Miss M2

Business traveller, on the left is what I travel with when I'm on business here in Baghdad. From top to bottom; IBA (Individual Ballistic Armor, a.k.a. bullet proof vest), M4 rifle with 210 rounds of ammo, ballistic helmet, video camera, Garmin GPS, laptop computer, external hard drive. Not pictured is my M9 pistol with 30 rounds.

On the right is my vehicle of choice, an uparmored desert tan BMW. If you have to roll through the streets of Baghdad, you may as well do it in style. Not really. But I did see this beemer in Baghdad. While I did take everything in the first picture with me, I sadly wasn't able to take the BMW on my recent trip to Victory Base. I was at Victory for the last couple days to attend a logistics conference at my battalion. Nothing really useful came out of it, it was all stuff that we covered during the ADVON (advanced deployment) so I tried to just enjoy not having any real responsibilities and getting some extra sleep. While I was there I took some beginner boxing classes and oh man, does my back hurt. I guess sleeping on cots doesn't help any either. In any case it was nice to relax for a bit. While I was out I picked up some presents to send back, don't anyone get your hopes up though, it's nothing to hoot about.

Good eats & good drinks, on the left we have our coffee bucket. We have a foot locker (about 3 feet long, one foot tall, one foot wide) full of assorted coffee that our friends and family have sent us.
On the right, our pet scorpion, Fluffy. We found fluffy scuttling along past our office door one evening. As you can see in the picture, I bravely picked him up by his tail with my Gerber. Seeing as how he was minding his own business and wasn't bothering anyone, I made sure to not crush his tail when I picked him up. We ended up setting Fluffy free, but of course we took a ton of pictures.

Miss America blasts the terrorists! Yes everyone, this is actually a picture of Miss America firing a M2 .50 caliber machine gun at terrorists. She's a pretty good shot too, knocked off 12 in the first burst. It doesn't matter if the background repeats or stops after her picture, this picture is authentic. Yessir, 100% authentic...