Help Wanted:Communications Management Opportunity in Babylon

  At night I can hear the locals praying over loudspeakers. Their trembling voices follow me as I walk back to my hooch in darkness. Distant Hummvee headlights cut through the dust that's always in the air. Why do they pray so loudly? Do they want us to hear, or would they be doing it so loud even if we weren’t this close? Strange days these are. The dirt and the rocks and the sandbags and the heat and the  bright sunlight and the explosions all collide in my mind as I find myself in the middle of it all and just do my J.O.B.

   Though I am in the middle of Iraq, in the ancient

land of

Mesopotamia, or

Babylon, I basically have an office job. The things I must do require me to be on a computer or a phone or radio a lot. My office is an old room from the Saddam era, and there are bats trying to co-habitate with me, but it works. No camel spiders or scorpions yet. Sure, I get out of the office all the time. I’m on rooftops checking out the Satellite dishes and antennas. I’m outside moving equipment around or following up on some issue. I'm in someone's Command post taking care of a request they put in. We work really hard, and long, but we try to have fun. Sometimes when it cools down in the evenings we drink near-beer and pretend everything's normal. I’ve said ever since this deployment started that I could make something positive even out of a pile of shit, and I’m going to make this a good experience one way or another.

   Some soldiers work “outside the wire” all day. They spend a lot of time in the heat and in their body armor, and in harm’s way.  Well, I did my time as an enlisted soldier in the 82d Airborne, and that is not my role anymore. My job is to manage  their communication assetts so the folks on the leading edge of the fight and the decision makers can reach out and touch each other when they need to.

   I’m cool with that, and I’ll try to do them all justice.

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

-Thomas Edison

"Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock."

-Pablo Picasso

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