First Day on the Road

We had a pretty good day today. It started off with a nice little treadmill run for some cardio, then we did pretty much a whirlwind tour of our AO. We will have some more tours here soon.
Our AO is partially a suburb of Bagdhad, we are on the other side of the Tigris River from the rest of the suburbs. The rest is agricultural type of land, mostly dates from what I saw today. We were tooling around with the National Police Commander, a very good guy, dedicated to settling Iraq's problems in a non-sectarian way, he will knock Sunni and Shia heads equally. His sector has had no serious incidents for several months while the sectors next to his have had several. Right across the boundary from his sector there was an RPG attack on a convoy the day after I arrived. It is funny when you see the serious incident slides for the past month, there are a lot of red and yellow dots in the sectors surrounding this sector, NONE in ours.

Our tour started off at a school that was just starting out it's school year (Ramadan ended last week, and they start school a week after Ramadan). The NP CDR handed out a pile of school supplies that a church in the US was kind enough to send over. It was pretty cool to see that in action, the NP CDR and the school principal decided to hand out the stuff only to the orphans and other students who's parents can't afford supplies.

We also toured some of the other hot spots in our AO. It was interesting to watch the NP CDR (my counterpart) walk right up to a business leader in the area and ask him how things were going. There were some areas that are clearly not pro-Iraqi government, but the CDR jumped right out of his truck and started chatting folks up. He made it a point to point out that business was happening and the markets were open, instead of closed when there was fighting between the National Police and the anti-government forces. Pretty cool. More folks in Iraq should do things like this.

Tomorrow is more briefings and area familiarization. Should be a hoot.

Fantasy Football update: I know I haven't updated my blog in a while, but last week was a huge week for Team Fritz. I left Team Wade further in the dust, moved up into contention for the money, and watched Team Mark not do so well. It has been reported that Team Mark has made some scientifically based trades, I hope they help, the grandma in the league is smoking him.

Running update: HUGE PROPS to JFord, my running buddy in DC. He scored me an Army Ten Miler Coin (I had a 5 year string of them going) and some running swag from the race. I hung the route map up in our gym, right across from the treadmill so I can imagine where I am running the Army Ten Miler every time I run on the treadmill. Thanks a ton, JFord.