I dont know if any of you have been over here, but in the mornings, well 5 times a day, you can hear the mosques belching out their call to prayer. Its really eerie at first hearing this voice singing, if I can call it that, and calling the faithful to prayer. Especially when you are walking through the camp at night. For whatever reason, it just kinda freaks ya out. Sometimes I tell myself they are watching me and everytime I walk they're singing, " Take the big ugly one! Take the big ugly one!" Sometimes I have alot of time on my hands to think about nothing that matters...

Its like a ghost town here. The unit we have replaced has bugged out, heading home for good in a few days. Its been 3 weeks here, and the time flies. There is NO ONE around. When they started loading up, you would think that a damn bomb went off, there was so much stuff around. Chairs, rugs, boxes, hangers, food, you name it, it was all over the place. ANd stacked a mile high. My predecessors who fought in WWII and Korea were gone for anywhere from 1 to 4 years. We are gone 14 months and its like they headed to busses like gang busters, 2 lines, no waiting. I worked out and then crashed, there was silence. They were gone. Which kinda sucks because as they taught us the ropes here, we've had some time to learn about them and what they did in the civilian world. There are some characters here, or were. The best is their operations officer, who made it implicitly clear that when Sherman marched to the sea, as he was going through South Carolina, THERE WAS A WISCONSIN UNIT LEADING THE WAY!!! I said you are a bitter man. I told him hey, at least I know not to call it the Civil War, but the war of Northern Aggression. We were instant friends after that. I started to ask what they were fixin to do all the time, and then I would talk real fast around them. They'd say what? So I would say damn, I forgot, youre from the South so I gotta talk slower. Then I said, " I know y'all dont read real well down south, so I will write real slow, OK?" I think they took a liking to me after awhile. You almost have too...

They still can't believe we will drill through 3 feet of ice to fish. They are in complete awe of the seasonal shanty towns that show up on lakes all over Wisconsin during the winter.

I bought a PS2 today, and the reason was twofold. Yes, I know I am 37 years old and buying a video game, but it also has DVD capabilities, so I am set and actually saved money. Besides, the enlisted talk smack all the time about how good they are, so the old man is gonna have a class on video games. Which leads me to my childhood. The first video game I ever had was an Atari 2600. Tank, Donkey Kong, and Galaga were the big names back then. I got this used when I was 15. Before that, I explored all the time. When I lived in Green Bay, we had a golf course behind us. I met my first "superstars" back then, 3 Dog Night. That was pretty cool. Then they sold the golf course and put in houses. We used to crawl through houses all the time. Of course, that wasn't good enough so we had to start unplugging the saws that the carpenters were using, pissing them off. This usually resulted in getting chased, sometimes by a bucket loader. There was always the throwing apples at cars, which lead to some really big foot chases. Thank god we knew the neighborhood. the most fun we had was Road Hog. We would get equal number of kids, half on bikes the other on foot, and the bikes had to run the kids on foot over, and then we would switch. Nobody really got hurt. Really. This was also the time when Evel Knievel was big, which lead to jumping garbage cans on our bikes. That usually resulted in ALOT of bruises and some pretty good cuts. Im assuming that eventually lead my foray into BMX and subsequently motocross...

Enough for tonight...

Sl'ainte