Letter From Iraq #15

Another week is over her in Iraq (and everywhere in the world I guess too) and all in all I would have to say that is have been a pretty good week.  The weather has been starting to get a little more active since the “rainy” season has started and so work has started getting busier and therefore the time goes a lot faster.  I’m sure that the excitement of the upcoming holidays has the time moving quickly for everyone.  Hopefully you all are taking a little bit of time out of your busy holiday schedules to spend time with friends and family.

Speaking of spending time with friends and family I figured that I would talk about some of the ways that people over here in Iraq are able to keep in contact with their friends and family.  Actually the idea for this letter came from my girlfriend Megan.  We have been really fortunate on this deployment in the fact that we are able to talk to each other almost every day, with the exception of when work gets in the way and things are just a little too busy.  Megan was wondering how most people are able to contact their loved ones if they don’t have a computer that they work at or if they don’t have a phone in their office that they call home on.  She was also wondering how people here get emergency information from back home if its necessary.

As I said earlier, Megan and I are fortunate in the fact that we are able to talk most every day with some of the tools that the military has given me.  Most days be are able to chat online through a web site called the Air Force Portal.  This site is only available to members of the Air Force and other employees of the AF.  With my full status on the site I am able to give people a guest account so that they can also use the chat server on the site.  The other branches of the military also have similar sites.  Now I’m not sure about the Marines of the Navy but I do know that the Army Knowledge Online site also has a chat server.

Now days everywhere you turn you can find a place to send emails.  This is a valuable tool for everyone in the military to keep in touch with their friends and family back home.  There are also sites like Myspace.com and Facebook.com that allow you to network with all of your friends from one site and at the same time keep up to date on their lives as well so that you don’t feel so far away.  There are several places that allow you do communicate in this way.  From work I am able to get to my email and so I can always write from there.  Networking sites like Myspace and Facebook are a little more difficult though.  The military is very leery about sites like this because of how easy it is to pass along information and the fact that it’s easily viewable by anyone.  It is a valid concern because even releasing a little information about a Post or about an operation can be dangerous.  So to try and thwart excessive information from getting out they have blocked sites like that on military computers.  In order to access these types of sites you have access them from other internet sources.

I find that the easiest way to access the internet is to pay to have it in my CHU (Compartmentalized Housing Unit, also known as, my little metal box I call home).  The only problem with the internet that is available to have in your room is the fact that it is quite expensive and it isn’t very fast, but at the same time it’s better than not having anything.  For those people who choose not to pay for the internet in their room they also have the Morale Welfare and Recreation (MWR) sites available to them.  The MWR also has many other things available such as books and videos.  They have computers there that can be used to send emails and chat.

When it comes to calling back to the States, I have it made in that department too, because I am able to make phone calls at work by calling through Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington and from there I can call my girlfriend or any other local number.  Most military installations will give you the ability to call local numbers from an outside line in an effort to cost less in calling cards.  The nice thing is that the call back to the military installations is also free.  But there are people who don’t work in an office and therefore don’t have a phone that is available to them to call back home and so the military has set up call centers on the bases and so we are able to call home using those phones as well.

Now when it comes to getting emergency information to the troops from their families back home the military has a system in place that isn’t just used during times of war.  The American Red Cross is the organization that gathers the information from the family and with that information locates the service member to notify them of a death or illness in the family.  As long as the family has the service member’s social security number the Red Cross is able to locate most anyone in the military.  But they don’t just deliver bad news.  Sometimes when a family wants to pass a note to a service member because they haven’t heard from them in a while they can contact the Red Cross and they will do that also.

So as you can see we have many different ways to communicate with our friends and families back home and we even have ways to get messages from our families back home.  As I sign off this week I want to say thank you to everyone who has written or sent packages in the last couple of weeks.  I would love to name everyone but it would take a whole article to just to list everyone because there have been a lot of boxes coming in lately.  I would like to send a special thanks to the members of Word of Life Baptist Church and Saint Pius V Catholic Church both in New Salem for their packages.  I also want to thanks my grandparents, Baldwin and Irene Ternes, for the packages that they sent.  We got the Christmas lights and though I haven’t put them up yet but I will be putting them up soon and the food is going over very well.  The cookies are already gone (and I ate most of them myself).

If you have a question that you would like to ask or just want to say Hi feel free to email me at john.iraq@hotmail.com.  If you would like to write and send the letter through the post office my mailing address is:

SSgt Ferderer, John B.

F Co. 5-158 AVN (AF Weather)

FOB Diamondback

APO, AE 09334

Until we meet again, Have A Great Air Force Day!