Today I spent some time with two of my Iraqi friends whom I haven't seen in a long time. They have been laying low because of the threats of kidnapping and death threats against contractors working with the Americans. One of our mutual friends was kidnapped a few months ago on the road to Baghdad. He eventually was ransomed for 40,000 dollars.

My friends seem to have a very good handle on what we call the atmospherics. That is, the mood on the street and the general security situation. They told me that the security is good again for them and they feel confident to come back. Their confidence in the future is very high.

Next week for the first time in their lives they will travel outside Iraq. Its hard to the understate the significance of this trip for these two men, roughly my age, who until recently had no chance of leaving. This will be a business trip to Germany to buy some factory equipment for a new construction material factory that they are setting up. They'll be gone for a month, but I'll keep in touch by email. It seems every Iraqi I meet has a yahoo or hotmail email address. I asked them why they chose to build a particular type of factory and they told me that they saw the future would be all about building. They are general contractors now and want to also get in on manufacturing some of the building materials. They contacted suppliers in Germany and arranged for visas. The Germans were eager to work with them. Because of guys like this who have hope in the future of their country and the ambition to help create that future, I have confidence that Iraq will succeed as a nation.

We had lunch together and chatted about a wide variety of things. One of them said that if things are calm in Najaf and Karbala in the spring, he will bring his whole extended family for the pilgrimage called Arbaeen. If there is violence only the men will go to represent the family.

We also talked about some of the positive changes in the country since Saddam fell. For one thing, marriages are way up. One of the reasons is in the former regime a couple needed to get government permission to get married. This invariably involved a significant amount of "baksheesh" or bribes. Now people simply need the approval of the family and no longer have to pay off officials or have officials prevent them from getting married.

Another interesting thing we talked about was about Yassir Arafat. He said that many people in Iraq didn't like him because he had two faces. I wonder if it has something to do with Saddam's support of Arafat and paying the families of suicide bombers. It was surprising, since I thought Arafat had widespread support throughout the Arab world.

It seems that Iraqis are more independent minded that some people give them credit for. I saw a report last week that both Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya are quickly losing marketshare to two local Iraqi TV stations. Also note that most of the calls for Jihad are coming from non-Iraqis. Like a lot of people, they don't like to be told what to think, especially from people outside Iraq. This is a good thing.

The chow halls went all out yesterday. KBR apparently brought 200,000 pounds of turkey, 45,000 pounds of stuffing and 25 tons of potatoes into Iraq.

The chow hall decorations were crazy. There was the huge 4 foot long Mayflower boat made out of bread, dozens of carved melons and pineapples, big bread cornucopias and a three foot alligator whose skin was made of pinapples and its mouth was a watermelon.

The food was good and the whole day was fairly very relaxing. It was a good sign that we didn't have an attack on the holiday. It follows the lull that we are having. We haven't had anything fired at us in 3 days, the longest we've gone for a long while.

I called my family last night and talked to my wife, my sisters, my brother, my sister in law and my brother in law all gathered at my parent's house with 10 grandchildren running around (well, not the babies). For once I think it was actually colder here than in New England.

Today was a cool blustery day, which we started early with 6AM sandbagging detail. Nothing really exciting. I saw the two Iraqi kids at physical therapy. They had a translator with them today so they were a bit more talkative. The girl actually knows quite a bit of English, but is sometime shy about using it. I spent the rest of the day preparing for and going to meetings. Dinner tonight was a little less appetizing. A corn dog, fries which I slathered with melted cheese and chili, and some tomatoes. A new thing that they are doing in our chow hall is making milkshakes. One of the guys has a few blenders next to the ice cream station where he spends a couple hours at each night making mostly strawberry shakes.

We all recently had our blood drawn for G6PD deficiency testing. We have been taking chloroquine since April for Malaria prophylaxis. We need to take primaquine at the end of the mosquito season but people with a certain enzyme deficiency can't take it because it may cause hemolytic anemia. Testing everyone in theater has proved to be a logistic challenge to say the least. The Air Force was smart and tested everyone before they deployed, the Army is doing it now with the new troops coming in, but has to catch up with us.

I broke out my Arabic CD again. The classes are now held on the other side of post at a very inconvenient time. I do want to start going again if I can fit it in.

All the chow halls are busily preparing for Thanksgiving tomorrow. Each one tries to outdo the other in food and decorations. The base commander will award one of them the top DFAC (Dining Facility) award.

Some of the units for OIF 3 have already arrived in theater. Several units from our state are on the ground. We've actually met with some of our replacements, even though we aren't leaving for a while. Its a good feeling to know that we'll be leaving soon enough. Seeing the replacements makes it more tangible. Part of the transition is trying to transfer the knowledge of everything you've learned over the last year to the incoming unit. It takes a lot of organization and reflection on what went well and what didn't. It prevents the new unit from making the same mistakes and lets them build on our successes. For the maneuver units this is essential. The enemy invariably tests the resolve of new units in an area. We can't give them any slack.

Our push against the insurgents continued in N. Babil province today. This area has been a problem for a while and some of the guys from Fallujah ended up here. Instead of letting them regroup and reconstituted, the idea is to keep them off balance. The goal is to allow the elections at the end of January to go on. There are other hotspots and the assassinations of government officials and candidates will continue in an effort to influence who makes it into office.

There are reports that Moqtada Al-Sadr is getting very frustrated with his henchmen. While he gives the nice political face to his organization, he is furious that his orders to assassinate Allawi and other officials have come to nothing. We may see some more activity from him.

Theater-wide we are continuing to see short-term positive effects resulting from the Fallujah operation. Attacks are down significantly, and those that do occur are not causing as many casualties.

Clearing operations continue in Fallujah. Attacks are down across theater by at least 50% compared to last week. The danger exists that, as insurgents sense the situation slipping away from them, they will get increasingly outrageous in their tactics. With two months until the election it will be a rough ride.

I've been following two stories out of Fallujah. The first is the unfortunate incident with the Marine shooting the injured insurgent in the mosque, caught on film. The reaction to the incident has been bordering on hysterical. In my opinion the Marine acted in accordance with the situation as he saw it. Keep in mind several incidents that day gave proof that even dead bodies were potentially dangerous. A booby trapped body injured 5 marines and killed one and a dying insurgent reportedly pulled out a grenade as his final act. Again the tactics of the insurgents dare us to become barbarians. One gray situation becomes an international incident and a propaganda coup. More disturbing is that he may have delayed action because he felt he needed to verbally justify his actions to the news crew.

Al Jazeera showed the clip all day long interviewing people on the street whipped up into a frenzy. One guy said that this proved the Americans behavior in Fallujah was just as bad as those decapitating innocent civilians and the idiots who killed Margaret Hassan. Luckily most Iraqis know better.

The second story, again promulgated by an eager media is that of a humanitarian emergency in Fallujah. There was a story that US troops blocked a Red Crescent convoy was blocked from entering the city by US troops. The story had to be refuted by the Red Crescent itself before anyone believed it wasn't true. The ministry of health made extensive plans to take care of displaced civilians, setting up food distribution and medical support. Throughout the operation the main hospital was taking patients and two clinics stayed open in the city. The fact is that most civilians left the city for outlying areas.

The moral of the story is that mayhem and misery trump progress in the news, even if it has to be made up. The Fallujah operation will be portrayed as a dismal failure, responsible for spreading the insurgents into the far corners of Iraq to cause mischief. We will have to wait and see how this effects the insurgency but I have to think removing over 2000 insurgents and disrupting a major command and control center can't be all bad.

Here's some pictures from my trip to Baghdad earlier this week. The first picture is a busy street in Baghdad on the east side of the Tigris river. Its amazing how many satellite dishes are around, even in the poorest areas. I think this may be the edge of Sadr City (AlThawra).



This next picture is of the former Grand Saddam Mosque, now called the Al-Rahman (The Merciful) Mosque. Still under construction it was to be the largest mosque in the world when completed with 64 domes and 20 stories tall able to hold 30,000 worshippers. Saddam went on a Mosque building spree after the Gulf War. He wanted a grand mosque named after him in every one of the provinces. He also reportedly donated 25+ pints of his own blood for the purpose of writing the whole Koran with it. This is housed in the Mother of All Battles Mosque in Baghdad. What a nut!



The last picture, though hard to make out is a group of people, mostly children, in a field with a flock of sheep in the farmland outside of Baghdad. Everyone in the group waved to our helicopter as we passed over.

My soccer injury has wasted a lot of my time in the past week. On the plus side I did get a helicopter ride down to the International Zone in Baghdad to visit the hospital.

The ride to Baghdad was good for sight seeing. The fields are now green from the fall rains. We came in to the International Zone from the east, flying over Sadr City and the parts of Baghdad lining the east bank of the Tigris. Crossing the Tigris we passed low over the Al-Rashid hotel and the Iraqi government offices.

We landed at the helipad and some guys from Brigade picked us up in a white chevy Tahoe. Last time I walked but it was a bit too far with crutches. I had a quick visit to the PT department at Ibn Sina Hospital where many of the car bomb victims go. Saddam even had a hernia operation there a few months ago. Now its manned by an Army hospital unit.

Rushing back to the helipad in the back of a humvee ambulance we managed to hitch a ride with, we arrived just in time for an afternoon ride back to our base. We flew west out of the IZ over the Baghdad Zoo, now devoid of animals. To our north were two large unfinished mosques that Saddam was building, The Saddam Mosque and the Mother of All Battles Mosque. We made a stop at another base in the Baghdad area and picked up a few more people, then flew back out over the date groves and fields to our base.

We've continued to get rocket and mortar attacks on base. In fact yesterday I woke up to a couple of loud thuds followed by the alarm siren.

Tonight is one of the most important dates during Ramadan - The night of destiny also called the night of power. The actual date seems to be different for Sunni and Shi'ia here. Usually on the 27th day of Ramadan Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel (Jabril) started to reveal the Quran to Mohammed. On the night of destiny many Moslems pray all night "one night worth a thousand months". It is also unfortunately another excuse for some to do mischief. For us this was no exception tonight. Illumination flares were lighting up the area north of our base to help troops in contact. We also had a number of mortar rounds come in an injure some of our third country national workers. Throughout the country we've had a spike in attacks.

Major combat in Fallujah should be wrapped up within 72 hours, probably less.

Today we spent time watching coverage on Yassir Arafat's death and reactions around the world.

The Fallujah operation seems to be going as planned. Its a messy, dirty business. We've been receiving casualties for the last few days. Soon the civil affairs teams will be moving into Fallujah to help with restoring public services as the civilians return home. Huge amounts of reconstruction money has been allocated for reconstruction.

The elimination of a safe harbor for the insurgents in Fallujah will not be the end of the insurgency, but the momentum of success can bring a life of its own. The most important element is that the Iraqis gain confidence in their leaders and security forces. I think things are moving in the right direction.

Today we had a higher level of attacks in other areas throughout the theater as a reaction to Fallujah. We expected this and will deal with the situations as they arise or intelligence surfaces.

When I went for PT today I met two Iraqi children who come to the base twice a week for physical therapy. The children are a brother and sister who were injured in a mortar attack. The little girl is in a wheel chair and can't use her legs. Her brother had the bones of his leg fused after the injury and is in need of additional surgery. The kids were very happy to be there. I said hello and exercised my stock Arabic phrases. They both teased me because I told them I hurt my knee playing "Toba" (Soccer). While I was lying on my back getting my knee iced they both came by and tickled my feet.

On my way out I grabbed some candy from a box that said "candy for our patients-take more if we made you cry".

I've been hobbling around today. Yesterday I got a knee injury during our soccer tournament. The physical therapist thinks it is fairly serious but can be treated here. As a result I get to go to physical therapy every morning. Our soccer schedule was a little too ambitious. The tournament was crammed into 4 days. It turned out that yesterday we had to play 3 games, 2 back to back. We were all beat up the end, I couldn't walk(or at least dance a jig), we dropped 3 people off at the clinic and this morning the clinic saw 8 people from various teams. I guess if our biggest problems in Iraq are soccer injuries, we'll be lucky. The Iraqi guys who got me cleats Saturday were amused to see me with a knee brace.

In Fallujah Operation Phantom Fury has kicked off. Once again the Iraqi Army's best units are involved, specifically 36 Commando. Today they seized Fallujah General Hospital, which was used to great effect for propaganda purposes in April. The Marines and US Army troops have started to move in. We have been seeing the big Marine CASEVAC helicopters and Army Blackhawk Medevac choppers coming into the hospital here. Its always a sobering thing when the big gray twin rotor choppers pass low overhead as they approach the hospital LZ. You know that your wounded comrades are in that thing. I always say a prayer for them.

Today one of our contractors who I haven't seen in a long time stopped by. He has been staying away for a while because of threats against people working with us. He was on post to pick up one of our other contractor's son who was wounded in a mortar attack. This little boy was lucky, he got some shrapnel in his flank, was medevaced here and spent a week in the hospital. His neighbor, another child, was killed in the attack. The boy was very cute and seemed very happy to be going home. We gave him a few little gifts before he left.

I just came back from a whirlwind aerial tour of Northern Iraq. I was up with the Stryker Brigade near Mosul on a mission yesterday and today. I caught a medevac flight up there after failing once again to find a space on the Sherpa. I came back on a Cav Blackhawk.

My return flight involved 6 stops, 2 refuels and hundreds of miles from Mosul to the outskirts of Baghdad plus a few backtracks. I really enjoy the helicopter rides, zipping over the countryside with people waving and sheep and birds scattering beneath us. The terrain up north is very different than the flat green plains of the Tigris valley. Heading north there is an east-west chain of hills a couple hundred feet high that rise up out of the flat desert. Further north near Mosul the land is hilly and very rocky. The Tigris winds through the city with lush vegetation on both sides.

On the way up we pulled some high G turns when the pilot thought he saw someone planting an IEDs and circled to investigate.

The FOB I visited was very isolated, really in the middle of nowhere. The good thing about the place is that it is so quiet. They rarely get attacked because of their remote location. The food was better than at my base. They have the same contractor as the Cav in Baghdad complete with the milkshakes to go.

On the way south from Tikrit, another of my stops, we saw huge numbers of sheep. In one location it looked like dozens of shepherd had gathered in one place with their tents, vehicles and probably 5000 sheep. I even saw a small herd of camels of three varieties (brown, black and white).

Last night I walked from the trailer I was staying to the MWR tent to send an email and watch the beginning of the election coverage. I got back to base around 10:30 and have been watching the TV throughout the day. Kerry is scheduled to give a concession speech around 9pm our time. I'm glad its over and I'm happy with the result.

My Medevac flight north


Hills north of Tikrit


City of Mosul

I just got back from a mission with the Marines in the Western Desert. It was interesting to see another part of the country. We flew less than 100 feet off the ground. Near our base we flew over big vineyards with the grapes climbing on a grid of lines attached to poles about 5 feet high. Away from the Tigris floodplain, there was dry scrub. I saw many trench wells surrounded by very green plots of corn and even rice.

We were lucky to fly over Lake Tharthar, the largest body of water in Iraq. Tharthar was created by flooding a large basin containing a much smaller salt lake with flood waters from the Tigris River. When we were out over the lake, all we could see in every direction was water. I could have been flying over the North Atlantic, the scene was the same.

West of Tharthar, the land had more relief than the plains of the east. There were deeply carved wadis and flat topped plateaus. Some of the cliffs were a couple hundred feet high. We crossed the Euphrates river as we flew west . It was a green ribbon cutting through the brown desert.

Near an old Iraqi base, the perimeter was lined with tank revetments and trench fighting positions cut into the desert floor.

Fallujah looms large in all our minds, it will be a hard fight however the outcome is sure. Luckily a majority of the civilians have left the city. Things have stepped up here with more harassing mortar and rocket fire today on our base. When major operations start in Fallujah, we can expect flareups in hotspots around the country and pile on by different groups along our supply routes. Fallujah will likely take weeks as the ground commanders calibrate their offensive.

On a different note, I was interviewed on National Public Radio on Thursday last week about my nature observations in Iraq. While I was out West the interview aired in the states. I had a lot of positive comments from people who appreciated seeing Iraq from a different perspective.

Surf's up in Iraq - Western shore of Lake Tharthar


Trench Well in the desert


Crossing the Euphrates

There's a paper out today in the British medical journal The Lancet titled "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion in Iraq:cluster sample survey". This paper that estimates 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq since the invasion has been getting wide play in the media and pile on play on anti-war websites.

I've read the paper and offer my opinion on the papers methodology and conclusions.

As my Epidemiology professor was fond of saying. In statistics you can never know the truth, you can only approximate it. The validity of that approximation is dependent on the quality of your data.

I'll leave it to others to analyzed the statistical specifics but I wanted to bring up the point that the much touted 100,000 deaths figure is not set in stone, even to the authors. For example a measure of the certainty is seen in the gigantic confidence interval in the excess death rate (8000-194000). In other words based on their data there is a 95% chance that the range of excess deaths could be as low as 8000 and as high as 194000.

A problem with estimating violent deaths on a country wide basis in Iraq is that violence is very focal, a neighborhood may suffer a disastrous event such as a major car bomb. If a neighborhood like this is included in the survey, representing virtually none of the population, the mortality estimates will be skewed towards being too high. Too me their sampling methodology is not as robust as it needs to be, I'm not sure given the situation there is one that could be. The numbers also fail my first statistical test, the believability test. When the statistics say something that doesn't seem right, its a good idea to look closely at the results. Sometimes a result may be correct, but chance in statistics can be a dangerous thing. Chance alone can produce spurious associations like linking a stock price to the grape harvest in Chile.

According to their data, if Fallujah is excluded as an extreme statistical outlier approximately 90000 of the excess deaths were caused by violence. This would be 6000 people a month for the last 15 months. I just don't see this magnitude of civilian deaths on the ground.

I don't knock attempting to quantify the health effects of the conflict. The war is a a very messy business, everyone suffers. I would agree with the study that infant mortality, at least in some areas went up because women stayed at home to have their babies because of security concerns. Violence also has claimed thousands of civilians. There is no doubt that violent deaths have increased dramatically in some areas. The authors did what they could with the data. Here is a great statement of the obvious from the paper "In this case, the lack of precision [of the study] does not hinder the clear identification of a major public health problem in Iraq - violence" - you don't say!

The authors to their credit seemed fairly rigorous in their statistics and appropriately reported their wide confidence intervals and noted the lack of precision in their data. I cannot ascribe pure motives to the press reports. First many fringe element websites as well as CNN et al. have latched onto the 100,000 number as straight fact and attributed all these deaths directly to the coalition, forgetting the Zarqawis of the world who care nothing about wholesale slaughter. There is also the spurious argument that because only a few thousand people died a year because of Saddam's regime and more people are dying now this somehow highlights the immorality of the entire operation. Very simplistic, flawed logic and very short term thinking.

The most direct route to improved health in Iraq is the quick demise of several thousand individuals responsible for the majority of the deaths of civilians. I reject the argument that coalition military action is the primary public health problem in Iraq.

The sky in the east is orange, the sun will be up in a few minutes. I had the last glimpse of the lunar eclipse about 10 minutes ago as the moon faded into the lightening sky. We were lucky here in most of Iraq, totality came at 5:23 AM, before sunrise.

I woke up at 4:30 and went outside to see a dark bite out of the top of the moon. Over the next hour the shadow progressed, revealing a dark reddish-orange moon with an ever decreasing bright crescent until totality came.

The Blood Moon seems to be auspicious for the Red Sox at least, in the 8th inning they are up. Let it not be so for the insurgents but instead one of impending doom.

Today was an earlier than usual morning for me. I woke up at 3:30 in order to get to the flightline to try to get a seat on a plane for a mission. By 6 AM it was obvious that I was going nowhere. We will have to put in a request and get me officially manifested. Sometimes Space-A works, often it doesn't.

My roommate gave me a 9mm to carry, since its much easier to lug around. This is a good idea in the Green Zone because they have started restricting long guns from certain areas. I suspect this stems from the fact that very few senior officers carry and M-4 or an M-16. Keeping the riff-raff out. Where I'm going I felt much more comfortable carrying my M-16 and over 200 rounds as opposed to a 9mm pistol and 30 rounds.

The plane flying to where I'm going is a small flying box called a Sherpa. They fly less than 100 feet off the ground to avoid enemy fire. By the time you hear the Sherpa it has passed over. An unfortunate side effect is that the risk of bird strike is high and every pilot in theater has hit at least one flock.

On another front, National Public Radio would like to do a story about my birdwatching antics here in Iraq. I talked to the producer a few days ago and we had a nice chat. I have to arrange a good time to get interviewed. Hopefully people can hear that despite the images of chaos and destruction, one can find both peace and beauty here if you look.

In the PX this evening my roommate and I went to pick up prizes for tomorrow's Halloween Bingo. We ate diner at Burger King, the first time I've eaten there since it opened. Some of our guys seem to have reverted to an all fast food diet consisting of Burger King and Pizza Hut commodities. Paper Burger King bags and Pizza Hut boxes fill up many a garbage can around here.

In the checkout line at the PX we met an Australian doctor working in the hospital. She and I chatted about some of the same places in Indonesia where we both had visited.

I'm jealous of my sister. She is in Thailand visiting relatives. Eat some nice weird fruit for me and try some of the roasted termites please. Give some to Mr. Baby too.

We are getting ready for the fight in Fallujah. The timeline is classified but everyone including the insurgents know its coming. It will be a symbolic fight for them and us. A successful outcome is needed to allow elections in the region.

Other than harassing fire we are fairly quiet in our area. A couple of rockets came in today.

I heard of an unfortunate thing that happened this morning. A civilian contractor in his 60's suddenly died while waiting to go home. The Air Force medics tried to use the AED to shock him but his heart wouldn't get going again.

I'm starting to think more about getting back home and getting back to my job. I still won't leave until next year but we have more days behind us than in front. This week my colleagues are attending an annual scientific meeting which we usually attend together and present some of our research findings from the last year. Next month they will be in Miami at the Tropical Medicine meeting....I'll really miss that. It is by far the most interesting meeting I go to. The get together before the meeting has the absolutely best food and drink. I also missed the Trop Med meeting last year because of my mobilization.

At home my wife is expecting our 5th child this spring. Thankfully, I'll be home for the baby. She is doing a fantastic job holding everything together, but it is very hard sometimes. Our friends and family have been very supportive and help a great deal with babysitting, food, cleaning the house, yardword and just being there. I couldn't be doing my job here without their help.

I am sore. The Army 10 Miler went well. I managed to run it in around 90 minutes. The race was well attended with people coming in from some of the outlying FOBs and we even had a few Brits and Aussies.

At the 3 1/2 mile mark we had our first turn around. As I approached the turn the first of the runners came past me running the other way. Way out in front of everyone was a guy wearing a blue shirt with a large Superman symbol on his chest. He was running so fast I first thought he was on a relay team, I was sure he'd fade. He never slowed down, Superman won the whole thing, 10 miles in 56 minutes.

It was a good diversion for a few hours.

The turn-in in Sadr City is winding down and will soon enter the next phase, verification of disarmament by going house to house. Some of the yahoos tried to get a bit more money for removing the IEDs but no dice. In the last few days truckloads of weapons were being turned in. I think the total for anti-tank mines is around 9000, thousands of RPG rounds, mortar tubes and rounds. I've seen the list and it is huge. We know not all the weapons are gone but it is significant progress. After verification a huge public works program will try to rapidly improve the infrastructure and provide jobs to the locals. Unfortunately I have seen little positive in the press about it.

The idiots who kidnapped the CARE director on her way to work have managed to accomplish something. They have somehow got Al Jazeera to criticize them. They had a story in which insurgent leaders in Fallujah condemned the kidnapping as unjustified. I hope things turn out well for her. To date all female hostages have been released but I don't put it past them to break tradition.

The pace of work is picking up. We need to maintain operations while preparing to transition things to our replacing unit. The clinic is busy with routine things like orthopedic injuries and respiratory infections. I will hopefully leave my base a few more times in the coming months on some missions. I enjoy seeing the different parts of what's going on in the country. I'd love to get up into the north. Some of our guys drove up to the Turkish border accompanied by the Iraqi National Guard. They told me the mountains and the rivers were beautiful, a completely different landscape than we have around here.

We are back to wearing all our gear (helmet, Body Armor) when we are outside. Full battle rattle. We have been getting an increased amount of mortars and rockets coming in so the base commander thought it was a good idea.

The insurgents have been for the most part laying very low. We all expect some sort of push by them before Ramadan is over. Our operations are keeping them off balance, though they will get their shots in when they can, like the suicide bombers in the international zone.

Between now and the elections at the end of January is a pivotal period for the country. If we can maintain the momentum, we can tip the balance in the right direction.

At home in the US, the leaves have turned and are falling off the trees, my wonderful wife carries on taking care of our four children. I wish I could be with them. A few days ago the baby pulled herself up and stood for the first time. The other three children clapped and cheered. They insisted that my wife take a picture of all of them together. Its very hard missing things like that but the work we are doing here is important and I don't regret coming here.

Its CQ time again. I get to stay up all night and with my trusty CQ runners, make sure the place doesn't burn down, answer any calls during the night, make sure the generator doesn't run out of fuel, and take people who need to catch flights out down to the flightline.

We had a nice dust storm today when a cold front came through. Sand blowing, covering everything with a nice coat of light brown dust.

Our local guys have returned, there had been some specific threats against workers at the beginning of Ramadan. They are all fasting for Ramadan, as is one of our soldiers who is Muslim. During Ramadan, observant Muslims are supposed to read the entire Koran, which is split up into 30 parts, one to be read each day. There are several special days during Ramadan, some are exclusively observed by the Shi'ia and others like the night of power are recognized by all. The night of power is night they believe the Koran was revealed to Mohammed. The actual night itself is said to be hidden to encourage observance throughout the month however it is often observed on the 27th night.

Ramadan for us is considered a higher risk time because some insurgents see it as an auspicious time for attack. The Koran says the night of power is "better than a thousand months" meaning acts of charity, prayer, etc gain a better than at other times. Some also extend this to "martyrdom". We expect the risk of suicide bombers to be very high around this time at the end of Ramadan.

The push is on to get all the absentee ballots back home. Everyone was encouraged to register and request an absentee ballot and was given every opportunity to do so. I sent mine off in the second week of October. In the chow hall the post office has a notice that they will be flying all absentee ballots overnight express until November 1st. Even if someone didn't get a ballot from their district they have blank emergency ballots that can be filled out and sent in.

All the Red Sox and Yankees fans woke up at 3 AM this morning to watch the 7th game in the series. There were a lot of happy Red Sox fans by the time I got up because of a Red Alert. One of our subordinate units is from Massachusetts and there was undoubtedly mayhem in the clinic this morning.

Yesterday was a pretty relaxing day for me. I slept late and then read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot a collection of short stories revolving around his 3 laws of robotics. I finished that book in a day. In contrast, I've been slowly digesting another book that is considerably denser called Nabokov's Blues. It examines the second passion of literary giant Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita fame. He was a very serious amateur lepidopterist specializing in a group of small butterflies referred to collectively as the Blues. I remember visiting the insect collections at Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) several times and seeing a small framed photo of Nabokov sorting butterflies over one of the benches where he worked in the 1940's. Its interesting putting more context in that photo and learning about his contributions to butterfly systematics.

Our Jamaican soldiers, of which we have quite a few, have been cooking some good food. One of the guys came back from leave with all sorts of goodies. We had jerk chicken on Friday along with corn meal dumplings and fried plantain, I had some little fruit in the lychee family that somewhat resembled longan which they called guinep. Today they cooked salt fish and akee Jamaica's national dish.

As expected, there has been an increase in attacks since Ramadan started. These attacks continue to be ineffective potshots on our base. Today we had 3 Red Alerts, all the rounds landed outside the wire. To me this means that they are having trouble getting close enough to the fence because of our patrols.

The amounts of weaponry turned over to the police in Sadr City is astounding. We are talking about hundreds of mortar tubes, thousands of mortar rounds and antipersonnel mines and a gigantic array of everytype of other weapon you can imagine from AK-47s to RPGs up to a 500 pound bombs, hundreds of 155mm artillery rounds and hundreds of thousands of rounds of rifle ammo. At first I was skeptical because Sadr has pulled this trick before, using it as an opportunity to rearm. In the past turn-ins we only got a few hundred inoperable old rifles, this time we are getting far more than expected. Its proved so effective that the amnesty program and weapons buy back is likely to be expanded to other parts of Iraq. This is another sign that the locals are sick of the destruction and willing to help clean up the problem.

There has been a theater wide lull in enemy activity for the past week. Attacks are significantly below norms. The conventional wisdom is that there will be a surge during Ramadan as happened last year. Ramadan starts tomorrow.

The insurgents see Ramadan as an all or nothing chance to prove that the Iraqis and coalition cannot maintain security. They will go all out because they know that time is not on their side.
The winter rains will limit their freedom of movement and they know if they can't bring massive destabilization and, more importantly, massive doubt in world public opinion they will fail. If they fail, the momentum of the government and the new security forces coming on line may leave them fatally weakened. We have started an major offensive of our own leading up to Ramadan to blunt their efforts.

Ramadan also happens occur at the same time as the US elections and the start of voter registration in Iraq.

In our neighborhood the bad boys have not been successful in their attacks, it seems that they are having difficulty even getting shots over the wire. The maneuver elements have been sweeping up a large number of weapons caches which appears to be putting a serious dent in the bad guys supplies. To me just the fact we are finding the caches is a positive sign. It means the locals are now more willing to tell us where they are. My guess is like in Samarra and Fallujah they see the insurgency as only affecting them negatively and are acting accordingly.

Today two suicide bombers got into the International Zone for the first time, places that I walked by less than a week ago. It was not totally unexpected. One was the Bazaar area and the other was the Green Zone Cafe. Both areas were off limits to US personnel since a bomb was found at the Cafe by a sniffer dog on October 5.

On our camp, the amenities keep coming. This week both Burger King and Pizza Hut opened on post. The place was swarmed. Personally my favorite place to eat is the Iraqi National Guard chow hall, which is only open for lunch. Last week I had lamb, hummus and Iraqi flatbread along with some excellent Basmati rice cooked by some of the Indian KBR workers. Very few US soldiers eat there.

The weather has been getting milder. Today it only got to 97 degrees. The mornings are in the high sixties, which is perfect. There are a lot more clouds these days. During the Summer there were no clouds for weeks at a time.

This evening we pulled the tables and chairs out on our patio and played bingo with some people from the Air Force.