Oh yeah, recently others have posted photos of where they blog. Here's where the magic happens, folks.

Posted by: Sarah at 05:41 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Cool photo. Nice little work space, desk area. Post more pics. Adios.

Posted by: jace at March 14, 2004 01:14 PM (FiD+L)

2 Very spartan, but elegant.

Posted by: Tom at March 15, 2004 10:37 AM (+1ZQW)

3 You can't be a blogger -- your blogspace is TOO NEAT & TIDY! :-)

Posted by: david at March 15, 2004 09:17 PM (QIZUp)

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I've decided the best part about a deployment is the way you rearrange your priorities. My husband is the only person who knows my cell phone number, so when it rang Friday at work, I grabbed it and ran out of the office. Work wasn't important, being polite wasn't important, all that mattered was contact with a loved one. It's funny because my husband used to call me at work all the time before he left, usually to arrange a time to pick me up at the end of the day. I often hurried him off the phone or hung up with him when a student came in the door. But now, the student can wait.

And the thing is that you never know when you'll have your last phone call. Tragedies occur every day, and my husband had just as much chance of dying in garrison as he does in Iraq. But I cherish him all the more now that he's gone. I write him long letters every day, explaining every detail of Reservists who bug me or a funny incident in class. When mortality is staring you in the face, you cherish what you've got. I encourage all of you to cherish your relationships as well, especially the ones who aren't deployed. They're the ones we tend to put on the backburner.

I also was thinking yesterday about how lucky I am that my husband is merely deployed. Last night I watched the movie Amistad and then read more Gulag Archipelago before bed; oh how much worse life could be. If you choose to look at life through the right lens, then deployment seems like a trifle. If fate had treated me differently, my husband could've been sold into slavery and taken from me for forever. Or he could've been put in a Stalinist prison for ten years simply for "failing to turn in a radio receiver" to the government. There are much worse things I could be facing right now, and the thought of that gives me strength to endure the simple one-year deployment we now face.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Amritas pointed to a comment on LGF that really made me mad. An Israeli family was in a New Mexico bookstore speaking Hebrew to each other when an American woman overheard them:

Suddenly the other mother said to my girls 'wow what a beautiful language ! What is that?" Eden innocently and very cutely told her " its Hebrew.. we're visiting from Israel" this womans smile vanished and she gave them a blank stare, said " oh. really." and than.... started telling her partner" do you know, I am going to start taking that Arabic language course,, it has a really cool Palestinian teacher, and I think it will be really broadening to learn it, blah blah;ah blah;ah" very very loudly. I was shocked.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was that Point-Counterpoint on Nigeria from The Onion. The American kid is envious of the rich cultural Nigerian heritage, and the Nigerian simply says, "Get me out of this godforsaken hellhole." It's a wonderful parody of how Americans multiculturalize everything and truly don't understand the vicious struggle that goes on in other countries.

I got a new button yesterday for my sidebar: I'm a Proud Friend of Israel. If I had been in that bookstore in NM, I think I would've beat that woman with a sack of Valencia oranges.

Idiotarianism makes me violent.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:13 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Hey, SGT Hellerman, you totally stole my gimmick! I'm the one who peeks out of the tank, got it?

(Fun article on tanks. But you have to look at the photo on Sunday, because there's no permalink for the main page.)

Posted by: Sarah at 03:29 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Bunker's boys sound like a real hoot. He posted a great photo today of his son making mischief in Iraq.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I've given up completely on the media, so I don't even bother to turn on our one news channel here. Ever. So when I got a phone call this morning from our FRG saying that there was nothing to worry about, that the two soldiers who were killed were not from our Brigade, I wanted to say Huh? Because I'm not following the death toll. That phone call this morning confirmed my theory that if anything happened that I needed to know about, I would hear firsthand from our chain of command and not from the news. I can't sit by the TV or AP feed and wait for that kind of news; I've chosen instead to live on a need-to-know basis.

Posted by: Sarah at 11:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Dogs made a funny statement yesterday that I can relate to: "I visited all 4,593,299 available weblogs this morning. I can't find anything to comment on that hasn't already been commented on in exactly the way I would have commented. What this means is that I must scratch around in the recesses of my mind for some other 'original content,' which I don't have right now." I read this morning thinking that I would come up with something new and interesting to say, but all I keep tossing around in my head are things that I've already shouted into a cave.

Yesterday I met a Reservist who was the most conflicted man I've talked to in a long while. He went off on a tirade against the USA and then switched gears mid-rant and slammed the Germans for a while. Then he talked about his recent tour in Iraq and what a good thing it was that the US had gone to help Iraqis, but then did a half-gainer and started saying that the US is the most dangerous country on the planet. He thinks the war in Iraq is just, but he wants Hillary to be President. He has some serious issues.

But one of the things he brought up was the WMD. Those jävla förbannad WMD. Sweet Jesus, I wish we could all look at the big picture here and forget about those stupid weapons for a minute. What did that Marine say the other day? "You can't even find an AK-47 in someone's home" so how can they expect us to find all weapons in Iraq right away?

Look, we should all agree on one of two things. Common ground, you know. Either Saddam had WMDs and has hidden them or gotten them out to Syria or somewhere else, or Saddam was so mean that no one told him the truth that they really weren't able to make any WMDs. So, if we must be forced to keep talking and thinking about those mfing WMDs, we have to assume that no one lied. President Bush honestly did think that Iraq had weapons or the potential to make weapons, just as both Clintons, Albright, Kennedy, and many others said back during the last presidency. And we have to assume that Saddam himself thought that he had WMDs, for what else would have made him feel so gutsy? Either he had them, or he was duped big time.

So when a Reservist says that we were right to go to war, but it was under false pretenses because we haven't found any WMDs yet, I want to rip his everlovin' head off. Especially when he's just finished telling me a story about how he stumbled upon dozens of dead bodies in a Ba'ath Party meeting house in Iraq that had been rotting for months. Months. Why hadn't anyone found those bodies before? I mean, they had months to find them, right? Well how come they weren't found earlier?

He also said that since the US has WMDs, we shouldn't be allowed to tell others who can and can't have them. Hmm. So since my husband carries a weapon in his job, he shouldn't be able to say that others can't do the same? If Iraqi shopkeepers, farmers, and reporters think it's OK to carry and use weapons as often as a soldier does, then that should be OK, right Reservist man? Who are we to say they can't, after all. Why don't you go back to Iraq and do your job again under these new "we're all equal" conditions?

And to say that the US is the most dangerous country in the world is just plain stupid. I asked this man straight out if he thought that head-to-head the first country to use a nuclear bomb would be the USA or Saddam's Iraq, and he said us. He is a damn fool. I know plenty of wives here who would love to see him proven right. I've heard many of them say we should've just nuked Iraq into a parking lot and not wasted our time and money on this stupid war. I know wives who don't give a flying leap about Iraqis and would push the button themselves if it meant their husbands didn't have to go spend a year on the other side of the earth. If this Reservist actually believes that our government is more ruthless than Saddam's, then he needs a big reality check. And I'm tired of hearing this nonsense.

I'm just sick of it. Of Michael Moore and John Kerry and Sean Penn and Jacques Chirac and everyone else whose image of the United States is that we're just itchin' to start somethin'. I'm tired of people saying we're a bully, as if we enjoy sending our troops to all these jacked up countries all over the globe to try to straighten out some centuries-old mess. I'm tired of people glorifying the UN, which couldn't even buy peace without a hefty contribution from the US. And I'm so tired of trying to explain world events and foreign policy to people in the military, people whose job it is to enforce it.

And I'm tired of hearing about those f-ing WMDs.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:53 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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1 Conflicted Man comes across as mere garden-variety "Confused" until he gets to the part about wanting Hillary to be President. "Serious issues"? Understatement of the year. Sounds like he's been watching too much CNN and reading too much NYT. Although it's not the most accurate analogy, perhaps our insistence that finding WMDs is not critically important is as irritating and frustratingly 'off-point' to the Left as their insistence that it was "just about sex" was to us. Thanks much for the link! I definitely know what you mean about shouting intoo a cave, too.

Posted by: topdawg at March 13, 2004 06:59 AM (JMaAr)

2 It gives me the shivers to hear that type stuff, and I do hear plenty of it here in Bush Country, Texas. I just look at the people who say it in disbelief, how can they feel that way. Some people are still mad at him for his looks, he smirks, they say. Oh yes, big political fault, look and smile like your mother, for heaven's sake! And why would that make him dishonest? Give me a break. The liberal establishment may yet get there wishes and we become a cowering, frightened, socialist country. It is disturbing and I don't have a husband in Iraq to worry about . But I have grandchildren I want to live in a free, democratic country. And I want that for you and all the rest of us, too.

Posted by: Ruth H at March 13, 2004 09:41 AM (GYS20)

3 Buurruuppppp - the mere thought of Hillary as a prez (shudders). I'm also in that "who cares about the m.f.'n WMD's" club as well as the "no it's not either about oil" society.

Posted by: OkieMinnie at March 13, 2004 02:39 PM (++56U)

4 I think this guy is stuck in the third level of Maslow's Hierarchy. Bogey asked why military people liked Bush better than Kerry since Kerry served in Vietnam. Many folks don't grasp that military service doesn't mean as much to military folks as being black seems to mean to blacks or being union means to union members. What we are interested in is getting a job done. Period.

Posted by: Mike at March 13, 2004 04:49 PM (AcqBI)

5 A big 'yeah' to all of the above. I read recently (um in the last 6mos) that Japan just found a huge stash of artillery/wmd-like stuff under an airport runway from WWII!! Then there's the German stash found in about the same way, same goes for something found in VA from the US Military from 50 yrs ago. These people who keep saying this drivel are being disengenuous and are just looking for something to pin on BUSH so they can further their mantra of 'Bush Lied'. Remember a few weeks ago Sarah when Tim wrote something of a similar nature. I think we all go thru a 'fed up to here' phase with the mumbo jumbo speak of the 'truth challenged' pukes from the left or maybe from the uniformed. I can't wait or is it I'm afraid to listen or watch the Sunday news talk shows tomorrow. I'm continually amazed at the complicit nature of the media. Anyway - it will pass for you as it did for me. At least I sure do hope it does.

Posted by: Toni at March 13, 2004 09:51 PM (ELGaA)

6 As usual, Sarah, you hit the bullseye. I hope that the guy who wants Hillary to be president shows up for sick call. The man's in a bad way.

Posted by: Parkway Rest Stop at March 13, 2004 11:48 PM (Apafo)

7 I just found your blog--great reading. Thanks. ) The guy who thinks the U.S. is a threat is just an idiot. I'm ex-army (22SAS) and every time see an American battle group in our waters here (Australia) it makes me grin.."there stands freedom"... Go well.

Posted by: Keith at March 15, 2004 01:27 AM (fyrCe)

8 >> It stands to reason that things we are not looking for are much less likely to be found. While I agree with the lot of you, that this guy was full of hot air, I find it difficult to believe that in a country that's only a little bigger than texas, we couldn't turn up something in almost 2 years time. You can bet if we were looking for something this BIG, this important in Texas, we'd have found it. Discount of course the hazards, and what have you... You've got a lot of people, most of them capable, acting on "reliable" intelligence looking for these things and *poof*... nothing? Technology in espionage improves practically by the hour, the world isn't nearly as big as it used to be, it just doesn't add up. Am I saying Bush is a liar? No. But I do believe that there is more to this than meets the eye. Not necessarily oil, but there's something going on that nobody's talking about outside the oval office. Secondly, why oust Hussein? The terrible ogre executed people for bad reasons? Of course he did. So then, why didn't we act pre-emptively toward Lenin? or Hitler? Hitler ordered the mass-murder of millions, for practically no reason at all. But even knowing that wasn't enough for us to go over and fight. No-- we had to be provoked... by this I'm referring to Pearl Harbor, another attack on the US that could have been at the very least defended against, if not for the nay-sayers and foibles of the military and intelligence committees. I think the rest of the free-speaking world believes, given our current representation, we're not gutless... but incompetent and foolhardy... And since we're bashing the left with awful words like 'truth challenged' (politically correct) and pukes (not politically correct) Let me ask you this -- What's so great about George Bush? Careful with your answer... I asked someone this once. Her answer? "I'm a republican". "What???" "I voted for a republican president once, and decided I was republican so now I always vote republican". It suddenly occurs to me that a certain percentage of both sides sees it precisely this way... and I've officially lost all hope for a truly democratic country. Where leaders can be chosen based on the decision of a group of complete idiots to be one-sided, regardless of the issues at hand, We'd be better off flipping a damned coin!

Posted by: Mike at January 12, 2005 10:41 PM (WeXqQ)

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My husband had to run an errand in Iraq today to the F.O.B., so he got to use the phone. He sounds great, optimistic and ready for a challenge. It was so nice to hear from him and know that he thinks things are going to be OK. If he thinks so, then I feel good too.

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Posted by: Sarah at 02:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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We're at the halfway mark for troop rotation in Iraq, and you'd never know it. If you don't know someone in Iraq or don't read a servicemember's blog, you would never know what's going on in a small port in Kuwait. Thousands of men are moving in and out of the most dangerous region we can imagine right now, and it's not even newsworthy. Because it works like clockwork. Sure there are some broken cots and some long lines, but so far this rotation has gone amazingly smoothly. Our military can get 'er done.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I read this entire thread from last week over at Smash's last night, and something didn't sit right with me, but I couldn't place it until this morning when I watched the ads again.

Many of the commenters said that they approve of President Bush's ads, except for one part. They approve of using footage of the WTC, but they didn't like the two-second clip of firefighters carrying a flag-draped coffin. That was crossing the line to them.

Didn't we have a big debate in our country back in October and November about how President Bush was being sneaky for not letting journalists photograph flag-draped coffins coming home from Iraq? People were outraged that he was "candy-coating" the war and not showing the human price that we've paid. But in his ad, when he shows the human price we paid on the morning of September 11, people say that it's in bad taste?

I don't grok.

I think it's the exact opposite. Intentionally shooting footage of servicemembers' coffins coming home to sway opinion on the war -- and that is indeed what certain journalists wanted to do -- is manipulative. Using footage that's "public domain" from September 11 to represent what happened that day is, in my opinion, appropriate.

And, by the way, when do we get to see Kerry's ads? I wonder if he's cookin' up a good one with flapping Bush and Cheney heads farting on each other and laughing à la Terrance and Phillip. Or a flag-draped coffin from Vietnam. Or one with lots of bleeped-out swear words.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:21 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Now, I'm not nearly as good at photoshop as others are, but this was my first thought when I heard about Mrs. Kerry's buttons. What does she think this is, The Terrance and Phillip Show? Not classy, lady.

Posted by: Sarah at 03:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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LGF found a touching article called Defending America that caught my eye because it opens with a quote from Dinesh D'Souza. I've never seen any bloggers talk about D'Souza, but he was personally instrumental in helping me discover my beliefs.

During my senior year in college I had to attend a mandatory lecture for a class on Malcolm X (which I took because I hated X and wanted to learn more about him. Learned more; still hate him.) This lecture was given by a speaker I'd never heard of before named Dinesh D'Souza. His speech was against affirmative action. We were a room full of students listening to his hour-long lecture, and I thought his argument was concise, informed, logical, and accurate. He opened up the floor for questions, and immediately everyone in the room pounced on him. No one agreed with him. People yelled, picked on him, argued, acted disgusted...and I sat there slowly realizing that the speech I had just whole-heartedly agreed with and understood was not received the same way by anyone else in the group. I started to really question my values and wonder why they were so different from my classmates' and the other listeners. That was the moment I realized that I had attended the lecture alone, quietly listened to a speech, formed my own opinion independent from anyone else's input, and found that no one else had heard what I had heard. That moment has stuck with me, and I consider it the turning point when I realized that I looked at the world differently from my peers. I have D'Souza to thank for that revelation, and I've never forgotten him. I've since read his books and have enjoyed them very much.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:43 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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For those of us who get a headache at the mere thought of trying to read the new Iraqi constitution but still want to know what's in it, Den Beste's our man. Naturally.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Oh Frogman, your bumper stickers are the best.

OK, I miss my husband. I just found out today he's made it to Iraq, but his new home has neither phones nor internet connection. And then I got drunk in my German class (wine tasting night), so I'm feeling a little melancholy. Hey, maybe a little Gulag Archipelago could cheer me up. Crap.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:54 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I've never posted any knitting on my blog before, but some people said they'd be interested in seeing it, so I thought I'd post a photo of a work in progress. I still have to make the arms, but this is what it looks like as of now.

MORE:

Someone asked how long this took. Well, I think it took about 25 minutes for an inch (basically one inch per South Park) and it's 23 inches each front and back, so mmm mmm carry the one mmm that means it took about 24 hours to knit. Of course I didn't watch that many South Parks in a row; I've been working on it in the evenings for about three weeks. And this one is for me. The next one will be for the husband, and I'll probably just mail him a photo of it and not the sweater. We joked about that before he left, that he could hold it up in the desert El Guapo style: "It's a sweater!"

Posted by: Sarah at 01:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Capt. Joel Cunningham of 10th MountainÂ’s 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment is in Afghanistan right now. He characterized the war on terror in a way I've never heard before.

"It's like working a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded and drunk."

Much of what our servicemembers do is extremely difficult work. It's hard to tell who the bad guys are. It's hard to scour an entire country for one man or one WMD. And our troops often don't have all the pieces to the puzzle; I remember reading that a reporter told a LTC that Saddam had been captured just 50 miles from where they were in Iraq, but the news had not reached them yet. Each unit focuses on their individual mission to help complete the big puzzle that our Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of Defense see.

While sitting with other wives at dinner one night, one of them said something that stuck with me. She said that going to Iraq is like going to the Superbowl; it's the culmination of everything you've practiced for in your whole career. I like that analogy. Another woman remarked that every soldier she knows who is not in Iraq desperately wants to be there, which made me proud of the caliber of soldiers we have in our Army. I feel proud that my husband can be a part of the culmination of all of the Army's work, the conclusion of interactions with Iraq that have lasted for 13 years, and the beginning of a new Iraqi constitution and chapter in Iraq's history. I'm proud that he can help contribute to that puzzle in a significant way. As my friend said, "Evenings are no fun, but like you said, as sad as I am, I'm just so incredibly proud. If you think about it the guys were really lucky, I mean how many people can say they were a platoon leader during actual conflict?"

What a positive attitude: our husbands are lucky. Our soldiers are lucky to be part of something so monumental in history. When the puzzle is complete, all their work will make sense, and a beautiful new Iraq will emerge from the pieces.

Posted by: Sarah at 11:21 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Our Division lost her first soldier.

Sacred Words.

Posted by: Sarah at 10:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Through our Family Readiness Group we got a list of planned demonstrations in Germany for the month of March. Dang, Germans demonstrate a lot. Most of them are anti-war with the occasional free-Tibet thrown in there, but there is one in Heidelberg on 20 March which is supposed to be pro-USA. We military folks are not allowed anywhere near these demonstrations, whether they're pro- or anti-, but if anyone else is in that area and could go, I'd love to hear about it.

Posted by: Sarah at 05:38 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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In a weird twist of irony, my dislike of Kerry is reaching bushian proportions. The thought of Kerry becoming president both scares and repulses me, which I imagine Bush does for many other people. But at least I can point to concrete reasons why I vehemently oppose Kerry the Waffler for president, like this account of Kerry supporting unilateralism in Iraq...back in 1997 before Hitler, I mean Bush, was at the wheel. For pete's sake, Kerry, this is the age of the internet. It's so easy to find what you said before; you'd better start being consistent.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:38 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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