Valen...Valentino?

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!! It's a lovely February day here, especially if you've witnessed it since 3:30 in the morning! You can see below how happy PV2 Witt was with the situation.

We spent the night in the field again last night, much to our chagrin, only this time we were practicing snap TCP's, which are nothing more than really quickly assembled traffic control points. They are mainly used in a combat patrol situation, where a small group of vehicles can block traffic and possibly interdict enemy movement. We began training for this yesterday afternoon with some classes and such. This morning we got up nice and early and went out to do them for real. I was the medic in the bunch, and also the patrol leader's driver. This meant that all I had to do was sit in the Humvee and be ready to move.

rollin' and tumblin'

Since it was the leader's vehicle, we also had the interpreter with us. He was a nice chap, from Egypt. We chatted all about soccer and stuff, and we told him about Valentine's Day, which he had no previous knowledge of. After struggling through the proper pronunciation, we finally hit the nail on the head: a day where guys spend alot of money to impress women that otherwise may pay them no heed whatsoever. He seemed pretty impressed, and maybe was even a bit eager to come to America to woo a few ladies for himself! He kept taking our rifles, pointing them into the air and shouting, "I'm a tourist, I'm a tourist!" It was quite funny.

me, Van and the translator

We saw some neat sights on the road, mainly these dirt mounds:

The big ones are all old Iraqi tank emplacements from Desert Storm back in '91. What's funny is that we're in northern Kuwait, not far from the Udairi Range, and the emplacements all face northwest, which is back towards the Iraqi border. We invaded from Saudi, which from this point is more due south than anything else. No wonder they lost the war.

Here's a few more good pictures from the day:

not what you want to run into

you'd want to run into this even less

beef ravioli MRE...hmmmm

I have one last complaint to speak of. Notice in the MRE above, there are two boxes. One is the main dish, and the other is usually some kind of side or dessert. In this case it is really bad mixed fruit in syrup. Now, after eating this, would I really want to fill out the postcard on the back and send it to someone? Plus, MRE's are meant to be eaten in a field environment, and the last time I checked, the field doesn't include any post offices to speak of. Especially not in places like Iraqistan. Funny, that's all.