Keeping Up With The Joneses

Bob and I had just returned from dinner. The sun was setting, but the temperature had to still be hovering in the 105 degree range. I had showered before dinner and donned a fresh uniform, but it was already soaked through with sweat. As we approached a neighboring trailer, I thought these folks have the right idea! ...and the sun-bleached pink flamingo lawn ornament was a nice touch. Have NO idea where they got that! As I took this picture, I heard machine gun fire in the distance. Somewhere in a distant Baghdad neighborhood a fierce gun battle was taking place. The sight before me and the sounds wafting over the 12 foot concrete "T" walls was quite a contrast, but contrast is one commodity that there is plenty of in Iraq.

It was a rough day yesterday for our supported battalion. They're newly deployed, and have only been here a few weeks. That is pretty early in a tour to lose four members of your military family to an IED. On top of my agenda tomorrow morning is to find out when and where the memorial service will be.

I had my first taste of the streets of Baghdad several days ago with a patrol in another team's area. It was extremely eerie and quiet due to a vehicle curfew that went into effect after the mosque bombing in Samara up north. Some of the areas we drove through looked like they had been lifted from a quiet Tuscon, Arizona suburb ...and then dragged behind a pickup on a dusty country road. One area looked like a lunar landscape; a sea of broken concrete from horizon to horizon interrupted only by cockeyed power poles and a few newly built houses. I was unable to determine if the area had once been a neighborhood and then been flattened, or if it was just an open, undeveloped field where people just dropped their cement debris.