It is frickin' hot here!

the weather has been particularly nasty the past few days. hot (high 110's) and windy which means sand everywhere and in everything. imagine using the above in a situation like this. i mean, those things are fairly unpleasant as it is. imagine going in there after it's been baking in the sun. i've finally gotten most of the guys to close the lids on the toilets to help with the flies but still pretty darn gross.

when we first came out i couldn't believe how ppl could let their things get so nasty and dusty but now i understand. it's nearly impossible to keep things clean and sand free. pretty much manages to get into every nook and cranny and you get used to it, i guess. or maybe it's just me too lazy to dust every single minute of the day.

my psychology final is tomorrow. here's hoping my students are studying. for the most part, they aren't doing so hot. quiz scores are horrific. i'm torn because on the one hand, you have to give them credit for participating and sitting in a class for 2 hours, twice a week. there are a zillion other things they could be doing (well, video games, movies, internet mostly) and they've chosen to go to class. if they fail, they have to pay back the tuition that's being paid for them, $500! but there is something to be said for actually doing some studying! and it's not fair for the few students who are actually doing well. i'm crossing my fingers that the final exam will bring them up....

a lot of folks ask about what i think about war and what's going on and such. i guess the first thing i would say is that old saying is very true, "don't believe everything you see or hear on tv!" our squadron's job here is ISR, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. our birds fly over the country looking for ied's or other suspicious activity. for the most part though, the activities are fairly normal looking, at least from above. but we do catch insurgents planting ied's. we've found weapons caches. we've discovered bomb making "factories" with chemical agents. and we've been able to take these things out.

a coworker sent me an interesting article about the current situation. obviously written by someone who's a part of all this, but take a look and decide for yourself. from a blog called the small wars journal.

Anthrax for everyone!

finally finished my third and final round of anthrax vaccinations. these were the shots i started about a month ago that caused so much bitching and moaning from my marines. yes, all of a sudden they became mandatory again...well, mandatory for iraq and korea at least, and they all had to be given out immediately....makes me wonder a bit about the urgency of it all. the whole process was a huge pain in the arse, too! one of my marines turned out to be prego and so i had to send her home. worse yet, i then realized that i had given her her first anthrax shot and she was most likely pregnant at the time! i made sure to ask all the females even if there was a remote chance they were pregnant (even though sex is a no-no out here) and she didn't think she was. i still felt awful. a couple of retarded stragglers left, but it's pretty much done thankfully.

month 4 has arrived, and if i had thought that ppl were getting on each others' nerves at 2 months, man, you should see things now. it's hot, everyone's super annoyed (myself included), and we still have over half the deployment to go. the irony is that our jobs aren't really even that hard. we're not patrolling the streets, we're not kicking down doors, we're not travelling in convoys. we sit behind computers in air conditioned rooms. our "pilots" fly with joysticks while looking at a monitor. we're relatively safe. the one thing that i can give the guys credit for, though, is the rough deployment schedule. 7 mos iraq, 5 months back, year after year. that def takes a toll.

surly j, thanks for posting. great to hear from you! muffin, i read your blog and i'm still jealous. those pics remind me of peru a couple of summers ago. same exact thing. psych j, i can't believe your deployment is almost over. can't wait to hear more gitmo stories.

and that's my room up top. mine's the one on the left with the yellow sheets. it's not bad, and prolly one of the better rooms at the alamo. kinda sad, huh?

Happy Father's Day

so that's lake habbaniyah from the road i take to work every day. it's actually a lot closer than it looks in the picture and we all stare out longingly at the water wishing we could just jump in. if only it weren't for the schistosomiasis and filariasis and god knows what other nasty creatures lying in the otherwise beautiful blue depths... on a clear day, you could imagine you were in another place, looking over some sand dunes, staring out into the ocean way out yonder (or you could imagine polar bears and ice caps as chu viet suggested :)...thanks for posting!). but just as you think about grabbing that ice-cold corona, you notice the barbed wire, and the control tower and a 7-ton drives by or gust of sand blows into your face, and by golly, you're still in iraq.

i often feel guilty whenever i start feeling restless and ready to go home. i mean, this is my first (and likely only) deployment and it's really not that bad. many of my marines are here on their 3rd, 4th trips, with some on their 5th! those of us on our 1st are def in the minority and as sucky as it may be, it's nowhere nearly as bad as being here the nth time around. now that, i can't even imagine.

daddy, happy father's day, and happy father's day to all the other pops out there. wish i could be there! micki, happy birthday and congratulations! great, great job! i know the fam's proud and you should be as well. helluvan achievement. welcome back to cali. i can't wait to get back there myself and i'll see you then!

Speaking of "deployments".....

my buddy muffin reports that he just started a blog as well. he's currently "somewhere in the pacific" on a humanitarian mission that's taken him to hawaii and will go to southeast asia including vietnam and thailand, amongst other cool places, all to provide medical care and support to locals. i've told him before, but i'm extremely jealous. if my military career consisted of humanitarian missions around the world, i'd prolly consider being a lifer. alas, here i am in the desert...not unexpected, and not all that bad, but not quite what i was hoping for either. some ppl have all the luck. perhaps i will just have to marry rich so that i can make my civilian career one medical mission after the next (i have to marry rich though, because i'm way too materialistic to be able to do it on my own).

i went to the rifle range today as the doc and had a chance to play with the m16 rifle as well as a couple of machine guns. usu, it's my corpsman that goes, but i wanted to give him a break...heheheh. yeah, it was pretty much a blast! we had hundreds of rounds to shoot and i had nevered fired any of those weapons prior (i've been relegated to my pistol so far) so it was pretty frickin' cool. pics to come soon, i promise.

there was one annoying thing in that the guys from training, the same ones who wanted to have the weapons course and who set up everything, didn't even show up! we had formation and 0530 and they weren't there. apparently, the marines from that shop didn't get the message even from within. i've had problems with them before in terms of scheduling my shot fairs and getting medical training to them just because they're frickin' lazy! these are the same guys who are the "flyers" in our squadron. bunch of prima donnas! i can't imagine what working with real pilots must be like, but ugh!

What kind of a deployment is this?!?

i just heard from one of my buddies from cherry point, psych j, currently on "deployment" to cuba and he sent me the pic above. how ridiculous is that?!?! he's been there since december and is almost set to head back home after 6 months of chillin' in a 2 story townhouse, fishing and surfing, and drinking coronas. some ppl get all the luck, eh? i guess the flipside to that is that he is the psychologist for detained terrorists and apparently the tour guide for congressmen, reporters, and other vip's who visit and want to see the horrors we are inflicting on those poor prisoners at gitmo. despite media reports, he tells me that his patients get "presidential medical treatment" and everyone has to "go out of their way to try not to offend them." funny how we never hear stories like that in the news. in spite of the bene's, i'll take caring for marines over jihadists any day.

hard to believe it's june already. pops, happy belated bday. i'm glad you like the crocs. amazing how easy it is to get over how ugly they are once you put them on and walk around a bit, eh? and they make great shower shoes over here in iraq, too. no feet fungus for me! i'm def a convert.