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Welcome to my improvised website about my current aventures in Iraq. For those of you who don't know me (or for those who simply don't remember), my name's Karl, and the Marine Corps Reserve has called me into active service for the time being. I call the greater Richmond area my home, although my parent unit, Charlie Company of the 4th Combat Engineer Battalion is based out of Lynchburg, Virginia.

Pardon the little red X's everywhere, I'm working with what tools I have available and polishing up the details when I can. Below you will find what I have to share in the way of news from the front or whatever's on my mind. Mainly I'll be using the site to post up some of my better pictures as I gather them. All of the pictures I have on this site were taken with my handy little Canon PowerShot A60 digital camera, unless noted otherwise.

2005/January/16-- I've uploaded the second collection of pictures. Most of them were taken from when the armorers were in town to headspace and gauge our crew-served weapons, so some of us spent the day down at the gear shed cleaning them. Incidentally, none of these pictures are organized in any sort of chronological fashion; I try to limit each batch of pictures to eight at a time, so I sort out the better pictures I have and try to group them by category.  

I'll do my best to keep updating the site once a week or so, but if that doesn't happen don't be alarmed; sometimes I just don't feel like dealing with the computers when there are other ways to keep occupied. This month has also been flying by, so my visits to the phonecenter have been a bit less frequent.



2005/January/12-- Working on getting the website up, bear with me. Ignore the little gray box to the right for now; I haven't figured out a use for it yet, but I don't want to get rid of it because it looks cool. Hopefully this website will make it a little easier to share my experiences with everyone back home.  

So, this is the official first update of my Iraq website. I'm pretty much limited to notepad.exe and Internet Explorer for all my editing and uploading, so I had to gut one of the derelict webpages I had floating around cyberspace and sort of reverse engineer it with nothing but plain html code. The first batch of pics should be available for viewing and downloading from the links below; this is the same first set of pictures I sent out via e-mail around Christmas time. I have plenty more pictures that I hope to get uploaded in the near future, so sit tight.

::  PHOTO GALLERY

Fun with Automatic Weapons--
Posted on the 16th of January, 2005

-The FN MAG-58 General Purpose Machine Gun, what the US calls the M240G. It fires the caliber .308 Winchester, or 7.62x51mm NATO, cartridge from a belt.

-Here's that AKM again, shown field stripped into its major components.

-A side-by-side look at an AKM and my M16A2 Service Rifle.

-Note that the AK fires bigger bullets than the diminutive .223 caliber of the M16.

-Little old me with the Kalashnikov.

-The AK does have its weaknesses, but I do prefer its balance and handling qualities to those of the M16 series.

-Group photo of automatic weapons including the M16A2, AKM, M249, and M240G.

-Same group of weapons and their accessories sitting on top of a palcon.

The First Batch--
Posted on the 12th of January, 2005

-A dusty old AKM with a broken buttstock, confiscated on a random vehicle search.

-A view down the Euphrates river, from 10 floors up on top of the Hadithah dam.

-This shot was taken from our room's balcony when they had been testing the floodgates one time.

-It does get cold in the desert, as this frost-covered M249 Squad Automatic Weapon will attest.

-The next 3 pictures are from a helicopter insert and extract we did for one mission.

-The helicopters you see are a pair of Sikorsky CH-53E's.

-When they were returning with the second wave, I was lucky to grab these shots from on top of a 7-ton.

-Me sitting in the back of a humvee waiting for a patrol to start.

-We spotted this on a routine convoy on Christmas Eve. It's an Italian VS1.6 anti-vehicle mine, containing about 1.6 kilos of TNT for its main charge.