Welcome to my blog. This blog will be my unofficial record of Army life north of Baghdad. It may appear that I am often writing in vague generalities on this blog, and that will probably be a fairly accurate assessment. I will not discuss details of any military operations so as not to jeopardize the lives of US soldiers or our allies. I will not hesitate to offer my own opinions and comments on matters that are already in the open press.

I am just at the beginning stages of this deployment to Iraq. For the next week or so, I will be training/processing at Ft. Leavenworth, KS, and Ft. Benning, GA, before heading overseas. Once I am on the ground in Iraq, I will be stationed north of Baghdad at FOB Speicher (near Tikrit), and my duties will take me to various locations around Iraq.

I am an Army Reserve Major who was once an Active Component officer. I was mobilized a couple of years ago after a break in service, and this will be my first deployment for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

So that my viewpoint is clear as I write this blog, I have been and still am a strong supporter of the US military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I believe that we each owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to the service men and women who are serving in these two countries, many of them multiple times. These military men and women who are patrolling the streets and towns of Iraq and Afghanistan are the ultimate professionals who are making split second life and death decisions on a daily basis. They are shouldering responsibilities at a level that their peers could never imagine, and they are accomplishing their missions with the full knowledge that the only time that they will receive attention for what they are doing is if or when they make a mistake.

Soldiers today are obviously not just warriors. They are police officers, they are diplomats, they are negotiators, they are counselors, they are construction workers, they are city managers, and they are cultuural experts. These are company commanders and platoon leaders and sergeants and privates. While they are rebuilding towns and neighborhoods, they have to be prepared at a moment's notice to make those life and death decisions as they resume their roles as soldiers. I believe that it is important that people not lose site of what their military is doing.

With that being said, the pace of this blog will pick up a bit once I am in country. I hope to be able to relay a little bit of life in Iraq back to my friends and family (and anyone else) as time and mission permit.