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Subject: Ben Hoffman’s Emails
January 1, 2004
Happy New
Year!
So how is everyone?
I’ve have been so busy! I was moved back to supply on the 17th,
since then I have been working very long days. I haven’t had any real free time
other than laundry turn in and chow, but it’s a good thing…the last few weeks
have flown by. Were mainly busy cleaning everything and getting ready to pack
it away once the custom inspectors get here.
There have been two chances I have been able to do something other
than work. First was on Christmas Eve afternoon Dave Letterman did a show at
the camp I’m at. For his guests he had a comedian, grinder girl and hula hoop
girl, plus Paul Shaffer was with him, it was really fun…I got most of it on
tape.
The other chance I had to get away from work I went to sight see
the birth place of Abraham the prophet. The ziggurat of the ancient city of Ur
is near his birth place so I got a chance to check that out as well. A ziggurat
is a structure that represented a mountain, the structure allowed prophets and
more important people to be closer to the gods. The city of Ur was pretty
interesting, a lot of it was still buried but there were a few buildings and tombs
uncovered and refurbished. One of the guys in my battalion is an archeologist
major at USD so he gave us an informative tour which was nice. There is a
native tour guide that gives a tour but he’s kind of hard to understand plus he
is sort of misinformed of the whole history of the place. The guy that gave the
tour is Jason Everson, interesting story, me and Jason were good friends when I
lived in Watertown. But I moved to Henry and he moved to Wessington then
Sturgis. Some how we both joined the same battalion 11 years later and were
reunited … sort of a case that it is a small world.
We have AFN TV (Armed Forces Network) in our room, it’s about 10
channels. The AFN gets the more popular shows from other networks, but instead
of regular commercials it has army commercials (safety tips stuff like that),
it’s sort of a non profit service by other stations. There are a lot of
football games on the sports channel so I’ve got to catch most of the Vikings
games.
The weather has been getting warmer the last week, almost nice
enough to get a tan, but the weeks prior to that it was really cold, 20’s to
30’s I guess.
The Battalion that is replacing us has its advance party in Kuwait
and will be making there way up here any day, plus we are starting
demobilization briefings, they figure the end of February we’ll be back in the
states. The last day anything should be sent to me in the mail is January 10th.
I’m really not sure if I’m going to get to the internet after we
leave the camp were at right now. We shouldn’t be leaving here for about
another month so, so I’ll try to get one or two more emails out. It sounds like
we’ll be living out of just a bag in half a month because we’ll have to load up
everything else. It’s okay though because that means were that much closer to
coming home.
I hope all of you had a great holiday season, you all helped me
have the best I could possibly have, so I would like to thank you all for every
card, box and email it really made it easier to be over here this time of year.
Hopefully next year I’ll get to spend the holiday season with most of you but I
need to get going.
Benny
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