as a civil engineer corps officer in the u.s. navy, my community is responsible for all navy and marine corps facilities and infastructure, both in the u.s. and all around the world. along with leading our seabees, we specialize in public works, capital improvement, environmental, and other facility issues. as you can imagine, we have a lot of folks in iraq and afghanistan. we constantly have people headed over for 179 days in country to fill a gap.<br /><br />here's a short message from a fellow lieutenant from my wardroom that is currently in iraq. thought i would share.<br /><br />"I'm staying here at Camp Victory where I've been assigned to the Victory Area Office (sort of the Camp Victory IPT) as the OIC of the DPW (Directorate of Public Works) - somewhat PWO as well as contract manager for what we would call the BOS contract with Fluor. About $40M annual value. I was amazed to learn that the Army Engineer Officers have no acquisition authority so that is the area where I think we can be of most value. Right now the DPW shop has $5K authority and everything else is reach back to the KO in the states. <br /><br />I would like to pass on to the wardroom, that while making this deployment wasn't part of my plan, I certainly have been blessed by it and would strongly recommend my Wardroom mates look at the IA billets on the Detailer website. I have a whole new appreciation of what it takes to rebuild a nation and establish democracy. I also have a renewed appreciation of how much good stuff done by coalition forces go un-reported. In fact today we are going to a pre-acceptance demonstration of the Advanced First Responder Network, a $49M state of the art "911" system for Baghdad. Work has started on the roll-out of an identical, though smaller, system in each of 15 cities, from Mosul to Basra, and covering 65% of the Iraq population. Great stuff!!"
