New Year's Resolution #1: Never Stop Posting!

COS Sykes NYE Party... yeah wasn't feeling it, haha

The title of my post is a reference to a catchphrase from the Something Awful forums, as well as my New Year's resolution to write more. I wasn't good about keeping a journal in Iraq other than my bimonthly newsletters to friends, so I'll make up for lost time here. I feel like not only is reflecting on my experiences good for self improvement, but I'll also be able to record more Iraqi memories before I forget them all.

Honestly, New Year's Eve 2010 wasn't great or anything - COS Sykes outside Tal Afar was a big base in terms of real estate, and once housed thousands of US troops when Iraq was completely melting down circa 2005-2006, but by the time I got there it was down to roughly 400-450 people, and the base was shutting down any day - eventually it happened that the base wasn't officially closed until July, but I don't think anyone knew when exactly the big day would happen. In fact one of my responsibilities was to help shut down the PRT branch office operations... a big pain in the ass, but that's a story for another day.

In any case, being my second day on base and still getting used to things... I wasn't really feeling the New Year's spirit, haha. I showed up to the official base party just to take a look around, and there was about a dozen or so soldiers and other people... not knowing anyone was kind of a drag, so I ended up leaving the party and going to sleep early, haha.

My office trailer

The State Department had its own little office compound that I ended up managing as part of my "Operations" responsibilities. For example, if the roof started leaking in the conference trailer, I called KBR to get it fixed, among other responsibilities! What was nice was DOS had their own contracted civilian internet for this office compound - it was nice because the alternative would have been paying around $100 a month out of my own pocket from a local contractor, oftentimes I would stay late at the office to go online and talk to friends. Another thing that helped was that my coworkers were very helpful for the most part, and I worked for a great boss. Apparently they used to have two people covering my responsibilities (a lieutenant colonel and a staff sergeant at one point in time) and then