IM'd with my brother!

While such a mundane event isn't normally post-worthy, this is a bit different, as my brother is currently in Iraq. He's stations near a town called Jallulah or Jawallah depending on the map you look at. It is northeast of Baghdad in a predominantly Kurdish area. His FOB gets rocketed a couple of times a week, but he says nothing's landed closer than a couple of city blocks away. They've found several large caches of weapons and ammunition, and a made several arrests of insurgents trying to sneak in from Iran. He's not yet fired his weapon nor been fired on, and he & I both agreed it would be just fine if that's how it stayed.

His company has only 5 armored hummvee's, and they've been told that isn't going to change for awhile. WTF! Why do they even make a model that isn't armored? He and everyone in his company have body armor. They never take the plates out, and are constantly telling each other "remember Blackhawk Down". That makes me feel a bit better.

Some things never change, and moving the mail is one of them. He says it takes 2-3 weeks for mail to arrive, letters moving faster than packages. At least he gets them, but it's weird thinking it takes that long to get a letter but the base where they are stations has 20 laptops for the guys to use to send e-mail and IM.

We cut our conversation short when his wife got on-line so he could chat with her. I don't think I could realistically imagine how that chat is going. He's supposed to be there until some time next summer. He may get leave to Germany, but we don't know when. If he does I'm sure that my extended family will do everything we can to get his wife and kids to be able to go over and see him. We'll see in time, I suppose.

update

Fark had a timely link to this article on MSN about the lack of armored humvees in Iraq. It seems my brother is not alone.

The article also mentioned one soldier who trained in a Bradley (an armored personnel carrier with an enclosed gun turret designed to support tanks with infantry and be an anti-anti-tank weapon), and then was switched to an unarmored humvee. I personally wonder if the dept. of defense is purposely doing this bone-headed stunts because they think that they will save money.