Why are you still in a van and not in a permanent structure?

Fielden: We don't really know how long we'll be out here at Balad, so we're trying to make sure we can easily relocate or pull out if the decision is made to do so.

We actually have several vans that we interconnect together. So the network control center, the data warehouse, is in one van; I have the control facility for circuit routing in a second van of about the same size; I've got a phone switch in another van; I've got a monitoring center in yet another van.

The vans get flown in and dropped on-site with some minimal equipment installed, and as the base population grows, we go in and add additional equipment.

Also, this used to be an Iraqi air force base, so we've taken over some of the buildings and house some of our comm facilities, office space, work centers and whatnot in those facilities.

Let's talk about your typical workday. When you get up and go to work, what's on your plate?

Dedham: Our days start at about 5:30 in the morning and end around 11 or 12 at night. That sounds kind of extreme, but that's what it takes to operate in that austere environment. It always starts off with a quick update brief from my network personnel on the status of my network - what different nodes across the country are down and what we're doing about it.

From there, it's just a series of events - meetings, working groups, trips, all interrupted of course by a daily crisis, from small ones like the commanding general's phone doesn't work to big ones like an entire combat operating base isn't connected anymore because of a major outage.

Fielden: It's very similar here at Balad. My alarm goes off at 5:45. I kick the day off with a morning stand-up, when I call in my flight commanders and we review anything that happened the previous night and then establish priorities for the day. We also do personnel accounting, to make sure everybody is where they ought to be.

And then we proceed with the daily task of providing the best comm service we possibly can, all the while dodging and ducking mortar attacks and rocket attacks. The duty day typically for me ends around 2230 or 2300 hours, assuming there's no crisis ongoing at that particular time. I call it "firefighting" - there are no two days alike out here, I've noticed.

How often are mortar and rocket attacks an issue?

Fielden: It's getting better. When I came out here last summer, it seemed like we were always hitting the deck. The attacks came several times a day and several times a night. But as the situation is stabilizing out here, the number of attacks has been reduced by about 50 per cent.

Were the attacks ever directly responsible for some kind of IT crisis?

Fielden: Not directly. They're not really targeting anything. There have been some issues with comm outages resulting from mortar and rocket attacks, but those have been few and far between. We have a pretty robust network out here, where a single incident on part of our infrastructure won't necessarily take us down.