New Year

So we moved silently into the new year here. The bredth of our celebration was my "Happy New Year, guys" as the opening to our patrol brief for the night. A brief outcrying of "woos" followed. It's hard to get too excited about holidays here I suppose. The only family we have to share them with is ourselves. We spent most of Christmas driving around looking for bad guys in the Market. Our Christmas dinner wasn't very impressive. But we did have each other to drink egg nog and fake wine with.

Right now we're running the night shift. Not much happens at night. The drive to and from the market is probably the most harrowing thing we do. No real complaints there, mind you. The biggest threat in the market at night is really sleep. It's a constant battle. Have to yell at my driver every now and then...and he at me, too. It is a nice break, though.

It's been somewhat quiet in the Market. Quiet meaning generally less than one IED per day.

I'm still amazed how IED's get dropped in the market while we're driving up and down the street. It's good in the fact that there's enough people that we don't notice it I suppose, that means the locals are confident enough to come back to shopping without being afraid of being killed. Bad for us because it apparently gives lots of cover for the bad guys.

The situation in general is weird, though. The bad guys use women, children to drop IED materials. They'll spend days building up the spots slowly. Then we get a truck hit. Thankfully no injuries so far...just some trucks towed back home. These folks are innovative, though...that's all I can say to that.

And I'm still intrigued at battlespace sizes. It's almost like we drive to work every day to do battle at the local mall. Very similar in area covered. It has a lot to do with mission and just general concentrations here, but still seems odd to me.

Before I go, have to mention the Saddam hanging. I was asked about protests here about it. I've seen none. We expected a lot of different things. We got nothing. Apparently on the news there's video of protests. I equate it to the protests you see on tv that happen in DC. Something's always being protested there. But it rarely is televised. Here, it has to be. There's not enough "newsworthy" material otherwise. The news folks don't want to put on tv that we've increased power capacity in the country, that we're improving water works and sewage, that a new school opens nearly daily, that hospitals are being improved and built. That goes against their aims of making the public think that things are horrible here and that the US completely destroyed this country and need to leave. We're doing great things here that don't get reported. Yes, we lose troops almost daily. Our brigade's lost a few itself the last few weeks. But we're also getting rid of more and more Al Qaeda and mujahadeen. We're improving the living conditions of these people. We're slowly, but surely making this place capable of standing on its own. In this quick fix society...we forget how long we had to be in Germany and Japan after WWII to help those countries. That we still have troops sitting in Korea for a reason.

There's no quick fix...and failing here is too critical to the region to let happen.