Don't look!

I left Germany for Iraq on 14 November 2005. The picture here is one that I took on that day of my sweetie. After I was in country for about a month and a half, I got an email with a countdown clock attached to it. You put in the day you arrived and it's supposed to show how much longer you have left before you go home. I remember opening it up on day 60 and day 70, but I can't remember exactly which days that was on. What I'm trying to do is check the clock every 10 days or so, I figure that if I look every 10 days that means that I'll only be looking about 35 times, hopefully to make the time go faster. The problem is that since I've lost track of the last time I looked I don't know if I'll be looking on day 80 or not, wouldn't want to ruin my streak. I think what I'll do is wait until Saturday to look, that should be at least day 80 by then. I'd rather see day 84 when I'm expecting day 80 than the other way around, kind of like when you go to work thinking it's Thursday and there's one more day until the weekend when it turns out that it's really Friday. That's always fun, unless you have a meeting early Friday that you don't have on Thursday so you missed it because you thought it was Thursday ramble ramble...

On a side note, I've been putting a lot of thought into pro/anti-war politics and support-the-troops-not-the-war people lately and came to a crossroads that I think will help the debate turn from a random stampede into something of an organized race. I was discussing this with one of the contractors that works for me and he told me that he opposes the war and thinks we shouldn't be here. When I called him on the fact that he is opposed to the war, but clearly benefitting from it he replied that he supports the troops, but not the war. Over the course of the conversation I was able to make a distinction that I think will help clear up some of this confusion. The troops are the war, without troops there is no war so if someone supports troops they support the war. What I think people mean when they say that they support troops, but not the war, is that they support the war effort, but not the reasons behind the war. Now that we are in fact at war, these people support our troops, and thereby the war-effort, but they don't support the reasons behind the war. This I can understand and abide by. In fact, this showcases what makes the States so great, people argue and debate, but in the end pull together and make it happen. This guy thinks that President Bush is one of the worst presidents in our history, but now that the chief executive made the decision to send troops to the fight, we (Americans) need to do what we can to win the war and get home. To this I say, "Hooah!"