Murphy Around the World
http://www.fyste.com/

Lieutenant Colonel Tim Murphy has over 28 years of service with 3 of them active duty (11B, 1/509th ABCT out of Vicenza, Italy) and the rest in the Reserves. Last summer he got deployed to Iraq for 18 months. He actually got to Iraq sometime in October, 2005 and is currently stationed out of LSA Anaconda.

His latest post starts like this:

Friday, March 17, 2006
Visit to Kirkush

I spent a couple of hours last night talking to Col R., the Iraqi LNO that we have supporting us. We had him all day for our trip and had some time to kill waiting for our flight out of Kirkush. It turns out that Col R knows quite a bit of English, much more than my pathetic Arabic. We have a terp with us but I didn’t need him for this. We talked about a lot of subjects, the first one being women. Sign language is SO universal.

He wants an American or British wife next. He already has two wives and fourteen children between them and is ready for another. This was confirmed by Ben the interpreter (terp) and I guess it’s OK by the Koran to have multiple wives, so there you go. We started talking about western woman and how he may have difficulty treating them as Middle Eastern woman are treated, being a more “enlightened” sect than he’s used to. He admitted that they’re much more of a challenge but was infatuated by them. I asked him about the Koran and about woman and why it was ok for Muslims to have 4 wives (that’s the max ok? Absolutely, NO more) and why woman couldn’t have 4 husbands? He smiled; he knows there are incongruities in his religion.

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