Greetings to all. It is sincerely my pleasure to accept the invitation from my friend, baldilocks, to post some observations and thoughts in her forum. I’m not a blogger, though I have enjoyed reading this site for the past several months. I certainly have not agreed with a lot of the things I’ve read here, but very much respect my friend and have applauded the way in which she’s shared her thoughts and opinions.
I suppose the best way to approach this is in bite-sized pieces. So, I’ll start with a little self-introduction. I’m using the moniker “King Buzz”; because that’s the nickname (rather, one of the nicknames) I was saddled with “back in the day” when baldilocks and I first met. We worked together on doing some intel work in Berlin for the Air Force during the Cold War and were on the same flight – Baker Flight. Baker Flight was known as The Buzzards. It was a wonderful group of people, doing an amazing job, at an extraordinary place. I was lucky enough to be selected by my peers to serve as flight president, organizing activities for this great group of folks and we all had a lot of fun. There was a lot of drinking and in the midst of all that happened then, someone (yes, I know who) started calling me King Buzz. It stuck.
I’ll give you just a little bit of what my background is so that you know where I’m coming from. I’m an active duty Air Force officer with 20 years of service. My primary professional areas of expertise are intelligence, nuclear weapons and arms control. Academically, my undergraduate and graduate studies have been in political science and international relations. Not surprisingly, I have had and continue to have some strong opinions about the situation in Iraq. Last year, when the opportunity arose, I volunteered to do a tour in Iraq to work in the Iraq Survey Group. I went over in November and got back home in the middle of March. My good friend, baldilocks, was a super e-mail correspondent while I was over there. She knows that my take on some things is a little bit different and she invited me to share some of my observations related to my Iraqi deployment.
My first observation will be a short one (since my greeting and intro have gotten too long) and it will be something you already know. There are some awesome American men and women over in Iraq doing some great work. I had the chance to work with active duty members from all the services, National Guard, Reserves, DoD civilians, other US Government civilians and contractors – and there are a lot of fantastic folks in all of those groups. Please keep them all in your thoughts and prayers.
My next post will be a tougher one. I’ll aim to explain my views of the invasion of Iraq before I deployed and how that opinion was affected by having boots on the ground. Again, thanks to baldilocks for inviting me into her blog and for being such a good friend, keeping me in good spirits while I was far from home.
