The temperature here is quite bearable for the humans - it is February, after all. I am still having trouble, though. If you thought it was amazing that a male polar bear could eat 160lbs of food in a single meal, you should see how much water we drink when you put us in the desert! All of the soldiers usually carry around a 1.5 liter water bottle and when they go outside the base they have a 3-liter “Camel-bak” that we drink from. I think I may have to start pulling around one of these 500-gallon “water buffalo” trailers.

I enjoyed the flight in to Iraq. I’m grateful that Josh was able to convince the loadmaster on the C-130 that I didn’t need to be strapped down to a pallet. What was most fun is that we were blacked out for most of the flight. Some of the soldiers on board got a little dizzy because of this, and because the C-130 made a few hard turns that you would never see a commercial jetliner do. But I enjoyed it.

That’s all for now. Oh - someone please write to my division back home and tell them not to issue the other bears any additional cold weather gear. I will never need to wear that polar fleece, and when I tried to eat it, it tasted terrible!