Officially Part of OIF

Hey everyone, thanks so much for the comments and emails! I would love to respond to all of them individually, but I just don't have the time. And our internet connection is sketchy at best. So I have to do the essentials before I can reply to you all (essentials being check my email, post an update and email my wonderful fiance)

So...last time I checked in I was in Shannon, Ireland, which by the way is FREEZING. We were laid over there for about 4 hours or so. Then we got on the flight to Kuwait. It was a thoroughly long and unadventurous flight. About the only excitement was before we took off the pilot got on the intercom and warned us to make sure everything was stowed carefully because we were forecasted for some "severe turbulence" as he called it. Let's just say that was probably the smoothest flight I've ever been on.

So we flew all night, saw the sunrise over Iraq from 30,000 feet and landed in Kuwait pretty early in the morning. Let me backtrack a little bit here. While I was in Georgia I was volun-told that I was going to be on the baggage detail. Meaning me and about 15 other guys get to load approximately 500 bags, all weighing in the 100 pound range, under the plane. So upon landing in Kuwait me and my baggage detail buddies were off loaded first so we could download the plane. After the downloading, during which I suffered (undiagnosed - but I'm pretty sure that my exagerated assumptions should be correct) a mildly shattered shin and a shredded bicep, we got onto a bus to drive to our staging point for the move into Iraq. I can't list all the places and times for OPSEC reasons but I'm in the middle of the desert somewhere in Kuwait. Some point in the next few weeks I'll move North to Iraq.

Anyway, once we got here we went to some briefings on how were getting paid, what the camp rules are, where the phones are and the like.

All in all, here's my rundown of Kuwait. Don't visit. There's no grass, no trees, no clouds, no wind, no water, and nothing to do. I haven't even seen a camel. I'm going to try to get some pictures up soon...having trouble with them for some reason.

I'll try and work up the energy to fix it later. We got alot of classes to go to this afternoon.