I appreciate all the support I received from all around the world during my deployment, and I thank those of you who still support me as I work my way back into civilian life later this summer.

Please keep those who are still deployed in your minds.

Take care,
Brad

The first is illustrated in this photo. In 2003, the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds lost a jet at a Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho air show. The pilot ejected, or punched out, safely less than two-tenths of a second before the plane hit the ground. In fact, this photo is the first ever taken of a real-world ejection.

The second type of punching out is when you decide to leave the Air Force. The analogy is as if you were the pilot (you) abruptly leaving the plane (the Air Force) before its scheduled landing (retirement).

No doubt, my punching out is the second type.

On Thursday, I received word that the Air Force wanted to deploy me again. This time it was to be for nine months in Afghanistan. Everything else, I can’t tell you. By Thursday night, my family and I decided that we were done.

It’s not really something we decided lightly. I imagine there were any number of scenarios that would have allowed me to stay in the Air Force, but there were few scenarios that allowed me to stay in and be a father to my son.

The irony is that it’s the “Year of the Air Force Family” according to their latest family-focused slogan. However, the reality is that in order to have a family, I have to sacrifice my career.

Given a choice between mission and family, I’ll choose my family every time. If there is a way to do both, I’ll figure it out, but that option isn’t there in this case. Sometimes you just have to know when you have to punch out. The aircraft isn’t always recoverable.

So, I presume I’ll be out of the military in August.

The job hunt begins. I haven’t seriously updated my resume since 1998.

(U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Bennie J. Davis III)

The big news was that I finally went on that cruise I was planning. I kept a daily diary of the cruise adventures on my travel agency’s website. The entries are here.

In addition to working on rebuilding the travel agency, I’ve been working on improving my blogging chops. I’ve migrated my personal blog to WordPress, and I’m just getting it going. I imported a bunch of stuff from my old Livejournal account, so there’s plenty of legacy content to go around.

However, the great holiday I’ve been on ends after this weekend. I return to work on Monday. I’ve successfully taken an entire month off of work. I haven’t spent a full day in my office since June. It’s also the last time I’ve spent a full day in ANY office without a gun strapped to my side.

More to come over the next few weeks…

It took about a week’s growth of an itchy beard to get to this point, and I only used a razor to get this long growth into a goatee. It was quite painful to shave… physically, not emotionally.

So, the reason I call this the “Evil Edward Norton” is simple. You can tell if Edward Norton is playing a good guy or a bad guy based on whether or not he wears a goatee.

Think about it. In what roles does he wear the goatee versus the clean shave?

In “The Incredible Hulk,” he was good-guy Bruce Banner. No goatee.

In “The Italian Job,” he played a dishonorable thief named Steve. Yep… a goatee.

He played an FBI agent in “Red Dragon” standing face-to-face with Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector. No goatee.

Although a supporting player in “Rounders,” he sported no goatee in the poker flick with Matt Damon.

In “American History X,” he played a former Neo-Nazi skinhead. You guessed it… a goatee.

So, now that I’ve grown my goatee out, I expect that people will treat me with a bit of suspicion. After all, everyone who attends the Edward Norton School of Facial Hair Choices knows that people with goatees cannot be trusted.

I’ll be keeping this during my month-long vacation, but I’ll have to shave it off if I wear my uniform on my cruise. It’s really sad, though. I think a goatee in an Air Force service dress uniform would look terrific.

1) What was that giant blimp you mentioned used for?

It was (and still is) used for aerial surveillance. The front of the blimp has a little globe containing a camera much like the cameras seen on television stations’ helicopters. The image clarity is amazing!

2) Was that a real life composer that commented on your blog?

Yes, it was Bear McCreary. He is well-known for composing 99.9% of the new “Battlestar Galactica” series, which ended earlier this year. He also composed for “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” which was cancelled by the dimwits at Fox. When I linked his blog, he received a notification through his WordPress dashboard, and he was kind enough to come by and offer his support.

3) What are you going to do with your blog now that you’ve returned home?

I brought this question up back in November, and I was really interested in the feedback. It turns out that none of the three options I laid out in the poll really made total sense to me.

View This Poll

However, I did like the suggestion by my friend Scott. He said that the blog should eventually die, but it should also feature some entries on my reintegration back home and back at work.

So, I think that’s what we’ll do. The site should serve as a moment in time for one person, and if things work out, there won’t be anyone else blogging from Iraq past 2011 anyway.

It’s been nice being home with my family. Although Christmas has passed in Baghdad, I’m just wrapping it up here in the United States. My son finally seems to be more comfortable with me, and he seemed to enjoy all the stuff that I had to build for him. After all, it is Christmas, so it wouldn’t be a holiday without me having to build something.

More to come…

I chose The Who as the background music for the video. While I was deployed, I listened to music constantly, and The Who provided me lots of energy to get through the days!

I showed this to a friend of mine, and he asked, “why did you choose that song.” Well, aside from my newfound love of The Who, I told him that I needed a song or multiple songs that ran about eight and a half minutes.

When I sorted my list of music by time, this one just popped out at me. So, no hidden meanings. It’s an uptempo tune that happens to be more than eight minutes.

I hope you enjoy it.

My dad and my wife met me at the Montgomery airport Thursday morning. My wife surprised me by bringing my dad down from Ohio.

So, I’ve been home for two full days now, and it’s been great to finally be here.

I went into work briefly Thursday to turn in my weapon and pick up my inprocessing checklist. I began tackling that on Friday.

Once I complete the checklist, I’ll be able to take time off of work. In fact, I plan on taking off the entire month of January.

I was so close to done on Friday, and then the finance office closed on me. So, I’ll need to go back Monday, complete the checklist, turn it in, and then I’ll be free for a while.

I plan on growing my old goatee back. It will be just like Edward Norton’s except that when I grow the goatee, I won’t be evil.

That journey allowed me the opportunity to see some truly amazing things.

One of the coolest sights was flying over the Swiss Alps at sunset. We were on our way to Germany at the time, and it just so happened we flew over the Alps exactly as the sun was saying goodbye to the day.

I captured a few photos. The gallery is below. They are about as good as they can be after being shot through a airplane windows heavily smudged by the uncleaned grime from passengers past.

So, this morning, I sit in the Baltimore airport awaiting my flight. I’m running on about three hours worth of sleep — part of my never ending battle to be adjusted to my new time zone tonight. It’s so early, that there are no gate agents, and the sign with the flight information is off.

The early departure time of my flight means that I’ll be home just before lunch. Unfortunately, I have a few inprocessing errands to run before I can even think about the gorgeous Chick-Fil-A sandwich I’ll be eating for lunch.

More to come… (like these Alps photos, for instance)

The internet told me to get bent.

Actually, I was trying to watch this video of LeBron James eating some kid’s fries on the sidelines of a basketball game. LeBron apparently tumbled into the crowd and then got up, dusted himself off, and started eating the kid’s fries.

Given that I’m not currently in the United States, Yahoo’s video player decided that I’m not worthy enough to show the video. This upsets me greatly because it was going to answer one thing that I’ve always wondered about LeBron James… whether or not he double dips.

As a habitual double dipper myself, I would have been elated to know that someone of LJ’s stature might also be a double dipper. For me, that would finally make my double dipping habit mainstream and make me less of a pariah at the local Wendy’s.

I guess I’ll find out what happened to the kid’s fries soon enough. I’ll be on the move soon.

I had a friend of mine put together this Photoshop job replacing the image of President George W. Bush with mine.

In my last briefing to the commanding general of Task Force 134, we displayed it on the screen. It was quite a hit.

I wouldn’t dare say the mission in Iraq is “accomplished,” but I would say that it is well on its way to the end.

In fact, in the six months I’ve been in Iraq, we’ve accomplished quite a bit. These are just a few of the things we’ve done:

1. Withdrawn from the cities in accordance with the Security Agreement. The Iraqis are now responsible for maintaining security of their sovereign land.
2. Released more than 5,000 detainees from U.S. detention facilities to their homes.
3. Transferred more than 750 detainees to the Government of Iraq with an arrest warrant or detention order.
4. Closed Camp Bucca’s theater internment facility, which once held more than 21,000 detainees.
5. Transferred the Iraqi Correctional Officer training center to the Iraqi government (actually, this happens on Tuesday).
6. We’ve reduced our footprint from 135,000 troops in Iraq to roughly 110,000. That’s 25,000 servicemembers no longer in harm’s way.
7. Using diplomacy, we’ve helped the Iraqi government resolve some of its electoral issues, and they are now planning on having elections in early March.

These are just things that I know about in detail. I know we’ve also been shipping equipment out of Iraq back home and to Afghanistan in some cases. We’ve reduced the number of contractors in Iraq.

Moving ahead, the commands in Iraq will consolidate into a single force structure called United States Forces – Iraq, or USF-I. This will further enable the command to streamline its operations into one cohesive unit, which will make things way more efficient.

Just from my point of view, there are way too many public affairs offices in Iraq, and none of them know what the others are doing.

So, I think “Mission Accomplished” may be a bit too early for Iraq, but I think it’s just about right for me. Very light posting on the blog this week as I make my way home through the spottiest internet on Earth.

More to come…

UPDATE: This audio is for Nikki…

Fortunately, I’ve been lucky enough to have a great teammate who not only knows the language but also knows the culture very well. He’s been able to help me so much that I’ve never really had to crack open this survival guide.

I originally found it in my desk, and I left it there for my entire deployment. Just this past week, when I was cleaning out my desk, I start poking through it. It contains lots of phrases that might be useful to me along with cartoons of several different situations I may find myself in here.

It shows me pictures of Iraqi ranks along with the Arabic pronunciations spelled out for me. It shows me the numbers, and it also gives me a few phrases that might help me as I travel through Iraq.

I learned Arabic numbers while I was here (mostly from reading license plates), and I’m proud of that, but I’m sad that I wasn’t able to learn more.

So, as I started poking through the guide, I noticed that the cartoons weren’t always politically correct.

This image in particular caused lots of giggles on my part. I leave it to you to figure out the joke.

The other thing that amuses me is that this one dude felt it necessary to carry a handgun, a rifle, and a giant knife, but the soldier was able to force him down on his knees without so much as a slingshot with which to coerce him down.

I’m guessing the soldier was once on the debate team and was able to use very persuasive words to get the heavily-armed insurgent to surrender. Clearly, he said, “Get down on your knees… or else!”

As my wife can tell you, I’m a big fan of using “or else.”

The water in my building is the crappiest of the crappy. When I first got here, the water was generally clear. You could wash your hands in it, but you wouldn’t want to drink it. However, now it’s so bad, nobody even wants to wash their hands in it.

I’ve moved exclusively to hand sanitizer while in the office.

The odd thing is that we are provided potable water for supply to our building, but somewhere in our system, there is a break allowing dirt to enter the water supply.

It’s extremely disgusting. The toilets look unflushed and are stained with dirt.

I see water systems like this, and I wonder how everyone else lives in this country. We’re very fortunate that we have excellent water in the United States. Sure, it’s not always as good as my bottled fish water, but at least I won’t die from it.

I dreamed up this idea after a particularly unsatisfactory lunch. However, after stacking these boxes, I instantly felt better. Perhaps I thought it was really funny, or maybe my OCD was soothed a little.

Either way, I was impressed with my ability to stack. What’s worse is that today, he received another package. It went on the very top of the tower.

So, I know exactly what day I’ll be leaving Baghdad (not the time, naturally, as that would be helpful to me) and the time I’ll arrive home.

In these last few days, I’ll be outprocessing from Camp Victory, but I’m still working as well. I’m setting up a media event for next week, and I’ve also been taking in queries.

In fact, I took in a query from Reuters yesterday, and my responses were prominently featured in articles around the globe. Here are the New York Times and Washington Post links, for instance.

I’m picking up my laundry from the cleaners tomorrow, and I’m going to be shipping home some stuff I don’t want to haul all the way across the planet with me.

Coincidentally, we have a U.S. Postal Service office here, and the postage is exactly the same as if I went to my neighborhood post office. The difference is that I can send letters home for free. Boxe$ are another $tory.

More to come on my adventures…

I’m starting to think there are some inefficiencies in getting people booked on flights.

I’m very close to my supposed departure date, and I still don’t have my flight information for flying out of theater. What makes it funnier is that they gave me the flight information for my Baltimore to Montgomery flights. Why can’t I just fly Delta the whole way?

So, to recap: no idea when I’m leaving Baghdad, but they have booked me on a commercial flight once I land in the states. This brings up the obvious question — how the heck do you book a specific flight home from Baltimore when you have no idea what day your military flight gets into there?

Don’t think about this too hard, or you’ll hurt yourself.

I wish I could say this worked really well on my trip to Baghdad, but it was equally frustrating. On my last full duty day in Montgomery, the travel office finally got around to booking my flight.

At first, they tried to put me in Baghdad one day after the date required by my orders. When I pointed that out, the travel clerk looked at me as if I was high. His supervisor actually rebooked me, and I found myself packing quickly for the impending trip.

Arriving at my transition point, I found myself unconfirmed for a flight into Baghdad. So, I had to wait it out for a couple days.

So, I suppose my point is this. We are the finest Air Force in the world. We have the tools and the technology to bring air superiority to any corner of the world. We can fire a missile directly at Osama Bin Laden’s left kidney and score a direct hit without touching the right kidney. However, when it comes to booking passengers on our aircraft, we become the village idiot. We’re tied to a completely manual process that fosters inefficiency.

I’m packing my bags. I have a feeling someone will call me one day and say my flight leaves in two hours.

I’m done venting now. I’ll probably take tomorrow off from the blog just to calm down a little bit.

(Photo courtesy Luis Argerich at Flickr)

I’ve already mailed some of my gear home. Some people buy big plastic trunks and stuff them to the gills with their junk. The idea behind it is that the more you ship, the less you have to drag home in a bag.

I’ve spent most of the deployment as a minimalist. People mostly sent consumables to me. Stuff I can’t use completely (like the 40 packs of Kleenex) are being donated to others. So, this should help.

I did receive a few things I want to keep. There are some John Grisham books I haven’t finished yet, and someone gave me a DVD of “The Village.” Joaquin Phoenix was in this movie before he went crazy.

With luck, I should be traveling relatively light on the way home.

You’ll notice that I slowed down my blog entries the past couple of weeks. It’s not that I ran out of stuff to talk about, but rather I’ve been preoccupied with several media events on my plate. I’ve got one more event to coordinate, which has been made all the more difficult given that I’ve been filling in for my boss for two weeks.

I’m hoping that by the time that event rolls around, I’ll be sipping glasses of milk on a luxurious plane back to the United States. Just kidding. The plane will be less than luxurious, but I will be served milk from a champagne glass.

Now, the obvious question is why in the world I would accept gum from a stranger.

When you do media relations, the word “relations” figures greatly into it. So, I will generally accept a piece of gum from someone. I won’t be chewing that piece of gum, but I’ll accept it… and put it in my pocket. You never know what you’re getting from a stranger.

Just before I hid the gum in my pocket, though, I took a picture of it. What struck me as odd was that it was a piece of spearmint gum manufactured in Baghdad, but the packaging was completely written in English.

One thing they have in ample supply here is Ice Cubes.  No, not the rapper or frozen water. I mean the gum.

They are little cubes of gum, and they are all over the place. In fact, the general was playing around with a box of these things when we were at Taji.

Still, I think I’ve had my fill of chewing gum for a while. I often get a cramp in my jaw from chewing too much. Of all addictions to get, chewing gum was the last thing I thought would hook me.

I flew up there yesterday morning to meet with the commander there. Normally, we don’t leave Baghdad until the evening before, but they insisted on a media prep.

We had invited Agence France Presse and Associated Press. They are two of the three largest wire services in the world, so I could understand their apprehension.  AFP had printed an unfavorable article recently, and I had never worked with this particular AP reporter before.

The prep session went as expected although there was one amusing answer one of the colonels gave. In response to a prep question about the religious discussion programs offered at the detention facility at Taji, he inadvertently said there were “extremist parts of the Quran.”

I let it go for a few seconds to see what would happen, but when it went unaddressed by the end of his answer, I asked him, “exactly which parts of the Quran are extremist.” He looked puzzled at my question, and I explained to him what he had said. He smirked a little once he realized his mistake, and he crafted his answer again.

The media event itself went terrific. Both reporters seemed to get exactly what they needed, and there were no hiccups in the execution of the event at all — something entirely unusual over the course of my deployment here.

One of the bright spots in this deployment is the great team that helps me do these events.

Almost all of the media events my office puts together are executed by this team of public affairs professionals. Lt. Healy is the PA officer at Camp Cropper, and Karim is our bilingual bicultural advisor. He’s really the one that makes these things so easy.

When we go out on media events together, it doesn’t even seem like work. It seems like a few friends hanging out together all day.

Our flight back tonight was my last Blackhawk ride. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as my first one back in June, but I flew with some awesome people, which made it a great flight.

Obviously, I wasn’t being hailed (that happened in June). Instead, I was being farewelled.

During the ceremony, new people are welcomed and the old are fondly remembered before they depart.

My friend, Jeff, said a few words about me, but it had more of a “Friar’s Club Roast” feeling to it. I prefer that sort of thing. He told a few stories that had a veil of truth to them, but one story in particular was very exaggerated… and hilarious.

It was great. The people I care about (in Iraq) were all there, and it gave me a chance to call out the awesome people I’ve been working with on a daily basis.

Above all, I thanked Brig. Gen. David Quantock for not firing me after I put him in a CNN interview, which eventually was featured on a Killings at the Canal: The Army Tapes special investigation on the network.

Afterwards, I was presented with the Joint Service Commendation Medal. Essentially, it’s an award presented while working for a joint command, which is what Task Force 134 is.

It’s been a great ride so far. I have a few events scheduled this week, but when I’m done with those, I’ll be packing my bags.

I took this photo back in September on a trip up to Camp Taji. Remember the ruins I described?

The rock itself was located near a shuttle bus stop next to the lodging facility where I was spending the night. In truth, I actually found it indoors. The sad thing is that the place was so dirty, it looks like the photo was taken outside.

I realize I titled this post as a clever little pun on the title of this blog, “Blogging Iraq.” However, there really isn’t a lot you can say about a rock.

I have been giving lots of thought to what will become of Blogging Iraq once I return home. Is Iraq something that I should continue monitoring from afar in order to continue the blog? Is there someone in Iraq who would be willing to continue blogging after I leave? Should I just let it die a natural death?

Decisions, decisions.

Actually, I have no idea what I want to do. I’m open to suggestions! I’ve posted this handy poll to make it a little easier. Let me know what you think!

The dining facilities here go all out with the Thanksgiving holiday. The main DFAC had a giant display reminiscent of those old department store window displays meticulously put together by some hot-shot artist. Think “Mannequin” but without the cheesy Starship song or Kim Cattrall.

Carved turkeys were the order of the day, which is a pleasant change from the processed turkey we normally eat about twice per week. We’ll call the terrible stuff “turkey loaf” from now on.

The lines to get into the DFACs are just ridiculous on Thanksgiving day for lunch, so I chose to avoid them completely. This posed complications as the sections in my building gathered to celebrate with a BYOC lunch. That’s Bring Your Own Clamshell, referring to the takeout styrofoam tray as seen in the photo above.

So, I decided on having a Mexican Thanksgiving instead… you know, celebrating the first meal shared between the natives and the Mexicans* who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. The nearby Taco Bell catered my meal with a burrito and taco.

For dinner, I was invited to a eat with our commanding general at the smaller DFAC. The line wasn’t nearly as bad. I was able to get my food in about five minutes, but the thing I’m most proud of is that I managed to get through a Thanksgiving in Iraq without ever touching a slice of turkey… and I didn’t starve.

I may have been the only person not to fall into a turkey coma today.

*It’s a joke, people.  I know it wasn’t the Mexicans.  It was the Australians.

At my unit (and others here), cigars have become the weapon of choice against clean air.

We have a spacious smoking area where people hang out and smoke their cigars. It overlooks the lake, and is quite a nice rest spot given the cool temperatures this time of year.

I don’t know much about cigars, but I know for fact that Cubans are smoked here. You can’t get them legally in the United States, but apparently they are easy to come by in Iraq. I’m told they last a really long time and offer a sensation unlike any other cigar in the world.

To me, it’s all relative. I’m a non-smoker, so I don’t necessarily think about anything other than the icky smoke clouding my lungs. For the cigar aficionados here, they really enjoy taking an hour to enjoy one on the patio.

Now that I’m near the end of my deployment, I’ll be needing a vehicle again back home.

I’m getting a 2010 Ford Escape.

I should say I just got it on Monday. While deployed, you don’t spend a whole heck of a lot of money. Given that they pay me extra for being a terrorist target on top of the extra cash for being separated from my family — not to mention that all my income is tax free in Iraq —  I’ve been able to save up a decent down payment for the car.

When you’re deployed, there is one easy way you can get a new car or motorcycle… Exchange New Car Sales. Essentially, it allows you to order a car at specially discounted rates (built to your specs) and have it delivered to your local dealer by the time you return home.

I didn’t take that option, though. Instead, I found that I could get a better deal on my own through Ford directly. The secret? If you are a Ford shareholder, you can apply for an X-Plan code. That entitles you to get your vehicle at near invoice cost without haggling.

This tricked-out vehicle, which was still expensive, ended up costing me several thousand dollars less than the sticker price. Combined with the 0% year-end financing deal, I made a great purchase!

Oh, and did I mention that I worked with my local dealer almost exclusively over e-mail? That power of attorney I did prior to leaving the country made it easy for my wife to buy the car on my behalf when it actually came time to sign.

In Baghdad, you would expect that some locals would be serving the food, but ironically, the people serving the food to me are neither Iraqi nor American. They are Indian.

They are all very polite, too, which is something I’m used to from all the cruise ships I’ve sailed. One guy in particular is really terrific to me. His name is Dinesh. I presume he is in his mid-20s.

Early on, I established myself as the guy who puts his grits on top of his eggs. It’s a southern thing. I won’t make fun of the weird crap you eat, so let’s just leave it there. Anyway, Dinesh is always happy to oblige my weird eating habits. He takes care to ensure the right amount of grits goes on top (even though I’ve never complained about the amount).

He doesn’t speak a whole lot of English, but he is better than most at the dining facility. There is one dude who only knows the names of the foods, but don’t dare ask him what kind of glaze is on the Roast Pork Loin. His response is usually “roast pork loin” said as if he’s asking me whether I want it. When I ask again and get the same response, that’s when I’m pretty sure I don’t want the pork anymore.

(Photo from Flickr)