For almost eight years, my life belonged to Uncle Sam. I was an infantryman—an indirect fire infantryman to be exact. The thrill of my life was to sit behind a 120mm mortar as the first round slid down the tube; the smell of burning nitroglycerin, the feel of the blast, the taste of my own blood in my nose from the initial impact—all of these are grand memories for me. In 2005, I was deployed to Iraq but taken away from my beloved mortar and attached to a reconnaissance platoon where I had to learn a whole new trade (nothing like playing with mortars). I deployed to the Anbar Province at a time when the province was rated "critical"; no other provinces held this high rating. Outside the wire
Archaeology is a science, but it is also an art–a good deal of educated guesswork goes into the analysis of the finds. This summer I had the great opportunity to lead a field at Mt Raitano, Sicily, but the results were less than desirable. To begin with, the actual goal of our original investigation was to excavate a series of rather large rock cut chambers on the southern ridge. Of the five chambers to investigate, only two were accessible from a side entrance; the remaining three are only accessible from a small opening at the top and drop about twenty feet straight down. These are rather large chambers, but they have never been excavated–some have argued that these chambers were Mycenaean
