For those who don’t know me, I’m a data Marine stationed in Western Iraq. If you that don't know what data Marines do, that means most of my day is spent fucking with switches, routers, servers, cat 5 cable, etc. Yes, a lot of the time I am in an air conditioned office, which is much more than the grunts get, and I am appreciative and grateful for that, but it is my job to support them so they can accomplish their missions. I can be cynical and bitter about lots of things, but that’s just me. That’s not to say that I’m some emo bitch who mopes and whines all day. I can also be easily amused and I’m a total smartass with a dark, fucked up sense of humor, so be warned. I’ve been independent for as long as myself and anyone else in my family can remember. I’m a pretty easy going guy, but if you keep on pushing me, I will eventually lose it and push back, consequences be damned.
I was originally inspired to start this after reading the “My War” blog (and more specifically the “Men in Black” entry) last summer when I was in comm school. It was the first time I heard of an event that happened in Iraq where I could actually picture what it must have been like. It wasn’t third person and polished, it wasn’t designed to push an agenda. It was real. It was the first time I felt I was getting the whole story from Iraq. And although I have been inspired by CB and his ability to tell his story, this will not be some bastardized clone of what he made. My voice is neither more nor less important than anyone else’s. In my opinion, all war blogs are equal since they’re all observations from different points of view. This isn’t here to force anything down your throat. You won’t see me cheering and clamoring for another 10 years of US forces in Iraq, nor will I demand we all pull out now. I think a timetable is stupid. If we said we’d leave in a year, the insurgents would wait us out for a year, knowing that we’d be gone soon and they could act a fool then. This is only here to act as a half-assed time capsule of sorts - something to chronicle the shit that I saw and felt while I was in this god-forsaken desert. There is nothing else to it. My fiancé probably sees it as competition or something since she has a blog about me being gone, but whatever. I really haven’t decided what to do with this thing yet… I have a few posts on myspace that I’ll probably clone over here, but after that… who knows. With my job, it’s hard to go into detail about anything without hitting the coverall “COMMSEC” barrier. And I’d really rather not give Ali bin Haji any information on how to more efficiently fuck with our network out here, or any descriptions of how it’s laid out. With that being said, you wont hear much about work unless it’s really general… you’re more likely to get random shit that I notice while running all over the base on trouble calls. I’ve been debating on doing a pictorial blog as well, but it’ll probably be a mix of the two… pics one day and writing the next. Anyway, with that being said, I need to pass out.
