Though I don’t get to go outside the wire, I figured some people would be interested about my observations of Camp Victory and Iraq in general.

For one thing, you know you’ve acclimated when 109 degrees feels moderately comfortable and 85 degrees is decidely mild. The other day, while walking to work at 4:45 in the morning, the temp was 77.5 degrees; we thought it was a little on the chilly side. Life is really going to suck when I get back to San Diego. > more <

Today was my first time interacting with the Iraqi people. I volunteered to help with the Hearts for Baghdad program, where we visit a medical clinic on base and play with the children who come in.

We first gave out coloring books and boxes of crayons but ran out quickly. Just like American children in kindergarden, if you don’t have a big bucket of crayons for everyone to pull from, they won’t share their personal boxes. Many children kept coming up, asking for crayons, but all we could do was borrow one from another child. > more <

I just added a bunch of new photos to my Flickr site. This completes all the ones I have taken while here in Iraq.

I will be taking more photos as I get the opportunity. But I usually don’t feel like it when the temp is 115+ when I get off work.

I’m working on uploading all the pictures I’ve been taking during my IA deployment. I don’t have all of them uploaded yet but you can view the ones available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/98739387@N00/

I currently have most of the photos from my time at Camp McCrady and Kuwait. I still have to upload the pictures I’ve taken since I got to Iraq. We have limited bandwidth and our Internet connection gets throttled if we exceed a certain amount of data traffic. So I have to do it piecemeal.

Flying into Iraq is an experience. We had to wait 3 extra hours at the airport in Kuwait because our original flight was converted into a cargo flight so they had to find another plane for us. We flew on an Air Force C-17 cargo plane; they put removable cargo seats in the bay for us to ride in. > more <

I finally made it to Iraq yesterday. However, I’m going to talk about the week of acclimation in Kuwait, mostly because I haven’t had a chance to “discover” the magic of Iraq.

When you fly into Kuwait, it will be after roughly 17 hours of flying. When you leave Camp McCrady, you get to sit in the airport for several hours or longer, as was our case due to the nightly thunderstorms. The local Purple Heart Assocation, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and some other support groups came to the terminal and supplied gifts and refreshments. It was a nice gesture and totally unexpected. > more <