Outside the Wire

I have been in country for exactly 6 days. And all ready I have ventured off post...or "outside the wire". The Wire refers to the borders of the base that is made of concrete and barbed wire. When we are inside the wire...it means we are nice and safe and we can walk around without much fear. The real danger is on the other side of the wire...where the natives live. That is filled with danger (or so we are told). Usually when soldiers go outside the wire, they go in convoys (usually up-armor humvees) but that is really dangerous because of all the risks we face with road side bombs and snipers. But I am with an aviation unit...and we dont use no stinking humvees. We use Black Hawks. (which do sometimes crash or get shot down but not that often.) Tuesday morning I got up very early and caught a flight to Baghdad to meet with important legal folks down in the "Green Zone". That was pretty cool I must say. Then we went to see some of the sites around town, including the court house where Saddam was arraigned and one of his many palaces (which is now the home of the Coalition Forces). I went on a little tour of the palace and then took some pics. I will be uploading them shortly. Later in the day, I got back on the helicopter and headed back. I was interesting seeing this big city. But I was surprized that there was no skycrapers. Its not what I expected. Almost all of the structures were one or two floors. It looked like one really big trailer park. Haha. With about 8 million people living down there. The highest structures in town are the Mosques and Saddam's palaces. Outside the city there were many small villages that looked very primitive. Some of the mud huts had satellite dishes on their roofs though. Go figure. Haha. Overall my trip was enjoyable. I still want to meet some real Iraqis...but that could be hard to do. The ones I really want to talk to are "outside the wire" and lots of people outside the wire want to kill us. So we will see. Oh yeah...I will tell you why they call the place I am stationed "Mortaritaville". But thats for another blog.