Hello again all. Time once again for the news. Got a couple interesting things to discuss for the start of this month.

For the past several days I’ve been at Camp Beuhring in Udairi, Kuwait, undergoing extensive training in the Army’s UAV program, or ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’. You may have seen them in passing on the news a couple years ago during the height of the Afghanistan war. There are various classes of UAV’s ranging from very small planes used for recon only, to large birds that can carry and deliver a small explosive payload. The type that the army is issuing out to various units here in Iraq are the Shadow and Raven-class planes. Our unit specifically is getting one Raven-class system, which is used strictly for reconissance. I’m not at liberty to discuss the exact capabilities of this UAV, for obvious reasons… but let’s just say it’s going to make our job much easier in terms of general scouting and recon, route-clearing, and so forth. The opportunity to keep ‘Joe’ from getting into harms way just went up several notches, and I’m very proud to be directly involved. It was an honor to be chosen for such training, and I hope to put that training to good use.

With that being said – I have already posted some pictures of the training we’ve received down here in Kuwait (yes, I’m still here, but will be returning back ‘home’ soon ;-) ) and will be posting more soon. To all the wives/girlfriends and familes from the rest of my platoon who watch the photo album for pics – sorry, it’s just me and the two guys who went with this time :-P No worries tho, normal platoon picture-taking will resume once I return.

Now, something else that may be of some interest… well, to ‘me’ anyway. I have a good friend who’s stuck up in Kirkuk, and the only way she really has of communicating with anyone online is through a web-based community that she is a part of, called deviantart.com. Her AKO account got screwed up, plus the system she has access to filters just about everything under the sun, and so forth… anyways, I set up an account at deviantart.com so we could msg back and forth. This site just happens to represent a very large artistic community, covering a wide range of styles, from drawings, to painting, to photography, to poems and stories… you name it, it’s there. And it’s very interactive, you can comment on and discuss any featured ‘deviation’ that ya want. Great source of some very cool wallpaper and OS skin art if that’s your thing. So I said to myself ‘What the hell, go ahead and submit something… so I did. A drawing (hah) and a couple choice pictures that I’ve taken that you can already find here. My own page there is at k-2.deviantart.com if ya wanna drop by and take a look. Yeah I know… K-2. Username had to be at least three characters long. I hate that. So go take a look, there are some extremely talented writers and artists that are part of that community.

OK, gotta run. Wrapping up training, and the final written test and assessment is in a few hours. Time to study ;-) Catch ya later folks.

K2