Marine Moms and Dads: 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines in Kuwait and Iraq www.MarineParents.com

Also see Mike's 1st Set of Photos
2004 Photos

Dear Marines, Soldiers and their Families and Friends,

I spent three weeks in August in Karbala, re-embedded with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines and the Army civil affairs team working with them. In addition to writing articles (my day job), I took a few hundred photographs which I am happy to share with any of you. As I did with my photos from the major combat phase of the war, I have posted these shots to a Kodak-owned website called www.ofoto.com When you log on, you will have to create an Ofoto account/password, but that's painless and free. It costs nothing to look at the pictures online, and you can download them for free. Just right-click on the photo, choose "save picture as..." and save it to your own hard drive. They're very high-density photos (5 million pixels), so it might take time to download over a slow phone line. For a charge, Ofoto will make prints of the ones you want and mail them to you - plain, framed, in calendars, etc. (Needless to say, the money goes to Kodak, not to me.)

The annoying thing about Ofoto is that you have to go to each of my "albums" separately. There are 15 new albums, sort of grouped by theme. So below are 15 web links, one for each album. You might be able to go directly to the albums by clicking on the links below. If that doesn't work, try copying each web address and pasting it in your web browser. That should take you to the Ofoto website and automatically open the album for you, once you've logged on. You'll have to repeat that step for each of the albums. If you have trouble with Ofoto, you can email Service@ofoto.com for advice.

Tracy Della Vecchia of Marines Moms has kindly agreed to put this note and the album links on the Marine Moms website, www.MarineParents.com or www.marinemoms.org. It might be slightly easier to wait until she does so and then click directly on the links. On the website, you can also find links to the 23 albums of photos taken between Feb and April (ie Kuwait to Baghdad). Click on photo galleries on the left side of the homepage, then scroll down until you see a note from me.

Please forward this email to other families, friends, Marine and soldiers who might be interested; I don't have an exhaustive battalion email list and some of the email addresses I do have for the Marines are from their deployment and might not work any longer. I haven't done much editing of the photos, so there is repetition.

As always, I apologize to those whose Marines or soldiers don't appear in the pictures at all. But you'll be seeing the real thing in the next few days and weeks. Enjoy the reunion.

Regards,

Mike

Michael Phillips
The Wall Street Journal
Washington Bureau
Michael.Phillips@wsj.com
202-862-9262

Note: All photos are for personal use. Please don't publish them without prior permission.

Album 1
The explosion and suicide vest photos in Album 1 were taken by Staff Sgt. Steve Mannon (EOD), the bulldozer/burning oil pipeline pic by USMC Combat Camera and another shot or two by Lt. Tom Kershul.
Album 2
Album 3
Album 4
Album 5
Album 6
Album 7
Album 8
Album 9
Album 10
Album 11
Album 12
Album 13
Album 14
Album 15