News and Notes

Target Number One has been captured, he was scooped up in a raid north of Bagdhad. We now have a new Target Number One, believe it or not he is supposed to be working at another Ministry. I am not sure what is up with that, but tribes and religions run deep here, one side may think that these guys are criminals while the other side thinks they are the next true patriot. The hard thing about a civil war is there are two sides, if you are on the wrong side at the end, it will be bad unless you happen to have lost to Abraham Lincoln, Douglas McArthur or someone with a reconciliatory mindset.


Yesterday was Smooth's birthday, even though he tried to deny it. You just can't hide from Army records yah know. We got him a cake, sung him Happy Birtday and made it a point to put an Iraqi fireworks candle on the cake. He was a good sport about it all, turned 37 which is about the average age on the team, only Savant is a bit younger.


I am attaching some other photos that I took recently. The one that I thought pretty much summed up the American Soldier's ability to sleep anywhere was this one. I have no idea who this person is, but he is pretty much dead to the world. He is racked out on top of his faithful HMMWV, in the motor pool while the whole world moves around him. There are vehicles being worked on, other vehicles being driven around, folks walking by but he is perfectly happy to just catch a few winks deep in his sleeping bag. Something like that you just figure he is where he is supposed to be, probably just got done with one of those all night sort of missions, had to stay up during the day to figure out the next day's mission and caught a break when he was told to take his vehicle to the motorpool and got a few minutes to catch up on his sleep. I think most everyone took his photo, including the Task Force Commander (LTC M) and even he just let sleeping soldiers lie.

Yesterday was also our first volleyball match against our National Police Brigade. I was not there, so I can't give a play by play analysis, but the 3-1 NP BDE takes their volleyball very seriously, we umm, did not take it as seriously. I had warned the guys that the national sport in Afghanistan was not soccer, but was volleyball, and that the General had told me that their team had been practicing regularly, so there was a bit of over confidence came into our game. The quote of the day came from 6.5: "We were in trouble when they showed up in uniforms." The first game was against one of the battalion teams, and we won. The second game was against the General's own team, and umm, it was close, but they beat us. I am pretty sure there will be a rematch.