Second Update

So here for my second update, sorry I havn’t been writing a lot it seems like I rarely have enough time off to write anything. So I’m still here….truckin along with my platoon. Things are well, just working hard in our area doing what we can for the Iraqi Police the Army and the local sub-district governments. The last couple weeks we have had a couple interesting missions. 
Something that most people probably do not know about in this country is the SOIz, I think I mentioned them before in the last posting. I will break down pretty much what they are. 2 years ago the US realized they had 2 problems. One was that they were getting blown up in every village they went to, the other was on the opposite side of that, they had no one to protect the villages that were getting blown up too. So they decided to create the Sons of Iraq. They, up until this point, are a US funded organization. So basically what they CF (Coalition Forces) did was go into these towns and hired damn near everyone to protect it. They get paid about 250 a month to pretty much sit on checkpoints with AK47s and protect/be there when people come to emplace bombs. 
What is happening with the organization right now is that US is no longer funding it. SOIz are going from US run to Iraqi Government run. Some 20% of the SOI soldiers will be absorbed into the Iraqi Army and serve with them. The rest will go under Iraqi Army command and pretty much be like a sub branch of their Army. So what my platoon has been doing over the past couple weeks is paying out the SOI contracts for the US government. This is a joint operation between us and the Iraqi Army. What we do is pretty much line the guys up, check there names by their forms of identification and then pay them the last amounts. 
Here is the problem; the SOI and Iraqi Army do not necessarily get a long so there has been a lot of mistreating of SOI soldiers going on. We have to watch them carefully during these “transfers” as we call them. But the facts still are there, in a couple months we won’t have anything to do with the SOIz anymore and they will be under orders from the Iraqi Government. The other problem is that we don’t know for 100% sure that the Iraqi Government is even going to pay these SOIz soldiers down the road. They have said they are going to…but you can pretty much take that word at will. As they say over here “In shalla”. It means “God willing” so they don’t really make any solid plans per say. Everything is God willing it will happen. Its pretty damn frustrating to me to tell you the truth. But anyways the big risk there is that if the Iraqi Government doesn’t pay these people…they go back to the street and guess where they will get paid from….yep. 
So basically if the Iraqi Government reneges on their agreement about 30,000 people just in the Kirkuk Province that used to be hired by terrorists will be back jobless and not protecting the villages. So the next couple months are going to be very interesting. 
I have met some interesting soldiers here so far. I am collecting their patches and their beret pins to put in a shadow box when I get back. I trade them something for them or give them $5 or something. They are normally pretty agreeable as long as I pull money out. We have been training the Iraqi Army platoons and stuff lately. I have some pretty cool pictures with my soldiers training the Iraqi soldiers and also some funny videos of them trying to clear rooms and stuff. Its great. I am trying to think of something original from the states to get a couple of the big wigs that I work with on a regular basis but havn’t come up with anything yet. So if you think of something post it in your comment at the bottom. 
My towns are doing well for now, we are just working on projects with them. Our platoon is currently accountable for about a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of contracts….that’s a weird feeling let me tell you. No real violence going on so that’s always good news. I did meet the biggest Iraqi I have ever met the other day. He is an Iraqi Police officer in one of my towns. I would say 95% of people here are smaller than I am, but this guy looks Samoan or something, he is huge. I have a picture of him and as soon as I figure out how to post pictures on this thing I will do it. I have over a thousand pictures already just from random crap we are doing. 
Well I need to get some sleep. On a serious note though, as much as the whole SOIz transfer is touchy here and could end up blowing up in our face it is pretty cool to be such a big part of it. This is one of those things that I think our kids will be reading about in history books in 15 years and I will have pictures and video of the transfers actually happening. 
I’m doing fine though so don’t worry about me. I keep myself busy all the time. I just recently started making friends with some other LT’s in another Battalion. Its nice to have someone to converse with that really don’t have anything to do with your job. I have gotten several packages from you guys that really mean a lot to me. Mail Call is like xmas every day. I miss everyone and I cant wait to see yall in August (hopefully).