This mosque, I was told, was Saddam's personal mosque near the Al Faw palace. Now, it's located on Victory Base Complex.

This graffiti showed up on some walls in a local national parking lot not long before I left. I was told it is a memorial to locals who had worked for the USA and been killed.

The extension on the front of this HMMWV is used to set off IEDs prior to the HMMWV actually passing by. These have been used in Iraq for some time, so I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here.

This photo was making the email rounds while I was in Iraq. Reportedly, it was a wolf captured in or around Baghdad. I don't know that wolves are indigenous to Iraq, so it could have come from the zoo.

I was able to visit the Ah Shaw(sp) palace in Baghdad - one of Saddam's old haunts and now the home of MNC-I. These columns were huge.

This is a typical truck driven by private security. It's armored to some extent, and features a "gun bucket" in the back for a rear gunner's position.

Believe it or not, this is what they served for dinner one night. I think it was a case of a Turk not translating to English correctly.

Here's one of my soldiers manning the gunner's post. This was during one of our trips into Qayyarah.

We went through training on how to search a suspect and I got to play "suspect".

I would love to tell you what this mural says, but I never got it translated. I'm pretty sure it dates back to when the Iraqi Army and Air Force were still under Saddam. It was located in a building on our FOB.

This is a mosque located on our FOB. No American was alloowed inside - even if you were security (like me) or an American Muslim.

That's me flying in a UH60 between bases.

Believe it or not, it does rain in Iraq, as these poor soldiers found out when they tried to move this large forklift over some muddy ground.

QWBC, the FOB I was on, was an old Iraqi air force base and there were some of these old, beat fighters still lying around.

Me practicing shooting an AK47. As you can tell, it was a hot day. It was fun shooting the AK on full auto, but I still prefer the M4.

Here's what it looked like as we boarded the plane to fly to Iraq. I remember being both excited and nervous at the same time.

If you fly much in Iraq, then you've likely been on one of these - a C-17. They are much better to fly in than C-130s.

In this photo, I'm in the lower right pulling perimeter security during a short halt in training.

Here's a couple of the Iraqi Army soldiers we had living on our base. Not exactly Western standards, but they tried.