I'll try to add to this as I find time......... my friend in Iraq keeps sending me nice photos, and I thought I should share, so we all know what is going on. I do like to show my students what is going on in Iraq tho, and these seem to be the nicer shots.

This photo has made the rounds on the Internet. It is called a "camel spider" and I have yet to get the scientific name. It looks to me like the lower "spider" is actually a cast off outer skin. Spiders are arthropods, and as such, always molt/shed their old skin as they grow. Yes these old skins lay around, and look like extra spiders!

Iraq has been subjected to "desertification" many eons, my friend says when the sand storms blow, it is more like a Dustbowl effect than anything else. (In the times of Gilgamesh, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley had forests of cedars). Anyway I'm fascinated by what these spiders must have evoluted from, and what their place in the local ecology might be. My friend said "Man if I see any spiders that size, I'm emptying my M-16 into it! I think they eat camels!" Don't know who took the photo, but it's a doozy, eh???

Isn't this a nice shot? Those big planes carry cargo, and up in the top they have a deck where passengers can ride. The nose lifts up so you can drive helos, jeeps and tanks (yes or Bradleys or Humvees) in there. Check out the hangars in the background; I wonder what they are made of! This apparently is the tarmac at LSA Balad.

I copped this one off the news webs. That's a Chinook helo in the background. Some of the news does not reach us stateside....... some months back my friend said they had one of these go down, and the crew got hurt. They were out in the field.......... they recovered everyone and the Chinook too...... no one ever knew, news, nor the locals.

This is my friend, and I'm not going to put his name on it, as he's shy. He sent the caption with this "Guarding the Enemy Palm Tree". Notice the Chinook in the background, and the buildings.

I hope this works, it's a shot of the guys doing rifle quals in Kentucky before they shipped out. They are a reserve unit from South Carolina, and they had to qual in the snow last winter. Made sense to me, qual in the snow, then get shipped to the desert.