War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

Ever wonder what it's like for a soldier in Iraq, well forget what you've seen on TV. Actually being deployed is alot different that watching soldiers driving down streets on TV. I hope that through this site you can get a feel for what it's really like being told to leave your family and your life behind to enter a dangerous war torn area, perhaps never to return.

The site is still under construction, so expect many changes in the comming months.

The journal is up, and pictures are comming.

   About 6 months before being deployed I bought a new laptop so assist me in my chosen career path as Network Technician, deciding to bring it with me on my Deployment was one of the best decisions I ever made.

    There were many times I think it's what kept me sane overseas.  First of all it allowed me to keep in touch through email with my family at home.  Second, through the internet I was able to at least look back at the normal world I left behind (the Army had amazing internet access for war time).  Third I was able to bring all my music with me as MP3's and the DVD player helped us all pass the time as the laptop worked as a portable theater.

    But most importantly it allowed me an easy way to type up my thoughts in a journal.  Getting my thoughts out of my head and onto someplace I could read them later got alot of thoughts and worries out of my head.  Now that I'm home I have every thing I transcribed from that time in my life at my fingertips for easy distribution.  If I had written a journal rather than typed you wouldn't be reading this right now.  It's hard enough writing a website to host a journal but to have to convert enough written info to fill 82+ typed pages of info would have been more than I wanted to take on.

    I feel it's necessary to notify you before hand that when the journal was being written it was a means for me to lay to rest the thoughts running through my mind and as such it may be a bit disjointed at times and rather outspoken.  Bear in mind that the life lived over there is completely different from the life lived over here, there's no way to transfer the feelings of a situation like that to you.  Try to imagine the most trying and difficult times in your life and magnify that a thousand-fold and you still wouldn't come close to knowing the intensity of being deployed for war thousands of miles from home.  Since the times over there were so hard on us you'll notice some very un-military thinking and behavior from me and the rest of the detachment, especially if you're in the military.  All I can say to those who criticize our relaxed attitude towards authority is that you can't judge unless you were there; in the end we were one of the most liked detachments by all of the units we got attached to.

    There are a few different ways to go about reading the journal, I recommend you click on "Calendar" at the left to get a feel for when things happened in relation to news stories and pictures I took at the time.  You can also start at the first entry and just click next to jump to the next entry in succession, clicking index will take you to the calendar if you need to get your bearings.  Or you can read the whole thing at once, on giant page copied directly from MS word to the net.  There is also two tables of contents, one is for the journal entries and one is the web page table of contents.  If you're just skimming the site and don't have alot of time to spend just rear this first story of the beginning of the Iraq war, it gives a good feel of how the conflict started.

    I retain copyright for all information contained in this web site, due to the nature of the content here please read the copyright information page before copying or using anything off this site.  

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