The calls for retreat—I mean—‘phased redeployment’ of American and Coalition forces from Iraq just keep getting louder, now including some Republican Senators who were once hawks but now have poll numbers to worry about.

Yesterday, as I was making final preparations to leave for Iraq, I received a phone call from one of my stateside managers, telling me not to get on the plane, and that my in-country manager wanted me to stay stateside for a while. Today I went into the office to discuss details, and the end result is that I am not returning to Baghdad and am no longer involved with the Iraqi Justice Integration Project.

I am limited in what I can share of the situation without endangering my career, but suffice it to say I feel a grave injustice has been perpetrated. It breaks my heart to think I will not see my Iraqi development team again, and I feel as though I’ve somehow abandoned them by my absence.

I’ve been back in the US over a week now, and I eerily feel as though I never left. As I’ve said before, I didn’t realize I missed so much of life here at home. As I read about the ongoing problems in Iraq, and I hear from my team members about various crises popping up on my project, I find myself reluctant to return.

Obviously I’m still going back, but I didn’t expect it to be this hard. I hope once I get back in country that these feelings will fade and I can focus on our objectives once again. If not, it will be much harder to actually get work done.

I think part of the problem is my disillusionment with the lack of institutional support we receive, and the project-specific turmoil that I left behind. For better or worse, though, that’s the reality of work for my employer, for the US government, and in hard post-conflict environments like Iraq and Afghanistan. If I find it insufferable I can always go home, but I don’t want to leave our Iraqi team.

I recently purchased a black Creative Zen Vision:M portable media player, in the hopes of preserving my sanity while on trans-Atlantic voyages to and from Baghdad, and keeping myself focused during my long and boring cardio workouts.

I previously owned a Creative Zen Micro, which I had a great experience with. However, I spent 20 hours en route home from Baghdad and found myself desperate for some video to pass the time; when I got home I discovered the Zen Vision:M was now widely available, and ordered one immediately.

At last, I’m home from Iraq for a couple weeks of break. I had a great time in Jordan; I particularly loved Aqaba, and will definitely return some day.

I arrived in the US on Sunday afternoon, and have spent the following two days recovering from jet lag and the rigors of life in Iraq. I’m rested and refreshed now, and looking forward to a couple weeks of sloth and gluttony.

We held a memorial for Hamoodi a week ago Sunday. I and the team have moved past our grief and are going forward, and my anger and resentment towards certain managerial elements over the actions following Ahmed’s death have simmered down to a mild bitterness which should be much more bearable. I think Ahmed deserved a longer grieving period than we gave him, but holding on to pointless sorrow is hardly an honorable tribute to his life.

Today, as the team grieved over the loss of Ahmed at the hands of terrorist murderers, more details emerged as to the exact circumstances of his death. Even AP picked up the story as part of a general Iraq update.

Today I was supposed to leave for 3 weeks of R&R, however instead I’m still in Baghdad. One of my local Iraqi tech team was assassinated yesterday, and I can’t bring myself to leave yet.

A2, or ‘Hamoodi’ as we affectionately called him, was a high-profile insurgent target for reasons having nothing to do with our project. He was targeted specifically and assassinated along with his body guards while out in the red zone.

He was always a source of amusement for our team. He had a jovial personality, and consistently made us all laugh. He struggled early on with the tech training, but was coming into his own as a server/network administrator.

He is survived by his wife, and six month old son. He was 23 years old.

I’m past 100 days in country, and it definitely feels like it. Though there remains a degree of excitement and satisfaction with the work I’m doing here, I also can’t wait to get out, first to Jordan for a week of vacation, then back to the US for two weeks of sloth and gluttony. The long days and 6 day workweeks are definitely taking their toll. So much so that I lost track of time (and lost my motivation), which accounts for the two week interval since my last post.

I attended Good Friday and Saturday Vigil masses at the palace for Easter. No matter how many times I go to Mass there, I can’t get over the armed congregation, the piles of body armor and Kevlar helmets at the end of the pews, and the T-walls surrounding the ‘chapel’.

My current project in Iraq is the first time I’ve developed software in another language, and more to the point, in a non-Latin character set.

Our alphabet, which we share with the Latin-based languages of Western Europe and South America, is based on the Latin alphabet of Roman times, which is why we call our character set ‘Latin’ and not ‘English’ or whatever. There are plenty of other alphabets out there, including Cyrillic (used by Russian, among others) and Arabic.

Each of these alphabets, in order to be represented in digital form, has at least one (and, confusingly, sometimes more than one) ‘code page’, which simply means a standard translation of each letter in the alphabet into a number. So, a latin ‘A’ in almost all Latin code pages is assigned the number 65, while the Arabic beh (ب) is assigned its own number in Arabic code pages.

It’s starting to feel like summer in earnest here in Baghdad. We had a bit of rain last Wednesday, which made for an uncharacteristically rich sunset (see below), but otherwise it’s been dry and ever-warmer.

I took the above picture while walking to the BE camp for burger night. To the left of the frame is the perimeter wall of the BearingPoint camp. The street in the photo is a main drag which runs through the IZ and right in front of the palace compound. The jersey walls divide the unmarked roadway into lanes, and the speed bumps from hell force all vehicles to slow to just over 0 MPH before proceeding.