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 with one of the local kids in a nearby village.

While in Iraq, you get a one-week MWR trip to Qatar. On one of the trips we were allowed to take, this Qatari was selling camel rides. I didn't bother with it.

A McDonald's sign I saw at Ali Al Salim base in Kuwait.

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.

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 the Perfume Palace on Victory Base Complex in Baghdad. The story I heard was that this was once where Saddam and his boys kept their extra-curricular female companions. Now, it houses contractors.

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

House clearing training.

That's me flying in a UH60 between bases.

Here I am during a trip to Qayyarah to check on a water-pumping station.

A collection of rocket launchers. Hajji will often set these up, put a rocket in it, set up some sort of timer device, and then leave the area for the rocket to fire at a later time.

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.

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

Everyone going overseas, no matter your job, has to learn how to do room clearing. Here we are training a "four-man stack". The squad leader is taking up the rear.

my new rifle

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.