The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

netic and the flow of incoming taskings is relentless. “The day begins at 8 a.m. or before, with meetings sched- uled as late as 8 p.m.,” explains an FSO serving in Baghdad. “People routinely work until 11 p.m., and there never seems to be a break. It creates a kind of Vegas casino atmosphere where you don’t know if it’s night or day outside because the activity level is constant. We have Friday ‘off’ but since Washington works on Friday, we need to be here then as well.” Work is similar to other posts, explains an officer in Baghdad, “except that the workload is triple (10-16 hours a day, seven days a week), and doing anything (leaving the embassy, scheduling meetings, making a phone call, get- ting anywhere) is 100 times more complex. And, of course, this is the most dangerous location to be.” “We work 75-plus hours a week for months on end with few holidays, no normal weekends, maybe two days off a month when in country,” writes an officer serving in a regional embassy office. He goes on to say that, “The security situation makes it very difficult to travel and to get beneath the surface politically. Frequent turnover makes for much reinventing of the wheel. The vagaries of military transport make it incredibly difficult to travel.” A security agent in Baghdad writes that his days start at around 5:30 a.m. and end around 10:30 p.m. A politi- F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21 Iraqi and American interpreters in Tikrit Bob Holby