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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This is a UH60 refueling. I don't recall what base this is on. They kick the passengers off while they're doing this, which is when I got this picture.

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

That's me flying in a UH60 between bases.

Me with one of the local kids in a nearby village.

During training, we fired our weapons many times. Here I am getting in some practice firing three-round bursts for accuracy.

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

The FOB I was on was a former Iraqi Air Force base. As a result, we had a couple of these old Mig-21s laying around. The former commander of the base told me the more modern planes were buried - and then dug up for scrap by the locals.

This gentleman was herding sheep around our FOB. The area we were in was predominantly farm and sheep-herding country.

Here's my section training in house clearing.

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

This Qatari was selling opportunities to hold his falcon for $5. I didn't take him up on it.