A break from Iraq

Happy Easter!

I’ve been shirking my duties, sorry for not writing but just getting off leave and back into the swing of the job. I have two computers on my desk for secure and non-secure email and both were full up. I would have liked to mass delete them all and start fresh but you know that never works. Sorry to everyone who's been sending me emails and I haven't answered, I'm going thru work emails first.

I had a wonderful time on leave, it went WAY too fast. I ended up planning all my activities around meals and put back on a good 10 pounds. Heaven. I brought my running shoes home with me and got a couple of runs in (Kelsey even got me out to run with her once, she kicked my butt) but gave up on that after a couple of visits to Wendy’s. What’s in those Frosty malts anyways? I think they put addictive chemicals in those. I had some really good meals which just reminded me of how wonderful the United States is with all the choices, all of the opportunities we have. We truly are blessed, it’s a great country.

There are two U.S. ports they use for the R&R program, Atlanta and Dallas. I flew into Dallas and as we’re taxiing in, two of the airport fire trucks create a waterfall that the plane taxi’s under. I thought that was awesome. Then, inside, there’s a group of VFW members and off duty police/firemen that show up every day to meet this plane (there’s one R&R plane a day) and shake our hand as we get off. They hand over phone cards or stand by with free cell phones for us to use. It’s a nice touch, really made us feel special. There were VFW guys standing by with vans to whisk anyone to another terminal and I jumped in with a couple of others (we’re all in fatigues). He had a cooler inside and offered us all a beer...only in Texas, eh?

All in all, I had a great time off. There was one thing that bothered me though and that was watching the news. They spent about 6 seconds one day covering the deaths of two soldiers in Iraq. It’s quite a difference from all the time we spend going over daily accident reports and incidents or shootings or the daily plans and missions that we attend to. It seemed so wrong to reduce the lives of those two soldiers to just 6 seconds and I thought about the families and hope they know how very important they were to us and how much time we spend trying to reduce the number of deaths any way we can. It reminded me of old news footage from Vietnam and how those deaths started to be treated towards the end of the war. They’re not just a number to us; somehow I hope the families know that.

Attacks are up across the country and that’s not good. We can point directly to the Iraqi leadership who struggle to decide simple matters and created this vacuum of power. Those that have stood up to lead in the past have been killed and to their credit we know how difficult a situation it is. We’re hearing that normal Iraqi’s are just lying low and staying out of the fight. The success of the Marines on the western side of the country have been pushing bad guys towards us in the center and back east towards Iran. Our base has been getting hit a lot; they were hit on one day with seven separate attacks while I was gone. I had planned on taking some trips to outlying posts but will have to see now if they’ll allow travel like that.

They said it got to 99 degrees yesterday. It’s currently 84 (11 am) with a high today of 94. It’s only April and I’m dreading thinking about July. The good news is that it’s downhill from here and we start planning already for the next unit to come in and take over for us in late summer.

We’ve been told that when the “good idea” fairy comes around now that we should smack her. We won’t have time to start anything new and anything we have in the pipeline going forward now is to be planned out and completed, or documented for our replacements. We are reducing our footprint here. We probably hit the highest number of troops on the ground during our rotation and there’ll be less coalition soldiers coming now for the future. That’s the plan anyways. We're running out of time because we have to have this country ship shape by our elections. That sure is the wrong attitude, but it's the reality.

Thank you to everyone for changing your schedules while I was home to see me and supporting us, it was a treat to see everyone.

Love to all and best wishes...back in Iraq.