CRSP-y Critters

Hello, everyone! As I'm sure you can see and have heard, we've made it safely to lovely Camp Striker, Iraq. It is part of a compound called VBC, which stands for Victory-BIAP Complex. It's nothing more than a fancy name for all the camps that surround the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). We are in Striker, which is the more remote of the three major camps here. The other two are Camp Victory and Camp Liberty. I got to see them in my quest for a Playstation Portable, and are they nice.
I understand that it's been a week since my last post, but trust me, things have been busy. We had a little "incident" regarding the database at work and that's had me working like mad to get it caught back up. Now, back to the story...
Liberty is where the biggest PX and Bazaar are, so it's more of a shopping destination than anything else. (I got the PSP, by the way, but I had to order it from Amazon, stupid PX.) Either way, both of the posts have trees and vegetation, where we have concrete and rocks. I guess that's because we, at Striker, live about 300 meters away from "the wire," or the external boundary of the Complex. Apparently, the last unit that was here said that mortars used to get shot over their heads towards the airport, but fortunately no live rounds landed here. They had one dud hit the ground, though. All in all, I guess it isn't too bad.
We work at what is called a CRSP (pronounced crisp) which stands for Central Receiving and Shipping Point. My platoon also runs a Class I (sustenance items) warehouse. I work at the CRSP. We deal mainly in containers, large loads and Class VII (major end-items) stuff. I work in the office. I practically run the place on many occasions, being the principal data clerk for night shift. Since we work with class VII, we usually get in new vehicles that are going somewhere in this general area. Alot of what we get are up-armored Humvees, but occasionally we get really cool stuff, like this Bradley Fighting Vehicle that I drove around a bit:

grrrrr!

It was neat. Oh yeah, this is what the CRSP looks like:

that's cargo section. guess what goes there?

It's not too much to look at, but it's something to do.
The other day we had to go to Victory for a short class on CMST (it's a container management system... more work stuff) and the class was held inside of one of the buildings of the Al Faw palace complex. The entire complex was built as a hunting and relaxation retreat for Sadaam to commemorate the Iraqi victory over Iran in the Al Faw peninsula. That's down south, where Basrah and Umm Qasr are, on the water. In order to "faithfully" recreate the feel of being coastal, there are several man made lakes here, and the palace is sitting smack in the middle of one of them. Here are some pictures:

the water smells

i think that's a mosque

yes, that mural's of their entire army

al faw palace, it's on a small island

hey honey, i bought us a house!

Anyway, that's about all I've got for the moment. We had a pretty cool total lunar eclipse here the other night, and I got some ok pictures of it, but I really could've used my 35mm to capture it perfectly. Oh well, I'll still put up the pics that I have.
Oh yeah, I promise that I won't wait a week to post anything new, ok? Check back soon!