Arrived in Iraq...

updated 19 feb 08: I have to get in the habit of not hitting enter, since blogger scrolls the lines for you. I normally write my monthly email in a basic text editor, where you have to insert
carriage returns to make the paragraph look right. So anyway, removed all those here...

So I'm at my final location in Iraq, been here a couple days. Already flown a couple times, this is the first time I've had time to check out the cyber cafe (which is also a DOD system and subject to monitoring).

We flew here in a C-17 from Al Udeid, which is where the rotator stopped after leaving from the east coast of CONUS and a few stops in Europe.

I hadn't been to the Deid in almost two years, and I haven't been deployed there in three, and yet it was all too familiar. I realized as they bussed us to our rooms and I was pointing out some of the basics to a first timer with me that I have spent more time at Al Udeid in the last 5 years than I have anywhere else but Abilene, TX.

Some notes for future entries: for opsec reasons I may omit or deliberately distort certain facts.
I may or may not note this when I do it.

An Iraq fact that gets overlooked even by DOD personnel: The U.S. has more contractors in Iraq than it does soldiers. No one tracks casualty counts on them.

They're booting us to clean the place, so I have to go.