Ahh, the military briefing. Fun for all.

We had a lot of briefings. There was usually (from my perspective, at least) about 25% information and 75% "filler". I think a lot of our People In Charge wanted to do something to reassure us, to give us the impression that they knew what was going on and that they were Taking Things Seriously, if you know what I mean.

Briefings updated us on recent events happening in Iraq, and tried to interpret and contextualize them, but in truth they were just pulling stuff from the news like anyone else. Sometimes there was a bit more information presented, stuff that was military-relevant, but most of it was information that was pretty easy to extrapolate if you were paying a bit of attention to events.

That said, I have to remember that this was still before smart phones were common. Phones at the time were primarily just phones, with cameras and texting, and couldn't really access the wider internet. Most of us had laptop computers, which we could use to go to news sites when we had down time and catch up on events if we were so inclined. But many people didn't bother to read the news; mostly they found it boring or shallow.

So I guess the briefings were helpful or at least well-intentioned to an extent, but they probably didn't need to last so long.