Party Time

Well, today was a VERY special day!! I went to a party, and this was no ordinary party. First of all, this was my first party and secondly and most fun, the Commander of the Special Operations hosted this gathering. My buddy invited me and I jumped at the opportunity jst to do something different ad I had no idea what was in store for the night.

It was very strange because there we all kinds of people "not in uniform" and therefore hard to tell who is who, but suffice it to say it was an iinteresting crowd.

Here am with the host, who was a very gracious man.

And here was the spread. We did not sit and eat, but it was more of a gather around the table and take what you wanted. It was just like an old fashioned family picnic for 100 or so of your closest friends.

The food was great, chicken, lamb, rice, mutton kabobs; it was all very good. This might be have to be a recurring event. More to follow on this.......

Getting Warmer

Well, time continues to move along and this week, the temperature here hit 100 degrees. Altough, here I am a bit spoiled. I live in an air conditioned room and work in an air condioned office. When lunch time comes around, it is almost a joy to get out of the artificial light and cold air and walk the 500 meters in the warm, dry air and break up the routine of the day.

I am sure by now all of you have heard of the horrible tradgedy that happened here last week where one Soldier decided that the only way out of his problems was to take it out on fellow Soldiers and health care providers. This actually happened right in my back yard. There are plenty of people that have dployed more than once adn I work with pleny of them. Being here and seperated from loved ones is hard, but there ar epeople that can help. The news media will spin this particular incident in a way that only they can, but we may never really know what happened on that day to that Soldier. Don't beleive everything that you read.

The job continues to be interesting and I am learning new thinfs every day. There are signs that there is an end as last week, we began to talk to our replacement. We will take part in teaching them, just as our predeccessors tought us. Also, as I continue to watch the clock, I will be home on my R&R leave in less than 90 days. Yippee.

This week, Household 6 took the family to Sea World and I am sure that they had a good time. I am very proud of the family as they continue their routine of normalcy as much as possible.

Thank you all for everything that you do.

Happy Mother's Day

Let me take this opportunity to say Happy Mother's Day to everyone. To my Mom, Leigh and the other Ya-Yas, and other friends, you are all very special and your work often goes underappreciated. We are deployed here with a lot of Moms and just like birthdays and other holidays, this one day is just a little harder.

In a time and place for milestones, this week we I hit a big one. We all count days here, days till we go home, days till Sunday, everything is a big countdown. Well, I count the days until I go home on vacation and this week we went from triple digits to double. Yippee. Now as I sit here and write this, the clock is turning to 96. It might still seem lke a big number, but is a lot smaller than 200 which is where we started.

So, no pictures this week as it has been somewhat quiet, but all is well. The temp is starting to rise and we are getting consistant days over 95 degrees as we work our way to about 130.

So again, Happy Mother's Day.

Catching Up

Where has all the time gone? I cannot believe that it has been almost three weeks since my last update. I normally set aside some time on Sunday for this type of stuff and I just have been delinquent.

Well, it has been a busy and varied few weeks. So far for visitors, we have had President Obama, Secretary Clinton and most recently, and one much closer to me, the Commandant of the Chemical Corps paid us a visit last week and I had the fortunate opportunity to spend some quality time with him. Probably more than I originally thought. He was going to fly to visit some training in my area, but the helicopter was unsupported, so we ended up driving and a ten minute flight turned into a two hour drive in an MRAP, where he and I had had some quality time together. :) The training was very good and the feedback that we received was all very positive.

Actually, it was not that bad and on the way back, the jetlag started to kick in for him and he began to doze a little bit. Anyway, at the culmination of his visit, he had a little social gathering and I wanted to take this picture.

More recently, I finally had the opportunity to take that helicopter ride and we flew from Baghdad to Taji, where we were met by some Guardsmen from the Great Keystone State (PA). On this particular outing, the flight was not going to be the highlight, it was the ride on a Stryker. Here is a recent picture of me enjoying life somewhere north of the city of Taji.............

and here is a picture of the Stryker vehicle that took us all over the coutryside. These things are awesome. They are much more comfortable than an MRAP and quieter as well. Although, it might look like some gypsy wagon with everything hanging off, it is a mobile home to a crew of highly dedicated Citizen-Soldiers and for one day, they protected our team.

We are now in May and time continues to roll along. I am almost four months (1/3) finished and vacation will come in 104 days. Yippee. I promise that I will do better in keeping this updated. Thank you all for what you do and I would be very remiss if I did not give a BIG shout out to my WILD HOG buddy, Kareem who just got promoted. Congratulations!! Good Job.

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.