MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune
MOSUL, Iraq - It was the very last thing Lt. Walter Hicks expected to encounter in Iraq: Snow.
It came down - heavily at times - across northern Iraq Sunday, mixed with freezing rain so that Hicks and the other soldiers on his convoy north of the city froze their you-know-whats off.
"When we left Mosul it was just like when it snows back at Lewis, all drizzly and mixed with rain," Hicks said. "But as we drove farther north, it kept getting snowier and snowier."
He estimates there was an inch to an inch-and-a-half on the ground at Badush, where he and others from A Battery, 1st Battalion of the 37th Field Artillery Regiment went Sunday to check on a contractor destroying ordnance at an ammunition storage point.
It's about a 20-mile drive north of Mosul - fluffier snowier all the way up, slushier and wetter all the way back.
Locals say it snows every three or four years in Mosul, but quite a bit each year in the higher elevations north of the city. Heading north, it's a long steady climb to the mountains and the border with Turkey.
It didn't help matters that Hicks' humvee gun truck has no back doors and a gaping hole in the roof where the gunner, Spc. Daniel Beltran, has to sit the whole ride.
Worse yet, there's no heater.
And even worse than that, Hicks said a soldier who shall remain nameless (that would be Spc. Dison Luzama, the rear gunner) managed to clobber him with a gigantic snowball. Right in the back.
But Hicks, Luzama, Beltran and the humvee driver, Spc. Gary Thomas, aren't complaining too much.
Come the heat of July, they'll be dreaming of Sunday's snowstorm.
Michael Gilbert: mjgilbert41@yahoo.com
(Published 12:01AM, February 16th, 2004)
Lt. Walter Hicks and Spc. Daniel Beltran of the 37th Field Artillery Regiment were soaked to the bone after a snowy, rainy 40-mile round trip in an open Humvee.