I know you said there's a few restaurants over there and a few other bastions of the civilized Western world, but if you want any particular goodies from the old US of A, post a wish list.
I think this bunch of bucket heads on this site can send a few items.
Just dropping a line to let everyone know how I'm doing.
First of all, my travel agent is fired!
I've been in Baghdad for about a week now. We've finally gotten our bags in and we've gotten settled in. I'm living in a tent with about 18 other guys but it's not that bad. We have an industrial A/C unit to help keep it cool and ponchos hung up to give us privacy. We should be moving into hard side barracks in about 2 months.
The base itsself is a hole. You wouldn't expect mud here, but good lord, the motor pool is about a foot deep mud pit. And it dries like concrete. You really realize you are in a war zone when the first night you have mortar attacks. There has been small arms fire every night since we've been here. Last night the guard towers were fighting and you could hear the M240Bs (big maching guns), 249s (smaller machine guns) going for about half an hour. Today, someone launched an RPG round over the wall. Luckily, it was a dud and no one was hurt (I wasn't in there at the time).
We have no equipment in right now, so we have lots of down time. Once it gets here, we will start our missions. The days are going by pretty fast, so once we start real work, they should really go by fast. Only 345 more to go!