So why is it that the one day that I try to be responsible and finally update my blog the internet wants to be bad? Oh well I will type it all out and then hopefully be able to post shortly. I am super sorry it has taken me so long to write something. I wish I even had a good excuse. It’s kinda nice though because you can look through the dates on the blog and see that when I was making the most posts was when I was extremely bored. Atleast I’m not bored anymore! Here’s what is going on.
We are staying busy but we also have a good amount of downtime. I go on missions between 4 and 5 times a week. Saturday is a guaranteed off day for everyone, Friday is maintenance day to work on our trucks (it is the holy day here so we leave them alone). Other than those two days any day can be a mission. Each squad has 3 or 4 missions a week. But on the days your squad does not have a mission you are still working somehow. People have to work in the TOC (headquarters basically, I don’t really know what it stands for?) and people have to help fill in other squads. I am very happy that we get leave, I can’t wait to go home on mine and see all of you wonderful people, but I can’t wait until leave is over. Filling in with other squads really isn’t that much fun. It’s nice to see new areas and see different things ( I got to see a herd of camels today when I went out with 3rd squad. They were the first camels I had seen since we left Kuwait back in March), but we all prefer to go with our own squads. The other part that makes it difficult is having people fill in for my squad. Right now we have 5 people on leave out of 12. We have 1 guy who can’t go out on mission because he cut his hand and had to get stitches. So every day that we go on mission only half of the people are actually from our squad. The other half are fill-ins. And they do a good job, not complaining about that but it will be easier to do the mission once we get back to the routine of knowing who is where and who is responsible for what and all that kind of stuff.
Our missions normally last around half a day depending on when we start it. So we do have a couple of hours of downtime in the afternoon before we all get busy again. This is normally movie or naptime.. ok its normally nap time ha. We have a meeting at 1700, after that its normally chow followed by the gym. They have a nice MWR here so we spend some nights in there watching movies or playing video games.
I really can’t complain much about time. The rest of our company is still not doing anything. Our Battalion Commander actually sent our Commander an email telling him that we are doing a great job as the only platoon in the entire Task Force conducting ptt. That’s pretty big, the Task Force has probably 6 or 7 ( that’s completely a guess, could be more) companies, each company has 3 platoons, and we are the only ones still working with the Iraqi Police.
I miss everyone back home a lot. I’m happy to be here because time is moving by much faster. We have been at Bucca for almost 3 weeks now and it has been a lot better than the time we spent at Basrah. It is almost August which means almost a month until September. That’s really exciting, I should be home in less than a month and a half (hopefully I got early September. I should know a date in about 2 weeks). I love you all lots