Happy Easter

Greetings to everyone around the world. Happy Easter!! The Easter Bunny even comes to visit over here in Baghdad. As usual, the cooks in the Dining Facility always put on a fancy spread and today was no exception. This was one of the two cakes that that had out on display and about five minutes after I took this picture, they started to cut it up. Timing is everything.
We all recovered from the President's visit and life returns to normal, whatever that really means over here.

One again, Happy Easter to all.

Presidential Visit

As I am sure you are aware of by now, we here in Iraq had a visitor earlier in the week. President Obama stopped by for a brief visit. Now, regardless of political persuasion, he is the President and it was just awesome to see him. This is a building that I go into all of the time, and I have posted pictures of the room in previous posts.

We were outside when his motorcade rolled by and then we were allowed inside. He was introduced at about 1805 and he spoke for about 10 minutes. Afterward he did the standard ropeline and I was about two people deep and was able to snap this picture. It all happened very quickly.

Anyway, I was glad that I went. It was about a five hour commitment of time when it was all said and done, but the opportunity does not present itself very often and it is something that I will be able to tell my kids.

Daddy was there!!!

KLE

There is a term used over here called Key Leader Engagement (KLE) which is where a US leader sits down one on one with an Iraqi leader, either a military or government leader as asks; "how can we help?" Well last week, I had my first KLE.

One of our sections duties is to trael around and provide vulnerability assessments of US bases around Baghdad. This is all very routine and the team that does this is very good at it. Well last week, we were asked to conduct an assessment on an Iraqi oil refinery. This is the only one of its kind in t city and it has been attacked recently; so we were asked to go out there and see if we can help.

This was a little strange because there are no US forces there and we have no standard to compare it to, but we linked up with some Engineers who were to asssit us and we were off.

What an amazing place; they produce about 90,000 barrels of oil daily and hope to improve. So, not only have I never been walkig around an oil refinery before, but now I am walking around an Iraqi oil refinery. We were very quickly linked up with someone who took us to the impact sit of a previous attack and we immediately went to work. Each one of us looking at the site with our own perspective all while our security team looking after us carefully.

After some individual and some collaborative work, we agreed that we were done and headed out, when our translator said that he would try and arrange an impromptu meeting with the refinery leadership. So within five minutes we were sitting in the refinery vice-president's office, exchanging pleasantries and being offered tea and briefing on what we had just seen and how we cold assist him.

Because I was the senior man, and because I had done this before in Korea, I spoke first and it was a wonderful meeting. He was very nice and very thankful for us being there; it was a very good trip adn one that I was ver happy and proud to be part of.

This is how we are beginning to make a difference in the future.