses with mattresses) until transportation arrives to take them to their permanent training bases.

At the crack of dawn they began showing up. We must have had an easy thousand people at dawn and it just kept growing! It's hard to estimate how many we had show up, but we ended up taking about 4,000 people. So, you figure we turned away a few because they were ineligible, kicked a few out for poor behavior, then turned away a lot of people because we just ran out of daylight. If I had to guess I would say that about 7,000 people or so people showed up.

Again, the biggest issue we had was with crowd control. There were no bombs (although we were sure there would be because we announced this ahead of time). There were several injuries, mostly related to either crowd/riot control, or from being injured by other people wanting to join up. They were pushing, hitting, shoving each other - all just to get to the front of the line so they could get in the army.

The scene makes one appreciate the lack of opportunity for the Iraqis in terms of jobs or economic welfare. They were fighting hard to get in. Even after we shut the recruiting down towards dusk we had to spend about an hour trying to chase people away. One unfortunate (or stupid, depending on how you look at it) individual who did not make it through by the end of the day ended up sprinting across the desert towards the area where we had the new recruits organized and waiting for the trucks to come take them to the post. Not knowing what his intentions were - does he just want to get in really badly? Is he a suicide bomber making one last mad dash to kill as many people as possible? - we chased him down and forcefully subdued him. Turned out he was just stupid and thought he could run in with the other group and we wouldn't notice. I imagine he was plenty sore the next morning though.

So now we get to house, feed, and control all these thousands of people until their training bases show up to get them. Now the fun begins in earnest! Plus, we're doing it again on the 23^rd since we turned so many people away. The army needs people and we seem to have them here in this area. In spades!