Deployment Gucci

Despite that fact that we on the regular got mortared there were some fond moments at Hurricane Point circa September 2005-March 2006. I'm going to tell you all this story in hopes that you share with us some of your "Deployment Gucci" moments. Deployment Gucci is a phrase I use (I don't care if you have a cooler phrase this is mine so go kick rocks asshole), to describe the moments wherein despite being in a shithole we got to live it up as a sort of ghetto fabulous deployment kings.We all had those moments where we knew that if we were to be back in the states, literally anything stateside would have been better. It made us proud though to use our good old Marine Corps ingenuity and craft some creature comforts at the FOB or even in our gun trucks.My platoon. Combined Anti-Armor Team Red, we liked fire. So we decided we'd build a fire pit. Not that hard to do in a country with no vegetation on the ground. Our hooch was on sandy ground and the only vegetation around was 20 yards away on the banks of the Euphrates River. A river where you may or may not find the firing pins belonging to AK-47s of dudes out in town who just felt kinda shady...the cradle of civilization or so it was called before everyone decided the actual cradle is somewhere in Africa.We digress. The members of CAAT Red didn't want just any old fire pit. No, we managed to get our hands on some ready mix concrete that we mixed ourselves. We also acquired a 50-gallon barrel. We then proceeded to bury the drum so the top was even with the ground. We then spread our cement around and had a nice little buffer zone between the sandbags and the barrel. We filled the barrel up with sand so that there were about 8 or so inches of room to light our fire. Sandbags were placed in a circle around the pit. We set up sandbags to hold the cushions from the back seat of the gun trucks. We then filled sandbags to build a wind wall.It may seem simple. It may seem dumb. That ghetto rigged fire pit was a place where my seniors Marines regaled us with stories from previous deployments, what the Corps was like before the war. We got shot at every day, we got mortared every day, but trust me, we were livin' Deployment Gucci.