My good friend here, SSG Liesl Marelli, is the PAO (Public Affairs Officer). She is here to document this deployment, so she takes thousands of pictures and writes the monthly newsletter. It's really cool being friends with the professional photographer! First off I get a lot of pictures and second she is willing to teach me everything she knows while we are here. Besides all that, she is just a really good friend and a lot of fun to hang around with. She keeps me sane and we have a lot of fun. Liesl is the one in the other pictures with the rifles.

Liesl has a little bear that does everything she does. So yesterday it was the bear's day to have his picture taken. He was helping me shoot my rifle. I thought you might enjoy these....

Having Fun

I constantly have other Army and Marine soldiers turning in Iraqi weapons for me to cut up. I am the only person on base that is qualified to legally destroy weapons. It's not hard, I take a blow torch and cut through them so no one can use them ever again. I have to sign forms that I took control of the weapons, and if I don't completely destroy them and they were found being used by someone in the future, I would be in a lot of trouble. But before I put a blow torch to them I have fun...

Rifles took off insurgent in Baghdad

One of these rifles I am trying to take back to Colorado to put in the Colo National Guard State Headquarters building. It was produced in 1939 by the Nazi's. The Nazi eagle is stamped on the rifle in a few places with the symbol of where it was made which was in Berlin. (I really don't know a lot about guns, I have had to sit for hours on the internet researching all this.) One thing I found interesting was that the Nazi's produced this weapon for their military and it ended up here because the Nazi's trained the Iraqi army during WWII.

Inside my room

Here are a few pictures of my room, well the inside of my room...

Yes, ALL my clothes actually fit in these two wall-lockers, PATHETIC!!! I can't wait to get back home and have all my clothes!

My little bookshelf

Yes, that is a microwave and tv you see in this picture

Yes, I am really putting in my room! Love It!!!

As you can see, my room is small and plain. Feel free to send pictures or anything else I can put up on my walls and stuff to make my room feel a little more like home! I can't print pictures, (they won't let me run off base to Walmart for some reason), so I don't have many.

I also love reading the comments that are posted on this from some of you, so please keep it up! And Lorraine... yes I know you are my cousin! (hahaha)

Random Stuff

The National Guard Unit we took over operations from was from Oklahoma. They had the Oklahoma Sooners (College) flag hanging everywhere. So the day we completely took over we hung our flag... Mom you will like this!!!

The Denver Bronco Flag!!!

In our first week of being here we got called for a very important mission. A donkey had got himself caught up in our perimeters barbwire so we had to go rescue him. Once we rescued him we had to keep him in our area until we could figure out what to do with him. It's not like we could call the local Animal Shelter. So the higher ups emailed the head guy from Ramadi (the town) and told him we had a donkey and didn't want him. He told us he would pay us $50 and give us 2 horses to keep it! HAHA, it was so funny. So soldiers actually had to feed him and take him on walks, I never laughed so hard watching all this. I am so glad I wasn't one of those soldiers writing a letter home about this... "So mom, I came to Iraq to serve our country and am doing it proudly by walking a donkey everyday." A few of us wanted to make t-shirts with a picture of the donkey with him as our mascots. We thought this motto would be perfect...

"the Colorado National Guard, a bunch of Jackasses."

Church

Yes, you read the title correctly, I'm writing about church, yes LDS services.

Most of you have no idea, I have been going to church since I was in Ft Hood. So the first Sunday I was here in Ramadi I went. We only have Sacrament and its at 8:00 pm. There is one other lady that attends, her name is Linda and she is not in the military. The lesson for that Sunday Linda gave and it was on the Relief Society. The services aren't like anything that any of you are used to, it turns into a regular lesson with discussion from everyone. Afterwards Linda told me why she was here. Her and her husband live in Virgina, he is in the army and on Active Duty. He was scheduled to deploy here, Ramadi, so she applied for a civilian job so that they could be together over here. She got the job and within a few weeks of them both leaving for Iraq his orders were changed. He went to Afghanistan and she came here alone, its pretty sad. So she went on to tell me how excited she was that I was here and that she has been the only female member since she has arrived and blah, blah, blah... then she started crying. Oh boy. I didn't want to tell her she probably shouldn't be too excited, and No I was NOT going to do visiting teaching like she just had spent the last hour telling us all how important it is. (haha) Also, every Thursday we meet and play games or have a lesson. So this past Thursday was on how we should all be speaking with the members that aren't attending and get them to come to Church. Then once again visiting teaching is brought up. I'm sorry, but I had to say no. I just think it would be really odd to go to her room and she give me a lesson then I give her a lesson. Um... I'm a little new to this as we all know, but something about all that sounds funny to me. I guess I could do it so she would be happy and I would be at 100% for visiting teaching EVERY month. (HAHAHAHA)

Proof I went to Church...

The Marine that is to the right of me is not a member, but he comes every sunday just to play the piano for us. He is a Colonel, and I'm sure has a lot of important things he could be doing instead of playing the piano, but it never fails, every sunday he is there. He plays very well and it is much appreciated!!!

A Day at Work

I'm sure some of you don't know exactly what I do for the Army, yes I do a little more than play golf. I am a maintenance Warrant Officer, my field of expertise is weapons. To become a Warrant Officer you have to work in a certain field for at least 6 years in a supervisor position. I am supposedly the expert for weapons maintenance, and I can also run the motorpool. I basically can be the manager of a large car repair shop that also fixes weapons and radios. No, not radios that play music, the radios we use to speak to one another. Our motorpool here has about 135 vehicles, over 700 weapons and over 100 radio systems. I am the one to schedule all the quarterly and annual services, assign all the work to the mechanics (which right now is a headache because everything needs fixing), and manage over $1 million worth of parts and supplies. Oh, and as for weapons, only myself and one other guy is qualified to fix them so that gets added on to my workload. Have I ever done all this before? Nope... but I am learning very quickly!!! Actually my college degree ( not the golf one, the Business Management one) is really paying off right now.

Part of the motorpool...

Me in a sandstorm in the motorpool...

My office and little staff work in the little corner building

Hard at work!

Hey! Take that crap out of my golf cart!!!

The days go by very fast, we are so busy! The hardest part of my day is when the sun is up, it's been around 130 degrees with humidity. You can feel the heat through your boots when walking on asphalt, it's ridiculous! I can't wait for August to be over with!!!

I have been so busy since the day we arrived trying to learn this job as I go. I have never read so many Army regulations and management books in my life. I am so glad I was given this job though, the time here is going to fly by and I will have learned a lot.

Finally in Ramadi, Iraq!

I finally arrived to Ramadi on July 16th. It was such a long journey gettting here, it sounds funny, but I am REALLY glad to be here!!! Since I started this crazy deployment I have been living out of one duffel bag. I can't wait to finally unpack all of my bags, it's going to feel like Christmas, well a really bad Christmas since I'll be opening up stuff I had already had at one time, but you get the point.

So this is my first home here (B9). Yes, thats right, I came all the way to Iraq to get my very own trailer!!! Well I don't even get a full trailer, I get 1/4 of a trailer, I guess the housing market crashed over here too.

Here is the bathrooms/showers... more trailers

Yes we have palm trees! Lots of palm trees and sand, all thats missing is the water.

There is also a MWR (Morale, Welfare and Recreation) building that has computers we can use for the internet, phones, a room full of books, ping pong tables and a tv room. The gym is decent size and has every type of workout equipment you could ever want. The bad thing here is the food, it's really bad! Since I left Ft Hood this is the worst food we have had, but that will be good for those of us who need to diet!

I was here in Iraq in 2003 and volunteered for this deployment because I thought it would be interesting to see how it's changed from the first year of the war to the last year of it. Last time all we had was tents to sleep in and we had to find wood to build our own porta-potty's. Living in a 1/4 of a trailer is luxury compared to what I experienced before, and having the internet and phones now is awesome! We also have cable tv in our rooms which shows all the AFN (Armed Forces Network) channels. There is 7 channels: sports, news, prime time tv (House, CSI, etc), movies, and others. It's crazy being able to watch tv and get on the internet in my own room!!!