June 14, 2006

"Well, the time is finally here. On Friday morning (2 days from now), I will get on a bus for a 16-hour ride to Wisconsin, where I will catch a 25-hour flight to Kuwait. I am not really looking forward to it, as I really, really, dislike long trips, but hey, you have to get from point A to point B somehow ;)

This departure is coming on the tail end of two months' worth of training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi (a very, very, tiny Army National Guard base). Some of the training my little unit went through included weapons day qualification, night-fire (shooting at night), shooting with our gas masks on (all with an M-16A2 rifle), going through a gas chamber, convoy operations, base defense operations, more convoy training, HMMWV training, night-vision goggle driving, Combat Lifesaver (medical), and some role-playing situations. Also, all along we have been doing some job-specific training all along. "
Dispatches from Iraq

This is new. the description says:

This blog chronicles the experiences of Elon journalism major Alexandra Hemmerly-Brown, who was deployed to the Middle East in June 2006 as a member of the U.S. Army Reserves 210th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment. Brown is from Blue Hill, Maine, and is the daughter of Jane and Daniel Hemmerly-Brown. As a public affairs specialist, Hemmerly-Brown writes stories, takes photographs, produces a newspaper and works with members of the news media. She is scheduled to be stationed in Iraq for about a year, and plans to return to her studies at Elon following her tour of duty.

It'll be interesting how the Mil/University thing works out for a student on deployment. We will see if this new arrangement will add or take away from the bloggers interaction with the public. I did notice one thing, it's always the first thing I look at when I find a new blog, no comments, or even syndication in this case. Not sure why yet, maybe that will change.