I think I quit smoking. For a while, anyway.  Haven’t been writing much, yeah I been busy but it’s not just that, I feel distant, from everyone.  I stand on the streets here crowds surging around me, brimming with malice and desperation and it feels like when I’m alone on some big cold mountain.  I stand like a statue in the chaos and it feels right like when I’m alone on some big cold mountain.  It’s like tapping into something primal, being so close to all the violence and mayhem, bullets whisper in the air around me, speaking in mad tongues. hissing women in black robes push and claw each other. kids encircle me, shrieking my name. men named death leap out from low archways.

Foot patrols through sad dusty streets lined with trash and dead animals, sewage everywhere.  Mobs of kids follow us as we weave through alleys, begging for chocolate, band aids, pens, sunglasses, anything really.  Some can speak enough English to converse a little.  They ask my name, and I tell them with a bellow, “rrrrrRaoul!”  Then I’ve got them, following us down the street shouting, “rrrRaoul!”  Then we emerge from the narrow passages into the street, our gun trucks roar up, and we climb into them, cursing the heat and cursing the stench, throwing a little candy to kids from the turret.  The kids love us, their parents tell us they love us but then they shoot rockets at the places we sleep.

Five days on the road, moving between units separated by hot dangerous roads, the little bases 2 miles apart might as well be a hundred miles apart since you’ve got to amass a terrifying display of force to travel between them.  Big trucks, big guns, rehearsals, the works.

Saturday was Operation Sheep Drop.  A bunch of Iraqi Army guys and a few of our guys brought sixty live baa-aa-ing sheep to just distribute randomly in downtown Baghdad, the part that looks kind of like Boston’s theater district with more mosques and barbed wire.  Twelve US soldiers and twenty-three Iraqi soldiers attempted to convince 500 livestock-crazed locals that sixty sheep weren’t worth rioting over.  Results were mixed.  Men in business suits ran into office buildings, each with a kicking sheep under an arm.

Continuing to refine a style, photographically.  Chaos is absolutely everywhere, and I think part of making a good journalistic photo involves blending some with that chaos, or void, or whatever the monks are calling it now.  Objectivity has not factored into this style as of yet.  It’s hard to blend gracefully with anything with 90 pounds of gear on, but I’m working at it, always.