As you can probably guess, internet access still is not as robust as most of us would like here in beautiful Basra, so I'm stuck sending these posts to my wife to post.
Not a whole lot of exciting stuff to talk about. We're still getting settled into our routines, but life here seems normal now. Little things that were annoyances when I got here are just part of life. Using bottled water to brush teeth, the weather, sand in everything, and just the general stink in the air are no big deal anymore.
One of my new duties is that I'm the OPSEC OIC. That means I make sure no classified material gets in the wrong hands. This includes collecting the stuff in the burn bags in my section, and...burning it. I actually have a job I like now. It's so fulfilling to go out and light a big fire of paper and just play in it for about 20 minutes. My kids would be so envious.
Anyway that's about it for now. I'll try to post more often, but it's pretty hard with nothing going on. That's actually a good sign that the Iraqis are handling things themselves. What drives me crazy is that we're paying for this war and are actually making huge strides to help rebuild this country but the media only focuses on the deaths of US Servicemembers. There's several stories a day that are released to the media touting the work that we and the Iraqis are doing, but how often is it on the news, or even US news internet sites? Never.
I know that we're making a difference though and that's enough to get me through this deployment and out of this $hithole.
