Rick finally posts a picture… the crowd goes wild.
Well I finally have a photo to post. It’s not so much that I finally took a photo I consider good enough to post, but rather I finally took a picture at all which would facilitate the posting of said picture. That was admittedly too many words. And I didn’t even take this picture… a friend of Eva’s named Tina took it for us. As though an explanation is necessary, this is Eva and I in Kuwait. If it doesn’t look hot then the picture is deceiving. We’re at Camp Buehring, and it could most certainly be a lot worse. There are plenty of facilities here to occupy the cornucopia of unoccupied time we currently have available. We spend about 4 hours in the DFAC (Dining Facility) every day, and whatever other time we have available is spent wandering about looking for minimally occupied common areas which have air conditioning. We’ve discovered that air condition is paramount. Not very Meriwether Lewis, but an important realization just the same.
Quick side note: if you would like a copy of the picture, click here to get to the large size on Flickr and then just click the ‘Download the Large size’ link right above the shot. Also, you can click the picture itself to see my photostream and some of my more recently posted photos. (“Recently” here is a relative term.)
What gainfully employed time we do have is spent in mandatory training; “checking the block,” so to speak, before we head up north into Iraq. We’ve learned about IEDs, Fratricide, Humvee and MRAP rollovers so far… real sunshine and rainbow stuff, let me tell ya. However, it is necessary and applicable so overall it was all probably good. Fortunately, almost all of the training Eva and I have had to do has coincided, so we’ve been hanging out more or less all day, every day for the last week. Not too shabby. People are jealous.
We’re both heading north here in a few days. We leave the same day, potentially on the same flight, and might be at the same base in Iraq for all of two days. We could just as easily part ways as soon as we hit the ground in Iraq. It’s not impossible to tell, but damn near.
We’ve actually seen a lot of people we know from West Point here in Kuwait. Most of them are aviators from the 1st Cavalry Division. People we’ve seen, in no particular order, are: Jason McCoy, Grant Cloaninger, Kevin Britt, Mike Hahn-Conti, Dave Park, Nick Fullmer, Tina Chong, and a dude I went to high school with named Marty Davis who’s a Specialist in the Wisconsin National Guard. Of all the people we’ve seen, seeing Marty Davis was the craziest. Seeing classmates from West Point is expected; seeing classmates from Horlick High School is decidedly not.
So that pretty much sums up the last week. Yes, it has been 4 short paragraphs worth of activity. I suppose I could describe the actual deployment out of Ft. Bliss too. Here it goes: we waited at the airport on Ft. Bliss, we got on a plane and flew to Bangor, Maine where we waited, we flew to Shannon, Ireland where we waited, we flew to Kuwait City, Kuwait which looked strikingly similar to El Paso and Ft. Bliss where we waited, then we got on a bus and drove to Camp Buehring where we disembarked and continue to wait. There ya’ go.
The “Stars and Stripes,” while likely sounding to you like a WWII anachronism, is in reality a wonderful resource here. It’s a great (albeit oftentimes the only) source of news and it’s free in deployed areas. As I’m new in theater, I’m still amused by the weather forecasts contained in the “Stars and Stripes” daily. Here is today’s forecast: “Hot today with sunshine and patchy clouds. High 100 to 106. Winds east-southeast 8-16 mph. Partly cloudy and very warm tonight. Low 80 to 86. Winds north-northeast 6-12 mph.” And it’s not even summer yet.
Well I hope that was enjoyable. Expect similarly long winded, somewhat disjointed descriptions of the happenings in Kuwait and Iraq as time goes on. Updates will continue to be sporadic for the foreseeable future, so keep checking back… you never know when I’ll bless this page again with my sharp wit and cunning logic, thereby quenching your thirst for quality commentary. If you’d like to send Eva and I an email, click the ‘About & Contact’ tab at the top of the page and use the email form there. Talk to you soon.
Surpise! Another photo! I posted this to see if any of you found it as novel as I did.
