First things first: I have good news, and I have bad news.

THE GOOD: The hermit crab is currently sitting in a glass container on my desk. I sweet-talked the soldier into giving him up (at least temporarily) and with help from alert blog contributor and Biologist, Dr. Steve Jordan, we may attempt to identify the creature more specifically, on the way to making this unique case a medical journal submission.

THE BAD: The aforementioned glass container is a test tube (actually a blood draw tube, but essentially the same thing). It seems the teeny tiny little dude bit the dust (perhaps literally; this is Iraq we’re talking about), as there was zero activity from him all day. Like all crabs, hermits need water to breathe, and I’m guessing that the humidity in the auditory canal kept him alive, but that outside of his little happy place, he dried out quickly.

Still, his krabby legend lives on, and we’ll see if we can memorialize him by publishing his sad tale.

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The weather cooled off nicely today, which made for a nice break from the past week. I got an ACU uniform in the mail, one which I had ordered from the “Kyloc” system which alows deployed soldiers to get replacement items up to around $50 – $100 per month while we are here. I needed a third uniform just to make the laundry cycle a bit easier. With three Unis, I can have one at the cleaners, one hanging in my closet, and one on my person; then, if I get blood or something yucky on the uniform I’m wearing, I’ll have a fresh one available. This hasn’t happened often, but it did happen once (yucky, not blood). Also, as with all pieces of Army apparel, the uniforms are made by different companies, in different countries. The ACUs issued to me at CRC were of a strange, much wrinklier material than the ones the medics here have. An inspection of the tags showed that mine were made by a different company. The new one I got via Kyloc is the stiffer, more “pressed”-appearing type which is much more common here. So now I’ll fit in with the other kids!

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As I write this, I can hear my buddies just outside my door, watching the new Indiana Jones movie on CPT Baker’s massive laptop. How do we have Indy, you ask? Well, the answer to that, my friend, is one of the best-kept secrets of deployment. Turns out that they often make current movies available freely to deployed military personnel. Of course, I should stipulate that by “they,” I am not referring to Warner Bros or Paramount. I am referring to French bootleggers who went to the movies with a digicam in tow, and “filmed the film,” so to speak, then made it freely available to us via the internet. (Just doing their part for the war effort…)

This illegitimate copy then makes its way to a big hard drive which certain computers on post can access, and can be downloaded from there to a thumb drive. These tend to be of questionable quality, and one can occasionally see someone with a big tub of popcorn make their way across the screen; also, they often have that annoying feature where the audio gets more and more out-of-sync with the video as the movie plays. But the soldiers watch them anyway. And then they watch them when they show up (again, free, but legit this time) in the theater on-post in a month or so.

If it sounds like the soldiers are getting a free ride here, I’d suggest to you that the cost of this gratis entertainment is likely recouped by Hollywood on military sales of the movie “Gladiator” alone. Every soldier in Al Asad (man, woman, hermaphrodite) has that DVD, everyone loves it deeply, and everyone is amazed, shocked, appalled and sometimes even angry when they find out that I have never seen the film (and, no, I don’t wish to see the seven-hour director’s cut tonight, thanks anyway). I narrowly escaped yet another “Gladiator” showing last night, and overheard talk of an “all-Roman-warriors” theme to this week’s Centurion Can City film festival. Doesn’t sound so great to me. Think I may just stay snug in my shell for the next few nights.