March 04 Stryker Brigade

Note from Webmaster: These are pictures taken over several weeks by Ryan while in Kuwait and Iraq. Ryan has returned from a quick trip home for the birth of his first child (James) and has added some captions.

Left : Me and SFC Kane, my Platoon Sergeant for a year including the first three months in Iraq. The platoon called him "Big Daddy," and he taught me everything i ever needed to know as a PL. Currently he is training the Iraqi National Guard in Mosul. A great American.

Right: Me and 1LT Tim Bagley, the PL for 1st Platoon. Tim is a prior service engineer and brings a lot of experience to the table and really helped me out as a PL and now gives me hell since I'm his XO. Down in Balad, Tim, SFC Kane, SFC Healey and I all roomed together. Our patrol schedules never coincided and we used to make a game of whose platoon could be the loudest coming in and piss everbody else in the barracks off the most.

Left: Route Lexus in NE Mosul, with Saddam's Mosque, now known as Mosul Mosque, in the background. For awhile construction had stopped but they are working on it again and it is truly going to be a work of art when they are finished with it.

Right: A really poorly lit picture of me standing on the porch of Building 137, the first house I lived in on FOB Freedom, with my Stryker and snow in the background. This picture was the first attempt before we took the better picture of me with the snowman.

Left: Me with "Money Mike" on Christmas Day in Balad. Mike was our interpreter/go to guy for anything you needed while we were in Balad. He could get you anything you needed for an extremely marked up price. He was absolutely crazy and liked to be the first one into a house on a raid. He didn't mess around and helped us out a great deal down in Balad.

Right: A picture of the signs in front of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (AKA Iraqi National Guard) barracks on FOB Marez in Mosul. I took the picture because our slang term for all Iraqis, all Arabs actually, is "Haji." On the sign the Company Commander's name is Major Haji.

Left: Ditch was a dog we adopted down in Balad. He jumped out of a ditch in front of 1SG Layden one night on a raid and was almost shot but instead he brought him back to the The Rock with us. The soldiers overfed him and 1SG started to train him to sniff out IEDs and explosives, he training worked too well because before we left Balad Money Mike had an IED placed in his house, we got EOD to come out and they sent in the robot to get the IED, the robot went in with Ditch right on his tail barking his head off at the IED, when the robot picked up the bomb it went off. No more robot and no more Ditch, but he had a honorable death which is a lot more than I can say for 90% of the mutts in Iraq.

Right: Downtown Mosul, looking West across the Tigris river from the shoreline near Ninevah Bridge.

Left: A bad picture of the inside of the container that SFC Kane and I shared for our first Month in Mosul when we lived on FOB Marez before moving up to FOB Freedom. When we first got to Mosul the 101st Airborne Division was still pulling out and we were transitioning in so we all lived on Marez. This container is what 99% of the soldiers in Iraq now live in. It's nice, A/C, heat, a bed and wall locker but it can't take a mortar round very well. Everyone used to live in hardstand buildings but higher command felt that living in the buildings that Saddam used to own set a bad precedence so we all began to move out and into container's like this.

Right: Me posing with one of the guys we caught on New Year's Eve after he and two of his buddies shot at us as we were conducting a Traffic Control Point. We processed him and sent him down to Baghdad, he's probably free now to shoot at other Americans.

Left: One of the "smaller" houses on Saddam's palace compound in Mosul. At the time the picture was taken a company of 101st Abn Div Engineer's were using it as their Company CP.

Right: Some of the weapons we captured while down down in Balad. Some mortar tubes on the right and a 107mm rocket pod on the left. We found it after they fired a couple rockets at us on The Rock. They had hooked up a car battery as the initiation device but had misjudged the angle and the rockets fell way short of the building. Our security platoon saw the point of origin and returned fire, the bad guys took off but we were able to get the pod so that they weren't able to ever figure out the correct angle.