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About From The Front Mission From a Marine Deployed in the Middle East: On the whole, our quality of life has been exceptionally good. We live in actual buildings with air conditioners; we eat (reasonably) good food; we have showers and hot water. There are a few important other things that contribute to morale here: 1. Getting snail mail (especially the care packages with food) 2. Phone calls home 3. Internet access for email, news, and entertainment Demand far outstrips the supply on the latter two. We have a handful of government-owned "morale" computers here that can be used for email, and a few phones to the outside world that have limited hours of operation and surprisingly restrictive limitations. All invariably have lines. Many Marines and Navy Corpsmen brought along their own laptop computers, hoping to plug them into the network.  Unfortunately, it's against Marine Division policy to plug personal computers into the government network.  This is partly a security issue (they don't have a way to ensure that everyone's laptop has the current security patches) and partly a performance issue (the network is already slow enough, and would likely become completely unusable if everyone plugged in). At present, the few computers set up for public access are sufficient for anyone to send an occasional email, but time and speed limitations essentially prohibit any recreational use of the internet.  Speed is a big issue during peak hours (approximately 10 AM to 10 PM local time) web pages frequently time out, and file transfers creep along at less than .5 K/s. The Army has made a strong effort to provide internet access to everyone here, but their network is struggling keep up with demand, and our inability to plug our own computers into the network is a major disadvantage.