"The merit of an action lies in finishing it to the end" - Ghengis Khan

What a bust, huh? My blog started out as a great idea and then fizzled as week after week went by with no post, no ramblings, no random thoughts on life out here in Iraq. So first, I apologize that I sucked you all in and then left you hanging high and dry. I feel pretty lame... and Ghengis's words of wisdom aren't helping me feel any better!

I'm writing this note from one of my last stops in Iraq; Baghdad, in a computer lab on Camp Slayer. Two months ago it seemed that this deployment would never end, but the end has FINALLY come and I'm on my way home.

I have much to thankful for, most importantly that I am slipping away back to U.S. soil without any injury, illness, or damage to my body. I had mentioned indirect fire attacks in an early post; those continued throughout my time in Balad, but to my knowledge none found their targets so no U.S. personnel were injured or killed by them in the past six months. There was a helo crash in Balad about a month ago that injured several and killed one: Specialist Michael S. Cote was his name, originally from Louisianna. It's hard to fathom how it must feel to find out that you've lost a loved one serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. It hurts to think about it. I had members of my team here in Baghdad and also in Tikrit, and I'm happy to say that all of them are returning home safely.

When I hop onto the internet back in the United States, it's going to feel like jumping from 14.4 dial-up circa 1994 back to the present. I constantly tried to remind myself how nice it was that we at least had SOME access to the internet for email, etc., but I grew increasingly frustrated with it throughout the deployment. I have taken for granted the luxury of high-speed internet! I can't remember if I mentioned it back in another blog, but one day when I clicked on a publication that I needed for a qualification I was working on, the computer began to download it and said it would take something like 6 days, 18 hours to download. I made do without it! Here in Baghdad it is only slightly better: I tried to download a word document from Jennifer that had some pictures embedded in it. The computer said it would take 28 minutes to download. Because of those frustrations, my one hour per day on the internet was usually barely enough just to log in, check a few emails, and send a few back. And I did that "in the background" while I talked with my beautiful wife on Skype. What a blessing that was! Seeing your loved ones' faces and talking with them went a long way toward getting me through this deployment.

I feel like I WAS able to see it through to the end. Admittedly, I was in a slightly bitter stage for a couple of weeks about a month ago, the stage where I was just so tired of life in Iraq and ready to go home, like NOW. But that stage quickly gave way to the "happy go lucky" stage when you realize that you are so close to leaving that nothing can bring you down (with the exception of an extension, which thankfully didn't happen to me). But we saw our work through to the end; my team did a lot of great work contributing to getting bad guys off the streets. One of my personal goals was to qualify as an Enlisted Expeditionary Warfare Specialist which I was able to do. It took the majority of my free time for a couple of months, but in the end it was worth it. To many people it may be just another badge for the chest or more of the alphabet added to your Navy title [now I'm CTIC(EXW/NAC/AW) Baldwin], but to me it means that I'm still relevant and contributing to this expanding part of the U.S. Navy mission, the one that is far away from the blue waters of the oceans.

Although I never verbalized it, I brought several books and hoped to end the deployment with more books read than movies watched. I'm proud to say that I watched three movies in six months, but managed to read about 7 or 8 books! Not to say that that was the only "watching" that I did; I watched a season of the TV show "Dexter" and all three seasons of the sitcom "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia". As much as I like TV and movies, when I'm on deployment I find it remarkably easy to live without them.

The next leg of my journey should begin in a few hours. If everything goes as planned I'll be out of Iraq before the new day comes around and my next post just might be from Qatar.

I'm REALLY looking forward to the luxury of communications that we have in the U.S. and catching up with all of you... thank you for all your thoughts and prayers during this deployment!

Marc