Statues and Pictures and MRAPs, oh my!

No sooner had I made the last entry about not getting any photographs, than I got a chance to make some.  We went out for pizza today at lunch.  On the way there, we stopped to see the Saddam statues.  These huge things are bronze.  They're in storage on an American-controlled compound for their own safekeeping.  Saddam had them made with his features in a military uniform wearing headgear from the old Assyrian or Persian empires.  Ego-strokers.  If they were out in Baghdad proper, they'd have been destroyed by now.  Here they're safe from physical destruction if not the wit and wisdom of the occasional graffiti writer.

Going around the IZ is interesting.  Security is tight and checkpoints are everywhere.  So are military vehicles.  Humvees and MRAPs are particularly plentiful.  Everybody is familiar with the Humvee, but MRAPs are new.  They're tall and narrow, with V-shaped undersides to deflect the blast from an IED.  There were a bunch of Bradleys around, too, which are armored troop carriers with tank treads and some pretty heavy-duty guns.  And there were plenty more types of vehicles, some of which I'd never seen before.  This display of high-tech warfare prowess is straight out of the old Star Wars movies.  Come to think of it, the dining facilities can be, too.  Remember the barroom scene in the first Star Wars movie?  Go into one of the dining facilities and you can see soldiers and civilians from dozens of different countries in all kinds of garb.  Heck, I've seen an Arab sheikh in full regalia, a Dominican nun, workers from Kenya and Pakistan and who knows where, security force guards from maybe Bolivia, soldiers from Ukraine and Australia, and carabinieri from Italy (the carabinieri are bad-ass police officers - you do not mess with them in Italy!).  It's a bit disconcerting to see a young girl who looks like she should be in high school, going through the chow line with a big honking automatic rifle slung casually over her shoulder.  

I'm still getting up to speed at my job.  Remember when I said last week that I'd soon be making decisions on things I'd never heard of the week before?  It's happening.  I'm still on the steep side of the learning curve, but this afternoon I scribbled out a to-do note to myself and realized the whole thing was acronyms.  Nothing but letters and numbers that would've been completely meaningless just a few short days ago.  I'm learning a whole new process, figuring out who does what to whom, how it's done, why, and what's been done in the five years since the rebuilding process got started.  Frankly, it's kinda fun.  Like riding a skateboard down a steep hill and you're barely hanging on, much less in control.  I just hope I don't crash and burn!

My sleep cycle is still totally messed up.  I cannot get more than 3-4 hours at a stretch.  Then my eyeballs pop open and I'm ready to go.  Except it's maybe 1 in the morning and there are still six or seven hours before I need to get to work.  So I hit the gym or pool, do laundry, read, write in this blog, and go back to bed and try for another couple of hours.  Then between about 3 and 9 pm, I'm completely brain-dead.  Most annoying.  Everybody says it takes two weeks to get adjusted, but I've been here longer than that, and my body clock is still out of whack.

So right now it's about a quarter to four in the morning.  I'm gonna try for another couple hours of sleep.  'Night, all!