Captain's Quarters

Marines in Fallujah:

Captain's Quarters has a piece on the Marines in Fallujah from the LA Times. Meanwhile, there's evidence in this USMC press release that the training at Parris Island doesn't prepare you for everything after all:

The bite of an Iraqi sand fly can debilitate a Marine, sailor or a whole unit, but with proper protection the parasitic infection it causes, leishmaniasis, can be prevented, according to Petty Officer 1st Class David A. Carroll, the preventive medicine chief with I Marine Expeditionary Force.

One bets they're not digging any graves for the little monsters.

Finally, the Chicago Tribune has an article (which I am quoting out of the Pioneer Press to avoid the Tribune's subscription walls--"The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it") on the Iraqi brigade:

Last month, Yasser Harhoush said, he fought with the armed insurgents battling U.S. Marines.

A week ago, the wiry, clean-shaven 28-year-old dusted off his old olive-drab Iraqi military fatigues and joined Fallujah's new army brigade under the command of a former general who served under Saddam Hussein's regime.

Now he carries a shiny black assault rifle as he patrols Jolan, a neighborhood where some of the fiercest fighting took place. He mans military checkpoints. And he says he and his comrades in the 1st Fallujah Brigade are the solution to the monthlong fighting between the insurgents and the Marines.

"We are protecting the city so the coalition forces cannot come here again," Harhoush said.

A mixed result, then, so far. But considering that two weeks ago we were killing his comerades in arms by the hundreds, that's more than you might expect.