Greetings and salutations! I have another few minuteso n a slow Sunday morning and it's time to update y'all on the goings-on here. I have actually had a pretty busy week or two, a welcome change from the first several days here. At the end of each month I have to put together end-of-month reports and summaries, so it does take a bit of my time. Our Commanding General (or CG) also got back from leave and so he is driving a lot more taskers to get done. The good thing is that it's making the time go by faster! There's been a lot of turn-over in people here this month, and so I've taken a trip or two to go out and meet some of the new people that I'll be working with and for them to meet me. One of these was to FOB (Forward Operating Base) Prosperity in the International Zone, or IZ, which used to be called the Green Zone, which used to be called a big target. The folks I visited lived and worked in a bombed out palace that, to the best of my knowledge is called the "palace of the four heads" mainly because sadaam had four giant sculptures of his head in brinze or something placed out front. The heads are gone now, one is in the Smithsonian (or so I hear) one may be in the British Museum, and the other two may be in the Baghdad museum which just recently opened up. I'm sure given a few years, someone will make a movie about them. Indiana Jones and the Four Heads! National Treasure...Baghdad's Big Heads! But I digress. The palace is still standing (obviously since people work there) even though 7 JDAMs hit it in 2003. I got to go up on the roof and get some pics of the damage that 7 500-pound bombs can do to poorly put together steel and concrete. Emphasis on the poorly put together too, seeing the construction of some of these buildings is absolutely terrifying, especially when you're standing 100 feet up on top of it! I think the buildings stay up because they're so light due to all the voids in the concrete (ask a civil engineer or anyone who knows what a "slump test" is and they'll tell you voids are bad things, especially in load-bearing walls). The trip over to FOB Prosperity was an uneventful event. I mean that because it was my first convoy, and it was extremely boring, which is a very good thing. The situation over here has gotten much safer, to the point where taking the armored bus (affectionately called the Rhino) from Camp Victory over to the IZ is a pretty dull, everyday thing. We still have to wear all our "battle rattle" but the threat has been significantly reduced. The Iraqi Army is ensuring the roads in Baghdad are much safer than in the past.
I'm starting to settle in and figure out the way the Army does business. They like to have meetings, a LOT of meetings. They even have meetings to get readty for pre-meetings before they have a meeting (I'm not exagerating either). They will hold a meeting to get ready for a teleconference during which they will discuss what they're going to say at the next teleconference. Maybe that's just headquarters staff in general, but it makes me crazy! I was in a meeting where we spent 15 minutes of intense discussion on whether to change a rating scale from 4 colors to 3 and the potential impacts. The best part is, they tabled the discussion until the next meeting! I'm amazed anything gets done at all. Well, I should really get going, it's time for me to get back to work, fighting the insurgency one PowerPoint slide at a time!
Don't ever accuse the Army of being unsafe. See how concerned they were about some spilled oil in the parking lot? If you look close enough, there may be room for 1 more cone...
Here's an entry hole from one of the JDAMs that hit the "four heads Palace"
From the roof of the palace we could see the second largest mosque in the world, apparently still unders construction.
Here I am on top of the "Four Heads Palace" with evidence of what happens when you make yourself a target for the Air Force.
Waiting for the "Rhino." See Mom, I'm being safe and wearing all the protective stuff they issued me.
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