Pictures

Greetings to all! I wanted to update my page with some exciting news, but I couldn't think of anything worth posting or making fun of. I know I promised you photos, so here are a couple to hold you over until I can get more pictures of my shining face on here. A short description follows.

The first photograph is Al Faw palace in Baghdad. Currently, it houses the General and his staff. We acquired this beautiful piece of property from its former owner, Saddam Hussein, after finding that piece of excrement in a hole in Tikrit. His casa is now our casa. I honestly don't think he suffered enough at his hanging. Here is this beautiful palace, with solid gold script and fine marble lining the hallways, a giant throne room, with no other purpose but to make Saddam feel like he was king of something, and the people who lived here under that man were literally starving and dying in the streets. To top off my feelings of disgust for that man, there was a room dedicated in the palace to housing Saddam's harem, which was kept well-stocked with unwilling participants to be used and then murdered or thrown into the streets to be excommunicated from their families for being "unclean."

When Saddam was done with his daily fornication, drinking, and delusions of grandeur upon his throne, he would cross the road to his personal mosque, which is in the picture with the sunset. There, he would learn all there was that Allah had to say about such activities in the Quran. Maybe it was okay for Saddam to do such things. He did go to the mosque every now and then. What's an infidel like me know about the holy ways of Saddam anyway?

The Perfume Palace is another tragic story of the Saddam Hussein era. It was built for his brother's family, who were invited to live there and then were murdered for their efforts. I don't know if you have noticed, but there seems to have been a pattern with Saddam's despotism. It was a clear cycle of observation and then subsequent action. He would evaluate who was Saddam and who was not Saddam. Those deemed not to be Saddam were put to death (the subsequent action).

The fourth picture was taken here on Tallil. Since we have such a large contingent of Air Force personnel that share the base with us, we felt it necessary to provide them with the basic living essentials - food, water, swimming pool, etc. As you can see, the swimming pool is nothing more than a hole in the ground that fills when/if it rains here. I'm sure the Airmen here are receiving plenty of extra pay as compensation for days when the pool is closed. Something about substandard living conditions...

More pictures are on their way, so please keep checking back.

I have been doing well this week. My feet have finally healed to the point that running is no longer torture and walking is done without the slightest hint of a limp. My boots, after only three months of constant wear, are finally to the point where they are comfortable. Military boots are made by the lowest bidder, so the leather of which they are made is often the same texture as hardened steel when you first get them. It takes a while to break them in. So sweet it is when the breaking-in period is finally over.

I got a new room as well. No longer do I have to walk a quarter mile to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I now have rock-star access to the gym, showers, and the "latrines." The Army has their own language, I have noticed. The word "latrine," for instance, means water closet or rest room. Rooms in which we live are not called simply "rooms." No, that would be too simple. Instead, in an effort to assign every physical object an acronym, a room is called a CHU (Commercial Housing Unit). Why can't they just call things what they are, like the Navy does? Everyone knows that the floor is the deck, the "latrine" is the head, the ceiling is the overhead, the water fountains are scuttlebutts, the front of the vehicle is the bow and the rear of the vehicle is the stern, etc. Dang, the Army makes things confusing...

I hope you enjoy the pictures and everyone is doing well back home.

A, E, L, I love you!