Troop Weblog

Friday Five

Musical Questions this week.

1. Who is your favorite Artist/Band?
That’s an easy one for me. Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band. Whether he’s singing alone or with the band he’s the greatest. His live performances are the best; he always connects with the audience and seems to draw from an unlimited source of energy. He plays for everyone, not just the folks who paid for the front row seats; he’ll spend half his time playing to the folks in the cheap seats behind the stage. Plus, he writes his own songs, so he passes the artist test-he’s not just a performer. Also, he’s a Jersey boy who never left home.

2. What are some of your favorite songs?
Marc Cohn: True Companion-Our song
The Boss: Jersey Girl, Thunder Road, Born to Run, Glory Days, Blood Brothers, If I Should Fall Behind, Secret Garden, The River. There are many more.
George Strait: The Chair, Heartland, The Best Day
Toby Keith: American Soldier, I Love this Bar, Beer for my Horses, Should’ve Been a Cowboy
The Indigo Girls: Ghost, Least Complicated, Power of Two, Get Out the Map

3. What are your musical guilty pleasures?
Meatloaf-I can’t help it; I think he’s great.
ABBA-But don’t tell Michelle (Mama Mia, is a great musical if you can see it)
Grease Soundtrack-Who doesn’t sing along to the Grease Mega-Mix when they play it on the radio? I know you do it when no one’s watching!

4. How old are you? Not in years, but what was the format of the first album you bought on your own: Vinyl, 8-Track, Cassette, CD, or MP3 download? What was the Album?
My first album was the Footloose Soundtrack (add that to the guilty pleasure list) on cassette.

5. What are your plans for the weekend? What music will you listen to?
First, an update on the furniture issue from last week: The furniture company or the shipping company has agreed to send more furniture since the first set was in fact hijacked near Al Fallujah (They must have insurance for that kind of thing). Any way, this time they are going to pay, at their cost, to have it flown into Baghdad International Airport. Thoughts of the Berlin Airlift are hard to suppress.

This weekend I will be happy for my friends Mike and Margaret who celebrate their five-year wedding anniversary on the 29th. Since, they got married on graduation day at West Point, I will be not-so-happy to celebrate my five-year anniversary in the Army on the same day. Before the deployment to Iraq this was to be the day that I officially re-entered the civilian world after nine years in this man’s army.

The soundtrack for my weekend will be the 20 GB of music on my MP3 player set to random. Although at night when I’m going to sleep I set it to play random selections only from the country music genre.

The Friday Five

1. Laying on your back and facing the ceiling, which side of the bed do you sleep on?
At home I sleep on the right side, here I have the whole twin size to myself.

2. Do you have to have covers (blankets and/or sheets) at all costs, no matter the weather?
I love to have lots of heavy blankets. In the summer I like the AC very cold at night so I can still have a blanket.

3. What's under your bed?
All my TA-50. That’s Army speak for all the GI (government issue) field equipment.

4. If you have pets, do you let them sleep with you? Why or why not?
Whitney and Toby are spoiled so of course they sleep in the bed. They are the reason we had to upgrade from Full to King. Before the switch we were sleeping like the grandparents in “Charlie and Chocolate Factory.” As an addendum to question 1: At home I really sleep in the middle. Whitney’s got the right and Michelle takes the left. Toby starts at the bottom somewhere and wakes up somewhere in the middle.

5. What are your plans for the weekend?
Last weekends plans for installing furniture were postponed… Indefinitely. The furniture, after finally crossing the border from Jordan where it was stuck for four weeks, was hijacked near Al Fallujah. This weekend we may go shopping for new furniture downtown.

The Friday Five

It’s been a busy week so this week’s questions will be a little shorter.

1. What toothpaste do you use?
Crest-Tartar Control with Whitening. It’s probably no different from the regular kind but just in case…

2. What color/brand is your toothbrush?
Crest toothbrush for my crest toothpaste. It’s white with blue racing stripes.

3. Do you use mouthwash?
Yes. The new orange citrus Listerine. Love it.

4. What gum/breath mints/breath spray do you use?
Wrigley’s Spearmint, mostly. But also Orbit, and Altoids.

5. What are your plans for the weekend?
We’ve got new furniture arriving for the General Officer’s and we’ll be working late nights to get it in so we don’t disturb them.

Another Side of the President

Our intent is to keep this site strictly about our troop and the craziness in our lives. We will try not post anyhting that is political or contreversial, but someone emailed me the following and I thought it would be appropriate to post it here and share it with you. Here it is:

"Attached is a picture of Mike McNaughton. He stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital. He told Mike that when he could run a mile, that they would go on a run together. True to his word, he called Mike every month or so to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on the run, 1 mile with the president. Not something you'll see in the news, but seeing the president taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and to give hope to one of my best friends was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life. It almost sounds like a corny email chain letter, but God bless him.

Justin P. Dodge, MD
Flight Surgeon, 1-2 AVN RGT
Medical Corps, U.S. Army

Regardless of your stand on this war and the politics that surrounds it I think it is appropriate to pray for both the safe return of all the troops and for wisdom to the nation's leaders.

The Friday Five

1. If you could vacation anywhere in your home state for one week, where would you go? Why?

If I were at home in Texas, I think I would pack the truck with all the camping gear, and head out to the dessert with Michelle and the Pups. We had a lot of fun the last time we went. Maybe this time we’d rent a trailer and head all the way out to Big Bend National Park.

2. If you could vacation anywhere in the United States for two weeks, where would you go? Why?

I think Yellowstone National Park. This would be a nice time to go. End of spring but not too hot yet. The newborn animals are still cute but not so shy that you can’t get some good pictures. I just read in U.S. News and World Report that for $195 (gourmet meals included) you can take a three-to-five-day trek in Yellowstone Park with Yellowstone-Llamas. The llamas will gladly carry all your gear as you hike into the lush backcountry. What fun!

3. If you could vacation anywhere in the world for two weeks, where would you go? Why?

Let me first say that the “Cradle of Civilization” is a little overrated.

There are lots of places I’d love to see. I’m going to disregard Europe because Michelle and I still plan to take a long vacation there when I get out of the Army. So my answer is Australia. I think two weeks in Australia would be an amazing adventure. I’ve met quite a few Australians working on the Joint Coalition Staff and they’ve all been wonderful people who paint an amazing picture of their homeland. From the amazing architecture of the Opera House and Bridge in the Sydney Harbor to the Outback country and Great Barrier Reef there would be so much to see. Plus we could go see Steve Irwin the Crocodile Guy and all the amazing Australian animals at his zoo.

4. [PUT ON YOUR IMAGINATION HAT] If space travel to the Moon and Mars becomes commonplace in your lifetime would you visit either? Why?

I guess if it was commonplace I would go for the novelty of it. But I wouldn’t be one of the first to sign up. You could attribute that to the death of the pioneer spirit, but I think it’s just common sense. I definitely have no desire to live anywhere other than this blue and green cosmic marble we call home.

5. What are your plans for the weekend?

I hope you all have some great plans, because my plan is to sit here at work, read what your plans are, and daydream vicariously (this will be a recurring theme in my posts for the next year).

Puzzle Palace

As I said in an earlier post, I work in the Al Faw Palace. It has earned the nickname the “Water Palace” because it sits in the middle of a man-made lake. I, however, have begun to refer to it as the “Puzzle Palace.” As you can see from the pictures below the palace is enormous.

It is difficult to tell from the pictures, but it has three floors. The windows you can see are from the first and third floors. Most of the rooms around the outside of the palace have vaulted, two-story ceilings. That makes the second floor the smallest of the three. The second floor does have windows but they mostly open onto balconies overlooking interior courtyards.

When you enter the palace, through the largest door I’ve ever seen (takes two hands to push or pull it), you arrive in the main rotunda. The octagon floor, surrounded by huge green pillars is large enough to fit our entire property in Killeen, Texas (house, lawn and driveway!).

My office is at the top of the spiral staircase. If the chandelier were hung a little higher you would see my desk just beyond the balcony. There is only one other staircase, opposite mine. Due to the fact that I am adjacent to one half the palace traffic I spend much of my day giving directions to folks who are lost. Most of the time they are looking for an office on the third floor.

They number the first floor of the building “0,” the second floor “1,” and the top floor “2.” So everyone looking for room 215 searches the entire second floor and then comes to my desk with a look of confusion upon their face. In an effort to become a better tour guide I did a thorough recon of the third floor. It’s huge and the complex network of rooms and hallways can be disorienting; hence, the puzzle palace. Here’s a typical hallway:

The ceilings on the third floor are the tallest in the building. To put it into perspective that is a 7-foot tall cabinet in the shadows of the right foreground.

No one I’ve spoken with knows, with any certainty, how the palace was used before the war. The running theory is that it was a Ba’ath Party Retreat. If you walk around and imagine what the rooms looked like before we filled them with “Dilbert” style cubicles, you can figure out which were meeting rooms, banquet halls, and bedrooms. The bedrooms (typically 1200 square feet) are some of the nicest rooms with large windows and ornate ceiling decorations:

Despite the size and ornate detailing of the palace, there is a lack of substance in its bones. Most of the Marble, which is very beautiful, covers up shoddy craftsmanship. The brick and mortar, electric, and plumbing are sobering sites. It’s no wonder the power goes out and the plumbing fails so often.

With some investment they could turn it into a very nice museum some day. Maybe I’ll come back as a tour guide?

May Trooper of the Month-Toby

The staff at BlueDogTroop.com (Dan and Michelle) has named Toby as the inaugural Trooper of the Month! In the future, each month we will post a new Trooper of the Month. Starting with the June award you will be able to view all the past Award Recipients by clicking on the “Trooper of the Month” category in the web log, to your right.

The Trooper of the Month title will be awarded each month to the trooper who has distinguished him or herself through achievement, accomplishment, or contribution to the troop.

If you are not familiar with Toby or how he came to be a member of the troop, please read about him in his biographical sketch. After we had adopted Toby he proceeded to test our resolve. This is a common reaction among the children Michelle works with in both adoptive placements and foster homes. The kids will often act out and push their limits to see if the parents will give up on them and kick them out, rather than work through the problems. The good parents are consistent and let the kids know that they are a part of the family; if they are bad there are consequences, but no one gets kicked out of the family. We suspect that Toby was similarly motivated. We know someone owned Toby before us, he had a collar, but it was clear that no one cared for him. He would often cry and wince when we raised our arms so it was clear that he had been beaten.

His acting out started with the typical puppy pastime—chewing. He chewed through furniture and baseboard with abandon. When he wasn’t chewing he was busy marking his territory. One can of Resolve later and he was living in the laundry room all day while we worked. That lasted for a little while, and then he started scratching the door. Nothing a little paint wouldn’t fix. The final straw was when scratched/chewed a very large hole through the drywall and was well on his way to tunneling into the garage… We bought a crate.

Since then he has lived in the crate when we are not home. Michelle and I are now both big proponents of crate training. The crate worked great. Toby was much better behaved and we were worry-free at work.

Still we hoped someday Toby could have free reign of the house. Whitney learned to behave fairly quickly and thus won her freedom from the crate, but it seemed Toby was doomed to spending half his day in the crate forever. Every time we gave him a chance to prove himself he failed. It wasn’t his fault; he just wasn’t ready. So, we gave up on trying. Michelle or I made it home for lunch most days, so he got a break and we didn’t feel too guilty.

But, with me deployed and Michelle knowing their would be days she’d work long hours and be traveling we knew we had to try again. And, guess what?

Toby did great! No chewing, no peeing, no destructive behavior at all. He and Whitney just played and slept all day with the house no worse for the wear. Our little man is growing up so fast, (wiping tear from my eye). He now spends most of his days keeping a watchful eye on the neighborhood, napping at the front window, resting his chin on the sill.

So the new soundtrack to Toby’s life is “Freebird,” and he is May’s Trooper of the Month.

Proud parents,
Dan & Michelle