Autumn in Iraq

Hello everyone! Well, it is October already. I'm not sure where September went, but I'm glad its gone. I'm happy to report that nothing interesting has been happening in my world here at the clinic. Lots of dealings with stock control, medications, expiration dates, and such.

I've been "outside the wire" a few times in the past couple of weeks, but nothing notable has happened. We are bumping up patrols and security, however, for the Islamic holiday of Ramadan. Also, the Iraqis will be voting this month to adopt the proposed constitution or to scrap it and start over. Due to these two occasions, Ramadan and the referendum, the violence is expected to escalate this month. Already we've seen an increase in attacks in our area of operations, most of them against Iraqi Police and Iraqi Army as well as civilians.

Hopefully my unit and the other units at our camp can get through this month without incident. We've only got about a few months to go and then we're home-free. This weekend, in fact, we packed up all of our non-essential gear to be shipped home. That was an exciting step towards the ultimate goal: wrapping up this mission.