Hi from Iraq

Okay. I feel thoroughly persuaded to post something given Heather's repeated hints. Unfortunately, that's not as easy as it might sound. While I have decent internet in my office, the internet in my trailer is very 1994 (that might actually be a little generous - it took a little over 2 minutes to upload the photo at left). While I shouldn't have much problem writing about what's going on, uploading photos can be a little problematic sometimes.
The photo is of President Bush here at the palace. This is the rotunda and my office is about 40 yards outisde of the left-side of the photo. I'm standing at the left edge of the rotunda, but I think I'm about 5 feet outside of the photo. I was working when he came, so when I heard that he'd arrived I just walked outside of my office and joined everyone else who was already there. Although Pres. Bush isn't much of a public speaker, it was actually somewhat inspirational to have him there and a little bit thrilling. He is very genuine and you could feel how much he actually wanted to be there. He shook hands with a lot of people who were there, but I just went back to work (remember - I'm at war! There's no time for fun when you're at war!)
While we were in Kuwait we spent several days "acclimatizing" which basically meant that I slept a lot, hung out in the USO there, read books, and re-packed my gear 4 different ways until I was finally satisfied. After a few days of that, we went out into the desert where we lived in a giant tent and bonded with camels. I have some cool camel photos. But. Internet. Too. Slow.

Okay - I gave up after 15 minutes of trying to upload my last photo. Really, I promise I've got some good photos. There's this one of a camel trying to put his head into our humvee through the gunner's opening in the roof. If I manage to upload it, I also have some photos of us on one of the ranges. Included in those few days was some great combat training (the purpose for us being there). We did some tactical movement where we fired our handguns at targets while moving together. It was a little bit different than a lot of our training because you really need to trust that the person behind you won't accidentally shoot you. In that I didn't trust a portion of our crew and didn't want to risk having them behind me, I purposefully went very last so that nobody could get behind me.

After our few days of living the nomad lifestyle, we returned to base and promptly prepared to fly in to Baghdad. It's been a little surreal since getting here. My schedule has fluctuated so much in the last week that I'm not exactly sure what's normal. I enjoyed when I was up in the early mornings. You can hear them calling out the prayers over the loud speakers at the mosques in Baghdad. Now, I'm on a late night routine that has me getting back to my trailer a little after midnight, attempting to use the internet/read for a couple of hours, waking up late morning, going to lunch, working, and starting all over again.

Okay, I'm going to give up on this now. The last photo has been attempting upload for 27 minutes. I'll try to get these good ones uploaded at some point. No promises on how often I'll write, but I'm sure Heather will put up most of the interesting stuff.