More Word from Bryan Part 2

Sent Tue 5/23/2006 10:37 PM
Received Wed 05/24/06 1:00PM

Hey everyone,

It took about a week, but we had our first official mortar attack yesterday. The ironic thing was that I slept right through it, since I had the day off and was taking a nap. I wouldn’t have known about it for some time longer except that I got a phone call in my tent making sure that I was wearing my body armor. The mortar was reasonably far away from anywhere that I go on a regular basis and it missed hitting anything vital. There were some more explosions this morning, but we are not sure whether they were mortars or training exercises. We usually get some kind of info either way, but there was nothing this time. Hearing distant explosions or Apache choppers at 4am seems to be a regular thing around here though. The weather hasn’t been too bad. We had overcast skies and about 10 drops of rain once, which is fine with us. Any more than that and half the base would flood and make a huge mess. It’s been between 95 and 100 with low humidity pretty much every day since we’ve been here, but yesterday gave us hints that it will still get hotter. We hit 106 yesterday afternoon while we were in our body armor…not a whole lot of fun. Fortunately, I was off and wearing shorts and a t-shirt. There isn’t a whole lot of stuff to do here, but we have ping-pong, pool tables, video games, poker, and movies. We also have a 24 hr sports channel, a news channel, and some U.S. programming to watch. What I miss the most though is the freedom to get in the car and go for a drive or make a cell phone call when I feel like it. I’m hanging in though. Today marks the 7th day of my deployment (time doesn’t start until our arrival in Iraq). We only have 16 more weeks to go before we can start heading home. As of right now, it looks like we will be home on time after all. Hopefully, that won’t change between now and September. I just got word from the command post that the temperature is now 95 degrees, and it is only 0930 local time. Considering it was 78 when I got up, this is going to be a real scorcher today. I am glad I work in a building with A/C.

If you want to send me things, that’s fine, but if you have a limited budget and can’t send too much, you may want to wait a few weeks. I expect that I will need care packages more in July and August than I do right now.


Take care, everyone! I am going to sign off and see if I can’t get a few constructive things done this morning. Talk to you all soon.

Bryan