Sour Swinger Predominantly follows my Army & Iraq Deployment. Also has some Geek, School, and other talk.

This is the second set of pictures from my platoon conducting missions. These show more of my platoon and the people in my units AO (Area of Operation). I picked 5 to show below. Click here to see the entire set. There’s about 50 pics total.

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With the end of our deployment drawing to a close, mission wise things have really calmed down. Our original busy schedule saw little change until we hit mid June. We then dropped back down to only one mission a day with the occasional 2 here and there. With July we saw a change in Coalition presence because of the Iraqi security agreement.

June was especially quiet for me because I was yanked, along with a few others throughout the battalion, to attend a mine detector class. Why so late in the game? Who knows. The system is great however yielded no real application for my company’s given mission. Now if I was an engineer, it’d be different. This class lasted for 2 weeks! Which meant no missions. It certainly felt odd to go from running tactical missions to being in a class room environment. Everyone else in my class had the same weird feeling. Upon completion, I returned to my platoon just before America lessened our presence in Iraq.

Effective June 30th was a withdraw from Baghdad. We further lessened the US presence and handed more control over to the Iraqis. Many units were pulled from their JSS and others lost land coverage. The security agreement itself changed little with my company but it did help the Iraqis declare national sovereignty. Basically they didn’t want to work with us any more. Since most missions require Iraqi Army to be present, we can only really run one type of mission and its pretty quick and mundane. One could say the Iraqis are finally really stepping up to the plate. It comes as a relief because most of us want to leave just as much as the Iraqis want us too. Let them deal with their own problems and so far, their Army is holding up to the task.

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For many of our longer company run missions, we’d setup at a JSS. Here are my videos from within that JSS. Once again (even though I was told I’ve made my point), thank you to my step-mom for uploading these videos. :)

Campaign for Baseball Bats from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

Having already brought out some gloves and a ball, we scoured around for a bat. Worked out…okay. Gumby then jests about donating baseball bats to you the viewers.

Documenting Lunch Break from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

Just me walking around filming our lunch break out on the JSS. Ended up being an 16 hour long mission. At the last few seconds of the clip, Helbert does some comical jog right past my camera. He had no idea I caught it on video.

Football At JSS from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

This is a little football game our platoon came up with. Basically you have two courts with a team in each court. The objective is to throw the ball and hit the other teams court. We never gave it a name. At night we use chem sticks.

Hows It My Fault from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

Just me messing with Goerner. He had made a few remarks because I made Conner take his feet off my seat.

Woody Pitches For Camera from Sour Swinger on Vimeo.

This one is for Woody’s parents whom I know is on my emailing list of readers. He messes up the first pitch but throws a good one the second time around.

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I’m sure everyone has been really itching to see these. This is my first collection set of the children in Iraq. You’ll see a mix of poverty and middle class. Many of the these kids, like Captain Achmed, we see on a regular basis. I picked out 5 pics to display below. You can view the complete set here. There’s almost 60 pictures. Enjoy!

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This is the first set of pictures from my platoon conducting missions. Most of these show the greener areas of the farm land found in my units AO (Area of Operation). I picked 5 to show below. Click here to see the entire set. There’s about 50 pics total.

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These pictures are from a patrol conducted in Abu Ghraib by my platoon. The Iraqi Police were there to assist. Unlike my previous DVIDs posts, I remember this mission well. It was here that SPC Chad Edmundson died the very next day due to wounds from an IED explosion.

The Army has been occasionally embedding Combat Camera in our missions. Photos were taken by Captain Mindy A. Yu. I linked each pic to its free downloadable high res copy. There’s a total of 12 pics. Click here to see them all.

The DVIDS mission is to serve as a turnkey operation that facilitates requests for Public Affairs video, audio, still imagery and print products; coordinates interviews with soldiers and commanders in a combat zone and provides an archive for ongoing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

Basically, DVIDs is where the military official posts audio, video, images, news, etc relating to any current combat operation. Everything is DOD authorized to be released to the public.

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This is just a general announcement to all that come August I will be unable to receive any packages. With the end of the deployment and everyone packing up, any mail that arrives in August has the chance of being lost. Since mail takes about 7 days to get here, I’d advice not sending anything past the last week of July. I’m trying to avoid what happened with Camp Taji where a huge box load of last minute mail was lost.

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