Burger King's and swimming pools

I finally got some sleep last night. There were no fire missions to keep me up, but I had to skip dinner to get the interrupted sleep. I work a 12 hour shift from 0300 to 1500, so going to 1700 chow means taking a break during sleep. I would still have to get up though, because there are no showers open for females at the time I get off work, I have to wait til 1800 for that. They have the new showers up and running in the new tent area, but they don't have a separate shower for the females. We have a rotating schedule with the guys, 12 hours for us and 12 hours for them. The shower is rather pitiful with no benches and poor drainage. I walked in the shower and the entire floor was flooded and there was no where to put my cleans clothes to keep them dry. So I've been walking across the FOB to go to the old female shower, it has a bench. But I can't complain too much, because the other FOB, I think it was ROW, only has 2 showers total and they really suck. I've been told by a few guys over there that they only get to shower once every 3 days or so. I've very thankful to be at FOB St. Michael. We have a phone center, an internet center, and a PX. The other FOB's don't. They have a few DSN lines and a few computers, but not much. The conditions at all three FOBs isn't that great, but we knew we were going to a warzone from the beginning. It's funny though how things are portrayed by some of the media. We read newspapers and watched the news before we came out here, and it seemed different. Well, in a lot of places it is. Other places have chow halls that serve breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight chow. They have movie theatres, ice cream shops, coffee shops, several internet cafe's with webcams, basketball courts, swimming pools, stages for the concerts they have, Burger King, Popeyes, Subway, and huge PX's . They also live in 2-man trailers that have internet connections. We, on the other hand, live in 8 man tents (has air-conditioning though) and sleep on cots. It really isn't so bad where we are, it's just that this kind of difference in living conditions makes people a little irritable here. It's also a lot more dangerous here. We had a commo blackout yesterday, which means somebody got hurt. I was responsible for closing down all communication but I had no idea what had happened, only that it was probably bad. I found out today that one of my friends got hurt, and another guy I knew got hurt even worse. We've had casualties here before, but it wasn't anyone I really knew. It's really scary. I'll write more later, when I figure out what I want to say about this.