The world keeps spinning, and in my life, the direction of the spin is towards the country of Iraq. I don’t have official orders yet but the omens and portents indicate a long journey ahead of me.
My National Guard unit is passing along information about where we might end up, and when we might end up there. It’s all speculation at this point. No one really knows what we’ll be doing, but we are military journalists, so it’s likely I’ll be spending a year shooting video and assembling the stories of soldiers participating in our occupation of that country.
The stories I write for my command will have a positive slant. Our job is to report the positive, not the negative. We are a propaganda tool.
It will be interesting to form my own opinions about the reality of life as an occupier. I intend to try and learn the basics of Arabic prior to arriving in country. I do not want to rely on others to tell me what is going on around me, especially when my continued existence could depend on my ability to understand what is being said.
I am trying to make my mind into a tabula rasa in regards to expectations about this journey, but I’ll fail, as usual. I’ve created a new category in this blog – Citizen Soldier for the purposes of documenting my time away from home. I’m going to teach my wife how to keep my blogging server up and running so I can post my experiences and share them with her and a few friends, as well as the people who randomly visit this blog.