The Midnight Hour

Brought that I don’t need:

Heavy black fleece (aka buffalo coat)
Rifle cable lock
Cold weather boots
Thermal underwear
Sleeveless civilian PT shirts (not culturally sound)
Four sets of utilities (three would be more than enough)
Bayonet (who am I kidding?)
LBV (load bearing vest, we strap everything to our flak)
Cold weather gloves (Nomex tactical gloves are more than enough)
Canteens (all our water [...]

Children walk to school next to the Euphrates River. It is hard to tell,
but one of the children is waving at me and I am returning his wave.

By the way, my fifth NYT Select article went live a couple of days ago. You can read it here. It is titled, Junkyards [...]

…is a gift, or so the saying goes. In the Marine Corps we live in a strange world of absolute integrity alongside the knowledge that anything not locked up or on your person could be ganked at any time. It is never permissible to steal. Never. But if someone’s belongings have [...]

The internet Nazis that lord over our net connection have been hard at work lately, thwarting morale by blocking access to certain sites. While some restrictions like pornography and gambling sites are reasonable, their recent crusade has attacked web mail, gaming, and my personal blog. That’s right. It’s been several weeks since [...]

I have a new post published at the NYT Frontlines Blogs. You can read it at http://frontlines.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=18 on the New York Times Select website. The article is titled “The Information-Age Marine.” It is a look at our internet, phone, and television networks here on base. Here’s to late-night antenna adjusting excursions.
Also, [...]

I am not a fan of fiction. The time I have to read is so small and precious that I have always said “I don’t have time to read about things that didn’t really happen.” In the Marine Corps we call reading about one’s profession PME (professional military education). One of my [...]

Wow, this is discouraging. It’s only late March and the middle of the day is already getting uncomfortably warm. When we first arrived just a month ago you could generally get away with wearing a warming layer all the time. Many people would wear a sweatshirt or other thin layer under their [...]

I occasionally receive email from readers of my blog. I recently found an email in my inbox from Lisa, a 23-year-old journalism grad student at Rome University. She is doing her graduation research on “blogs from Iraq” and polled a few milbloggers. I thought I would share part of our brief conversation (my answers inserted):
Dear [...]

My third post is now live on the NYT Frontlines blog. I describe the city of Fallujah.

Thanks for the support!