…a few things to say on the subject of towels.

Bonus points to the first commenter who catches the reference in the title. As to the rest of the post, here’s what kept me from posting last week:

Note the lack of pretty much anything in the photo. Sandstorms pretty much nix air travel. And, considering that picture was taken north of Tikrit, I wasn’t exactly able to get to my computer and edit the photos for a weekly update. I got the opportunity to fly up to Tikrit to the IA 4th Division G2 conference, and although the meeting was as expected (boring, uneventful, and fairly schizoid), the subsequent sandstorm and stranding were completely Un-expected. A couple of lessons learned from the whole affair, so it wasn’t a complete loss professionally, and a couple of good photos, including one spectacular one made it an overall positive. First, on the way up, I noticed we were crossing Tampa above one of our checkpoints, so I took the opportunity to shoot a couple of pics in passing. Here’s one of the checkpoint shots:

A bit further northwest, we flew over a farming area, and the ‘crop circles’ where the irrigation arms watered the barren nothingness were rather strange. Instead of the same setup in the states producing crops in a sea of grass, these were crops surrounded by a sea of dirt. It’s not exactly desert in the way Kuwait was, all covered in sand, but up away from the river there is very little ground cover.

We landed at an IA FOB which used to be the grounds and buildings for one of Saddam’s palaces there in Tikrit. Feeling he had been left out recently, Quirk decided to tag along and was very pleased at the palatial spread.

Of note, the script-looking “E” on the front of the building is actually the Indian numeral “4”. Sidenote: English uses Arabic numerals, while for some reason, Arabic switched at some point in the past to an Indian numeral set. Weird, I know. Anyway, the back side of the palace overlooked the Tigris, being built on the cliffs some 40 feet above the water:

As I said, the conference was pretty much a goat-rope, mostly because it transitioned from a US led endeavor to an IA ‘led’ affair in the last week prior to execution. Reference here my comment in the last post about sticking to a calendar / schedule… SFC Shuck was not pleased. Of course after we flew to a US fob to await the return flight to O’Ryan, we got weathered in. I thought we’d escaped the large tent with cots scenario when we got out of Kuwait, but the ADACG transient housing tents at Speicher were thus:

We finally caught the birds, which did wonders to improve SFC Shuck’s mood:

And finally, the Coup de Grace. While flying East off the Tigris south of Samarra, I noticed a ziggurat off to our South and managed to crack off two shots with le-point-and-shoot. The native image was about 11* off camber, and almost didn’t leave enough to rotate and crop the photo, but Photoshop was kind, and after some auto-leveling to help reduce the dust, I came out with the following:

I’ve got a slightly larger and clearer image, but this should suffice for most wide-screen computer desktops. The other image is also considerably larger, and considering the tones are mostly browns, the ‘saved for web’ image isn’t degraded too much. I’ll take the time to find the actual location on Google Maps when I get a chance, but since the internet here in the MWR lab is giving me fits (along with the crappy mouse), I’m punting on that goal.