There was no ballroom jammed with projection screens, balloons and red-white-and-blue confetti. No congratulatory drinks or trays of catered snacks. No campaign signs plastered on the walls.

Instead, Washington service members serving in Iraq watched the inauguration of President Barack Obama, their new commander in chief, Tuesday in familiar settings: in conference rooms, company headquarters buildings or their rooms.

“(It was) mostly just another day in Iraq,” Lt. Col. Paul Morgan, the brigade executive officer of the Washington National Guard’s 81st Brigade Combat Team, said in an e-mail.

Morgan, a 45-year-old Snohomish resident, watched the festivities with another member of the 81st from a conference room in the unit’s headquarters at Camp Ramadi. He wasn’t aware of any large-scale watch parties at base in western Iraq.

The brigade of 2,400 Washington residents and about 1,000 others provides convoy security and run day-to-day operations at several bases across western and northern Iraq.

“We probably had more discussion about upcoming Iraqi elections (on Jan. 31) than the U.S. inauguration,” he wrote. “The Iraqi elections have the potential more a more immediate effect on our operations.”

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Apparently these Stryker vehicles are pretty handy: A Fort Benning-based brigade will use 30 of the medevac variety during a deployment to Iraq later this year.