After 9 days in the box, you get scruffy...

The mustache looked much better after another week out there. I didn't plan on growing one, just decided that I'd keep it since it was about 3-square inches less I'd have to shave. When we finished and went back to "The Dustbowl" (and running water, hot showers and such) I decided to keep it a bit longer. The battalion XO asked if it was my porno star mustache. The 'stache grew longer, was trimmed to meet AR 670-1 standards and made me look like I was 45 years old.

A shave, haircut and hot shower later, I was back to my baby-faced self, only without the baby face.

I had forgotten how bad 14 days without a shower smelled. Field showers were available for my platoon on about day 10, but since all my guys didn't get to take one, I refused to. Pwew! Thank goodness for baby wipes.

Another thing I appreciate again (not that I didn't already have a "more-than-healthy" appreciation for it before) is good food. Sure, Army chow is pretty good, mostly healthy and only available three times a day. But, there's no MRE that is quite as good as JILL's home cooking. The hot chow was mostly ok, too. But I found myself summarizing the quality of most meals with this phrase, "well, that was remarkably unsatisfying."

Finally, this was probably the last time I'll wear BDU's more than a day or two at a time. We should be receiving an issue of ACU's soon and that's what we'll wear "over there". So, the uniform I spent nearly 18 years in will soon be relegated to the back of the closet or to a bin in storage, only to be taken out when I can no longer justify (in my mind) hauling around clothes that I cannot wear.

I hope that there's lots of newspaper laying around in Iraq. That seems to be the only thing I can find that ACU's blend in with. I guess camoflauge doesn't have the same importance as it used to. {shrug} Wait, is that "legacy" Army thinking? Am I old and out of touch because I'm clinging to the old notion that camoflauge has [had] some importance?

Ugh, I am a dinosaur.

One of my Soldiers joked that, "SFC Nichols' first confirmed kill was a pterodactyl." HA... cough, cough.

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