Welcome home Jim Spiri

I never claimed to be a writer. Just ask my EN302 professor or my AP English teacher from high school. From my ignorance of how to properly punctuate a sentence to my habitual dependence on my computer’s spell checker, I am nothing but a hack at this game of wordsmithing. Just because I type a page or two of words on a computer, it doesn’t give me the credentials to be a writer.

This fact does not stop me from writing though.

My blog is just a venue to tell of my experiences here in Iraq. I created it for my family and friends and it focuses on my day to day happenings from my point of view which is why it’s closer to a journal than to any sort of real journalism. It has the smell of a voyeuristic diary with a smidgen of sarcasm for good measure, but there are people out there who tell the story of Iraq with much better flavor than me.

I’ve come across some good writers in my surfing of the web and I’ve highlighted them in the past. Check out the right side of this page and you’ll see the links to a few of their sites. Most are of fellow IRR officers I know or of friends back home. Two of note are Michael Yon and Jim Spiri. I read Mr. Yon’s articles a long time ago and supported his style of journalism because it focused on events that were not in the mainstream news. Two months ago I started reading the Philadelphia Newspaper site featuring Mr. Jim Spiri.

I first mentioned Jim back in August when I met him on one of my border visits. Standing outside a kitchen tent in the light of a sun setting over Syria, we swapped stories of our experiences and why we were in the middle of nowhere. He was a contractor helping with air movement in Kuwait and I was an IRR call back up from the IZ visiting the port we were standing in. Both the IZ and Kuwait were a long ways away from northern Iraq, so we took a minute to explain what we were doing there. I was informed that he was no longer a contractor but was traveling Iraq, collecting stories and taking pictures and documenting them in a blog on philly.com. It wasn’t until I returned to the IZ that I could start reading his entries and I saw that his stories portrayed a realism not seen in other news mediums. I passed the word out to my family and friends about this man on a mission and they soon followed me in tracking his progress across the country. Jim and his camera, a Nikon that was replaced 3 times during his time in the desert, followed soldiers and marines doing their day to day missions all over Iraq. From maintaining a fleet of unmanned drone aircraft to walking the beat in Fallujah, he has done an exemplary job of recording the lives and missions of the military forces in country. This is important because the people back home don’t get to see a lot of what is going on here, with the exception of the aftermath of a car-bomb in Baghdad or some important general pontificating about when they think we’ll start sending troops home. And the best part about it is that Jim wasn’t a paid journalist trying to gain any particular fame nor was he tied to the constraints of a finicky editor more concerned about selling papers than relaying the real stories over here. He didn’t go hunting for body counts to plaster on headlines nor did he seek to document smoldering battle damage that streams every half hour on the national news channels. He focused on the soldiers, the marines, the members of the military who do their difficult jobs, day in and day out, and that made him special. Read Jim’s blog and you’ll understand that he is a husband, a father, and more importantly, he is a patriot.

The reason I mention Jim is because his mission is now over. He returned to his home in New Mexico and is anxiously waiting for his wife (also deployed as a contractor) to return home. Because his travels are over, he will probably not write much more as he gets on with his normal life in the “real world”. However, if you have the time, you ought to check out his site and feel his Iraq experience through his eyes as he tells the tales of all of us over here. He can do this because he walked among us on the patrols, fought the complexities of air-movement like we do on a daily basis, shared a plastic tray of mystery food in the chow halls next to us and experienced the struggle and danger by our side. He might not have been wearing a uniform when I met him, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s one of us.

Welcome home Jim. God speed to your family, Candi and Jimmy, in returning home safely.