The Diggs

Okay, Okay, Okay. Enough already. I shaved off the abomination. Jane really liked this picture from the last post, but said the stache ruined it, so I shaved and took another one, just for her.........and Jeri........and the ten other people that told me how hideous I look. The point of the "deployment stache" is that you aren't around anybody you are trying to impress with your good looks, so might as well grow it out and have some fun (and fun I had). After I shaved it I even had one of my female soldiers tell me that she was really happy I shaved it. I know what to do now if I ever want to get people's attention.

So this is a post about where I live. I know many are curious to see where I live and work, and what Iraq looks like. Well, I can't show a lot of my base for security reasons, but I can show some of it. These pictures are where I work on my golf skills. The one on the left is right beside my office (you can see my A/C unit sticking out of the wall). It is where I work on my short game, and above is our driving range for the long game. Some guy in Pennsylvania sends us boxes upon boxes of golf balls. The field we hit them into has not been cleared by the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team so we don't dare go get the balls for fear of stepping on a land mine from the Saddam era, but we still have about 10 boxes of balls left, so we should be good for a while. So far none of the balls have set off a mine, but we keep hoping for the million dollar shot.

This is Joe Camel(spider). He is my pet. He lives right outside my office by my golf trap. He is not the largest camel spider I have seen, but he is about as long as my index finger. This is a nice shot of him eating a beetle, like the ones you see in the movie, "The Mummy." There are beetles everywhere. We also have a lot of scorpions, and killed one the other day that was five inches long. One guy has seen a desert viper, but they must be rare around here because he is the only one. Other fine wildlife we have here are sand fleas. They bite like mosquitos, but are smaller and harder to see. My room has been infested since I have been here, and I have at least ten bites at all times. Jane tried to send me a flea collar to wear (seriously), but the post office wouldn't let her send it as it is poison.

Here is yet another wildlife story. We have a lot of desert foxes/coyotes here on post. I don't know exactly what they are, but they are a little bigger than foxes and a little smaller than coyotes. Anyway, I have had to stop running at night because they have been biting some soldiers while they are running, who then have to get the rabies shots, which are really painful I hear. So I'm flying a mission the other day, and over the radio we hear a call for the MEDEVAC helicopters to come pick up a wounded soldier. Being attack pilots we listen to these calls carefully to find out if if there is anything we can do (like go kill the bad guys who wounded our soldier). Well we heard that the soldier was suffering from dog bites and gunshot wounds to the feet. We put two and two together, and it was later confirmed that he had been attacked by the wild dogs and pulled his pistol (we all carry loaded weapons over here with us at all times), and while shooting the dogs, he shot himself in the foot. OUCH! I now run at sunrise or sunset and have my pistol in hand so I can shoot the dogs BEFORE they get to my feet.

So there is my neighborhood. LA10, or "Living Area 10." We live in aluminum trailers that are surrounded by concrete "T-walls" to protect us from the rocket attacks. We pretty much live underneath the Airfield's traffic pattern so we have helicopters and airplanes flying over us 24/7. Earplugs usually do the trick when trying to get some sleep.

This one is mine (97C). Each trailer has three rooms and each room has two soldiers assigned. Sometimes it is hard to sleep when your roomie and you are on different schedules, but again, earplugs help. I have about a 2 minute walk to the shower trailer and about 3 minute walk to the restroom trailer. The bus stop is also only about 2 minutes away, and I can walk to work in about 15.

My sancuary. Actually it is my sand flea torture chamber. Anyway, this is my bed and wall locker with the broken door. Next to my wall locker is my roomie's facing his bed on the other side. My wall locker is so busted up that if it weren't for his pinning mine up against the wall it would fold sideways, but what do you expect from particle board in a war zone?

Here is the office. On my desk to the left you may notice a boxed American flag with a kid's picture glued to it. That it Luke Stacey telling me to "Stay Tough." Andrew and Lauren Stacey (friends from BYU) sent me a package with the picture of their son Luke, which inspires me everyday to work hard and stay tough. The computers above are where the bulk of our mission planning takes place. We receive our missions electronically and then dissect them and plan all the details on these computers. Below is our briefing desk where we hold our mission briefs everyday before our missions. Sometimes we get fancy and use the projector screen, but usually we just sit around the table and brief. It is also a good table for a game of cards, and it even has the markings on it to play craps, although that has only been used once to my knowledge.

To the right is the common room at our Company Tactical Operations Center (TOC). The flat screen TV is where we video conference with CIA agents about intel for our next mission, and get our real time satellite imagery of target locations..........seriously you guys watch way too much TV if you fell for that one. That is where we watch football games on Armed Forces Network (AFN), and movies sometimes.

Well, that about wraps up a lot of the stuff I can show you. There are some other places, but I don't have pictures of them yet, so I'll keep you posted.