Wednesday, June 09, 2004

For those wondering...

For those I've left wondering just what is it I'm actually doing over here, I'm going to try to explain all that my job entails over here. I am the FSIO for my company, FSIO standing for Fire Support and Information Officer. My primary job, and what I went to school for, is the coordination of all indirect fires (artillery, mortars, close air support, attack aviation) for the company. Well, since we're not doing much shooting of artillery in downtown Baghdad, they added the Information Officer part. This part means basically that anything not normally done by the company, I get to do. Yipee. Primarily, that's debriefing every section when they get finished with a patrol in the Green Zone. I pass that up to higher so they can decide what to do with the info I gather. I also gather HUMINT (human intelligence), which is a glorified way to say that I talk to people about things that are going on and hope that at somepoint they tell me about bad people doing bad things in our area. That is without a doubt the most fun, becuase I geniunely enjoy talking to Iraqis and finding out how they think. Also, in my scope of responsibilites is handling GZ access badges, translators, the census of everyone in the GZ, any walk-up HUMINT source, and any other thing that no one wants to do. That may sound like a gripe, but it ensures that my job is very varied and I cannot get bored doing the same thing every day. Burned out, but never bored. Lol. OH, and any impact in our area, I have to go there ASAP and analyize it to figure out where and what was fired. I love that job most. LOL. So, I hope that explains things a little. Any confusion, just leave a comment, and I'll clear it up. B

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