FOB Marez, Mosul __ If anybody’s wondering what the rooms for enlisted soldiers look like here, Tony took this picture.
“It’s about one and a half times a jail cell,” said the soldier in the picture, Pvt. Chris Walters.
It’s pretty small, but still beats living in a tent with cots.
Walters is a 20-year-old from Carson City Nevada. I’ve mentioned him before in a story.
Walters married his wife, Sarrah, right before deploying from Fort Lewis to Iraq. He downloaded Internet phone software so he can call her and get voice mail messages on his computer.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ Fort Lewis soldiers doing counter-IED work in the streets of Mosul say there is a strange rumor among the locals.
Apparently people are saying that the Americans are planting the IED’s themselves to justify staying in Iraq longer. When pressed by Fort Lewis troops, Iraqis tend to admit they know this isn’t true. But somebody keeps spreading the rumor around anyway.
Fort Lewis soldiers I’ve talked to find it amusing that people think they are doing things to stay in Iraq. They’d like nothing more than to finish this and go home to the U.S.
-- Sean Cockerham

FOB Marez, Mosul __ It is really hard here to keep up with what is going on in the world.
Internet access is very limited. There are sometimes copies of the Stars of Stripes newspaper around, but they are a week old at best.
I’m vaguely aware there is another Congressional scandal going on. Even the news from elsewhere in Iraq is hard to follow.
I get the sense that it’s the same for most of the soldiers. They might catch a few minutes of Armed Forces Network news between missions, but prized Internet time is often spent emailing instead of checking out the news.
Some events, though, do grab people’s attention. Everyone was talking about the small plane that crashed into a New York high rise.
Fort Lewis soldiers all wanted to know whether it might be terrorism. It turned out not to be. But, for obvious reasons, it’s a possibility people here are pretty highly attuned to.
-- Sean Cockerham