Corduroy, OPSEC, haircut

I hate the AF PT gear. The t-shirt is okay, but the jacket and pants are 100% nylon, which makes them loud as hell when I get up and am trying to get out of my room without waking up my roommate. It's like swinging big plastic bags around the room and zips like corduroy as you walk, too. Also, being nylon, should I get shot or hit with shrapnel, or be in a fire, they would burn and melt to my skin. Not a fan of that. Interesting note, our new utility/camoflage uniform (the airman battle uniform/ABU) has a 100% polyester undershirt that does the same thing. The white in the ABU also tends to glow in white light if washed with detergent containing optical brighteners. Likewise, not a fan.

Until I put my PT gear on at Al Udeid, I didn't really feel like I was deploying.

Clarifying OPSEC: It stands for operational security, and the idea behind it is that it is impossible to classify and control all the information we would want to classify to confound the enemy and still do our jobs, but you still want to limit the spread of that information. So, for example, the day I flew out of Nevada to deploy wasn't classified, but it was OPSEC, since it was a troop movement. Some of the old posters from WWII (e.g., "Loose lips sink ships,") capture the idea.

I have disagreements with certain instances of how this concept is used, but overall, I agree with idea. I certainly wouldn't want anyone out there to get hurt because of me. I bring this up at this time, because some people would object to me even writing this blog, and posting a picture of myself in uniform. So I screen what I write and post pretty carefully...I won't post many pictures, and probably won't use any with anyone else in them unless they okay it. But I do think it is important to put this information out there.

I'll go more in depth on this a some point, but when I watch the news on TV about the war, it's incredibly frustrating how inaccurate it is. I am not even referring to distinct factual errors (which do occur, but rarely). What is more often the problem as I see it is that the news media is reporting on something they know little about themselves (the military and warfare) to people who know even less (the public). While there might not be errors in reporting, it's information in a vacuum that lends itself to misinterpretation. For example, I was when we killed Zarquowi (sp?) in 2006. For three days, there was nothing but coverage of this on the news. Again, there were no factual errors that I saw (bearing in mind that I had no first hand knowledge of the operation myself). But to watch the coverage, you would think that an operation like this (airplane working with ground troops) was a rare event. It isn't. Operations like the one that got Zarquowi happen every day in Iraq. The only thing that was out of the ordinary about that op was the target.

I planned on getting a haircut before coming to the cyber cafe to write this. I deliberately let my hair get long before I deployed so I would be a little less conspicuous flying commercial and then on the rotator. (I was wearing civvies.) But when I got to the barbershop, there were about 25 guys there and 2 barbers, and I hadn't brought a book, so I skipped it for today. Maybe tomorrow.

[edit 6 mar 08] I may or may not note omissions for OPSEC with a label