Whoever pushes the most paper, wins

NOTE: The following comments from Ed (in italics) may have been modified to remove excess profanity, not incriminate specific people or simply to to aid with the flow of dialogue. The overall content and his tone remain intact.

Although Kathy often complains about the bureaucracy that she currently finds herself in, after talking to Ed, she sometimes has to admit that things could be worse: "Each night I have to send out a regurgitation of stuff that can be found on someone else's report. For example, a report that is also presented every night and every morning on our "shift-change brief slide," also needs to be in its own document in its own specific format. If this wasn't bad enough, not only is the file is attached to an email that is sent out to everyone, but the text of the report is also copied into the body of the email. As in "here, in the body of the email, is what I'm attaching to this email."

Of course, his days aren't all bad. Sometimes he even manages to sound upbeat. I am getting some good media exposure for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams and the Corps of Engineers teams in our area. In the past couple of days I've lined up coverage of: PRT operations in Mosul and Tikrit (Guy Raz, NPR), an upcoming Tikrit Governing Council budget meeting and meetings w/the Provincial Governor and Deputy Governor and other regional and GoI ministers (Newsweek), efforts to recruit and train police and security forces in Tikrit and PRT efforts in Tikrit and Mosul (LA Times),and PRT work in Mosul and maybe in Tikrit (Michael Gordon, NY Times). (Note 10/30 - not all of these actually panned out, maybe at a later time).

Note: when you read about getting reporters to a Governing Council Budget Meeting, does anyone else suddenly flash ahead a year to Ed working in a county PR office? Or is it just me?

And of course, he's learning to pick his battles. So I've spent the past hour proof-reading a speech, and comparing the latest draft with an earlier draft that has comments from one of our high-ups on it. Just now, for about the 5th time, I caught myself thinking, "boy, that's awkward" or "that sounds silly" about part of the speech, only to find, after I'd crossed the offending language out and then looked back at the draft with the comments, that the text came from the high-up guy himself. Ooops. Guess it stays.

But quite honestly, Ed talks very little about what he's doing. His most frequent comments are about the food. Now, the first draft of this post talked about how bad he says the food is. However, upon reviewing the post prior to publication, Ed asked me to take out those comments and insists that that the food isn't really that bad. My email record says he feels differently. But perhaps this is just something soldiers do, complain about the food, especially when they're in a war zone. Because yes, despite his bureaucratic existence, he is a war zone. 'Though apparently his experiences with mortars are more or less limited to his monthly visits to the Green Zone.

Or, at least that's what he lets me believe.

More than happy to go on believing that mortar attacks only happen in Baghdad,

Kathy

ps - despite Ed's claim that the food isn't that bad, I'm sure he would not be adverse to care packages from home. It generally takes about 7-10 days for a package to arrive, so I do not recommend sending anything that gets stale quickly or moldy.