From 30 to 3 and mastering my greetings...

Today is a great day! Today we move out of the tents and into the barracks! This means I can shower and use the bathroom in the same building and not walk outside a few hundred feet first. It also means there will be only 3 to a room instead of the 30 I'm living in one tent with now, therefore I might have some shred of privacy in my day. The double edged sword is that I know nothing about my two roomates - both of whom are pilots in my squadron. I think they're both married and my age and neither of them dip tobacco like 90% of everyone else out here so there won't be half empty dip cups filled with brown spit lying around everywhere (like in the work spaces). (Thank God for small favors, right?)

Otherwise, I'm getting down my 'Marine Greetings'. It's amazing, marines have about 20 different non-sensical ways to say hello to one another, each with a corresponding response that makes equally little sense but sounds really tough. For example, the standard greeting is 'ORAH' (pronounced ooo-rah). So one might say, 'ORAH Marine'. The response could be one of several - they might say 'ORAH Marine' right back, or just say 'ORAH ____' where the blank is your rank (i.e.- ORAH Corporal, ORAH Lieutenant (that's me), or ORAH Doc (what they also call me)) ...Now saying ORAH all day gets kind of mundane, so here's where the art of the language comes in. You could walk past another marine and growl like a dog - 'RRRRR' (pronounced errrr). Usually if you do this the response is simply 'RRRRR' right back. However if you greet someone with 'Semper Fi' (pronounced sem-pur-fye), the response is usually also 'RRRRR' but some marines will also reply 'Do or Die'. This rhymes (Semper Fi,... Do or Die!) and it kind of flows so I like this one, although it's not that popular. Some hard core long time marines will say 'Kill' which is another way to say hello. This is usually used as more of a goodbye, 'Kill Marine', for example as you walk away from a conversation, but much like 'Aloha' it can mean both, or so I've heard. Now there are also combinations of the above that incorporate a marine's nickname, 'Devil Dog' into the mix. (The origon of this nickname is lengthy and I'll tell you later). One might say 'Semper Fi Devil Dog' or 'ORAH Devil Dog', but for some unknown reason I rarely hear 'Kill Devildog', my personal opinion is that the combination of 'Kill' and 'Devil Dog' is too powerful, even for a marine to say, and so unless you're in the middle of a battle fighting a terrorist considering whether or not you should blow his head off and seeking the advice of a fellow Devil Dog to make that decision, 'Kill Devil Dog' is usually ommitted as a hello. It's also important to note that if you say 'Semper Fi Devildog' or 'Semper Fi Marine', the response cannot be 'Do or Die' - for obvious reasons... the third word after the Fi will negate the rhyming of the enitre phrase. Personally, I'm a fan of 'Hello' and 'Good Morning' and since I'm in the Navy and not a Marine anyway, my greeting would be something to the effect of "Good Morning Shipmate (or Sailor), It's a fine Navy Day!", but I'd probably get stripped down naked and thrown into a mudpit full of Camel Spiders if I said this, so I tend to say 'ORAH' and see what I get in return. As Forrest Gump put so eliquently, "Life's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get!" Very true Forrest, very true.

Enclosed is a map of Iraq (unclassified). Baghdad is the orange city in the center of the map and AL Asad (my airbase) is the little red triangle just above the R in IRAQ, about 100 miles away. A lot of the bombings and terrorist action happen southeast of here. Some of you have asked.