Hello from Kuwait

Well, I made it in country without a hitch – unless you count a hitch as a 24 hour trip, over 40 hours without sleep (lying down that is, plane and bus sleep are about as much as I got). We showed up in the desert and it was in the 50s and raining! Go figure! We are living in ‘temporary housing’ – not quite a tent, but a huge building with canvas roof and walls and a wood floor with about 30 guys in it.

The bathrooms are just that – a room with showers in it, and portajons everywhere. They haul water in every day, we are supposed to shower like this: get wet, shut off water, wash, rinse off, done. We walk about 6-7 miles a day just going to eat and to the gym, everything is at least a half a mile away. Today, (Friday) was the first day we had sunshine – actually cheered people up a little bit!

We had half of our section leave today – they will not be stationed with us for the duration. It really sucked, because we were like a big family, but we are hoping for a visit here and there and possibly joint missions somewhere in Iraq where we can work with them. But, we’ll see!

The training we are supposed to be doing here has pretty much been a wash. There is a bigger group that came in and has priority over any of the fun ‘war-like’ training. So, we are stuck doing small group training twice a day to pass the time and prevent boredom… like that is going to happen!

The food here is pretty good and you get as much as you want of it. We had steak and shrimp the first night, so it set our expectations pretty high from then on… hasn’t been better than that though. We do get 3 hot meals a day, usually our lunch is from a bag so we're pretty happy.

There are a few fast food type of places here – a Taco Bell and Burger King out of semi trailers… I’ll get some pictures of that! Haven’t tried them yet though! The gym here is huge! Although with 10,000 people here, it does get pretty crowded and dirty from all the sand & dirt. I guess it opened 5 days before we got here – at least that worked out nice!

My address for Iraq whenever I get there is:
Jason Wallace
HQ16th Eng. Bde.
Bldg. 3, Camp Liberty
APO AE 09344

Feel free to send whatever you like! I miss everyone! Feel free to click on the “comment” link to share your comments with me and everyone else that reads this! (I'll try to get pictures soon!)

Take care, Jason.