A woman who apparently got her training in a Greyhound bus station – a really big, important Greyhound bus station – says, over the loudspeakers: "Attention all personnel. There has been an indirect fire attack. All clear, all clear, all clear. I say again, All clear, all clear, all clear."

There are rumors and stories about mortars. One is – no way to verify it – that the insurgents pay local farmers to fire them into the air base. According to this story, the insurgent gives the farmer, say, $200, a mortar tube, and a round. The farmer puts the tube in a haystack, aims it more or less at the base, drops in the round, and then runs like hell. That's why, the story says, the mortar fire tends to be ineffectual.

There was a decent snowfall, with a little freezing rain, at Balad on Jan. 11. Enough for a security guard to make a slushy snowball. In Minnesota, in October, we all would have said, "Clipper," and turned up our collars and forgotten about it. At Balad, the rain turned the surface, which is a combination of sand and dust, into mud. Tan mud. The amount of moisture was insignificant, but then ... it didn't evaporate, it didn't sink in, it didn't do anything. It just sat there, making new mud every time anyone took a step. For days, everything that wasn't gravel was mud – and the mud stuck to anything it touched: boots, pants, floors, sidewalks. You'd get it on the back of a pants leg, not know it, then cross your legs, and transfer it to the front of the pants, and from there to your elbows, then to your face, and by the end of the day, you were a mudball. And it never dried up. It was like some kind of mud miracle that we don't have in Minnesota. Maybe they do in Wisconsin.

Many people in Minnesota have an image of the National Guard as guys who provide security and aid at local disasters – tornadoes and floods and forest fires. And the Guard does do that. But for some time, the Guard has also been an expeditionary force, and for veterans, the Iraq deployment was no big surprise. Staff Sgt. Duane R. "Rick" Gendreau of St. Louis Park has been in the Guard for 18 years. He is a veteran crew chief, which means that he is qualified to do the maintenance of the 2-147 AHB's Blackhawks, and when they're flying, he goes along as a door gunner.

There are private security guards everywhere, armed with M16s. They tend to be Peruvians and Ugandans. The Peruvians are usually short and wiry, and the Ugandans tall and thick. Both sets of guards look like they could pull your arms off if they wished, but they tend to be pretty friendly.

Everywhere in Iraq, the one constant is pallet-loads of water bottles, which sit around on the ground, in the middle of anywhere you might care to name, and along the walls outside the residential areas. Most installations have coolers full of water bottles. They are free, and you are asked to take as many of these as you can possibly use.

American soldiers basically work a six-day week, and average nine or 10 hours a day. Everything is fully staffed every day, for 24 hours. At 3 o'clock in the morning, there will be people walking around outside, going to and from work.

Some things never change, like the Army's love affair with acronyms. Here is a paragraph from an Army information office, instructions to reporters: