Friday, October 9, 2009

Flights are on Again, Maybe

I thought I could not write this post because I can't say anything about where troops are going. So I won't. The main news is I am scheduled to fly in a Blackhawk tomorrow and a Chinook on Sunday night. I actually don't much care where I am going and if I told you, you probably would not know any more than I do. So I'll let you know where I was when I get back.

I am charging up my camera batteries. Tomorrow is a daylight flight so I should be able to take loads of pictures. Sunday is a night flight and the point of the trip for me is to see how well I can take pictures through night vision goggles.

Everything is happening so fast lately. Three weeks ago I was still figuring out how to get the time to write one or two good stories a week and had just made a to do list of important things for me to do in the motor pool: sort nuts and bolts and washers in the spare parts Conex (a container about half the size of an over-the-road semi trailer), make inventory sheets of hundreds of special tools, most of which are still in paper and plastic wrappers because we never use them, coordinate schedules of the people who will sign out the tools when I am on other duties, etc.

Now I am writing and taking pictures and getting stories published all over southern Iraq. Three weeks ago, I was trying to decide what to use for the lead story for the Echo Company newsletter.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

  Blindness  reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to c...