Life on Mars

"I have obviously not been able to post in quite awhile, so I will do what I can to catch up. I have been sending a series of emails to family/friends over the past couple of months, so I will copy those emails on this blog every few days until I catch up to what is happening today. Bottom line is that I will be compressing the last 2 months into about a 3 week period on this blog, so some of what you read will have to be understood in the (slightly) past tense.

For openers, I am based out of COB Speicher mear Tikrit, Iraq. I am attached to Multi-National Division North (MND-MN), and our main insurgency problem up here is a Sunni problem. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is the largest and most vicious of the groups, but none are afraid to kill. There is some Shiite activity down around Diyala Province, which is in the southeast sector of MND-N. AQI is fighting hard for its last stronghold up here, which is in Mosul. The following was first sent out to my list around late April:

Hello everyone,
If any of you ever had the desire to live on Mars, come here to Speicher on a day like today and you will be pleased. The attached photo doesn’t do justice to how red the day was with this massive sandstorm. It blew in Wednesday night around midnight and it will be going strong until around noon on Friday. It actually got worse as the day wore on after that picture was taken."
Up Country Iraq