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My hand has been on the quick release for a few days now and as I pack up my cameras I'm ready to get out of Iraq and start working on my tapes and start planning my next trip to Iraq.
Dropping your pack is the term for letting up your guard, intentionally losing your edge. When you are in Iraq you keep your pack on. You are always ready to go.
But when you hit Kuwait or when the plane lifts off or when you hit U.S. soil, you drop the pack.
I'll be out of here soon, but Michael Yon is still in Iraq doing the kind of reporting no one else will--living with the grunts day in and day out, going on patrols and missions and staying in Iraq for a year or more at a time.
Matt Sanchez is the new writer in town. He's upstream from Fallujah seeing the awakening in person.
And of course Iraq The Model is the indispensible website for understanding the nature of this emergency in Iraq.
And as the military slowly opens up to independents and bloggers, there will be others who drift through to report on the emergency in Iraq first hand.
I will be back in the late Summer or early Fall. In each area I went to I gave the Battalion or Company Commander the opportunity to pick the criteria in which I would judge their success or progress.
Going back and following up in each area with the criteria selected by the commander will be the benchmark needed to see the state of Iraq as the Surge moves into its second phase and the Awakening matures a few months.
There will be more blog posts to come. I'm sure that as I go through my tapes and notes I will find plenty of material I neglected while in Iraq due to time constraints.
While I'm here I will hammer out posts as fast as I can type with little or no thought put into them. I try to get 5 or more in the hopper to be posted while I'm out with a unit then hammer out another 5.
Hopefully the quality will improve some--but I doubt it.
To everyone who has bought a DVD, thank you. If you have not bought a DVD you should. A lot of what I write here will make more sense if you have a frame of reference like the deployment of Vengeance Platoon in 2005.
The new video material--however it is released--will make a lot more sense to people who have watched Outside The Wire on DVD than those who have not because it does allow you to see parts of Iraq in 2005 then compare them to 2007.
As for right now--my pack is still on, but the quick release is ready to be pulled.
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