Landed: Iraq

My address for the foreseeable future is:

LTC Tim Murphy
CDC, 3rd COSCOM
LSA Anaconda
APO AE 09391

The weather is cooling down; its 10 degrees cooler than Kuwait, that’s for sure. The base is large, one of the largest in the country and I can’t find anything on base, I’m lost.

The Army doesn’t mark buildings for security reasons and everything is surrounded by Texas barriers. They’re like Jersey barriers, but bigger. You’ve seen Jersey barriers on the freeways at home; they’re the movable cement barriers that temporarily reroute traffic, common in construction zones. The Texas barriers are a bit different; they’re about 16 feet high stood on end. They’re everywhere. Every building is surrounded by them, interlocking so you have a curtain of cement surrounding all the buildings & tents. Barriers, and then sandbags stacked up past the windows, it reminds me of the movie Apocalypse Now where everywhere was sand bagged and then these Texas barriers. To get into the building, they leave a couple of barriers out and you slip in between the sides of them. ID checks everywhere, it’s a very secure place. The barriers are there in case of mortars, but we haven’t had a single one since I’ve gotten here. I guess they got the memo.

Today is the Iraqi Referendum, and we’re all on high alert. We can’t go outside without body armor, weapon and helmet, the minimum essentials at our threat level. I went to the gym this morning in PT clothes and wore everything else over it. It’s been a while since they’ve been at a lower alert level but everyone is hoping that the Referendum and elections in December go well. Then it will be nicer to be outside, maybe even run the streets inside the compound.

My room is nice, I share it with one other person but we rarely see each other, I was up at the gym by 5am this morning and got on the treadmill for a nice long run. We rarely get back to the room before 9pm and honestly, there’s not a lot to do on the time off. At least I haven’t been able to find any trouble to get into.

I’m at my desk at my new job and trying to figure out exactly what I’ll be doing. There’s a unit here that we’re replacing, they’ll be leaving in the next couple of weeks. They have short-timers attitude, can’t wait to leave and we have 1000’s of questions on how they do their job. It’s like a new consultant starting on the job and the replacement has already given notice and now they’re going to dump the world on your shoulders. It’s pretty big, and I don’t want to screw something up and wind up on CNN, or Al Jazeera. That would be embarrassing but I’ll do my best to uphold the red, white and blue.

I think I could do it better with a cookie…
/Murph