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Soldiers: E-phone home

Jan-20-2005 » Filed Under: TF Olympia

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By Steve Walsh, Post-Tribune staff writer

MOSUL, IRAQ — Staff Sgt. John Sykora surfs the Internet while listening to a Web-based radio station on his headphones.

For $2 an hour, he can go online with his wife, Toni, in Crown Point and talk about their 4-month-old son, Christopher.

The connection is slow, especially in more remote locations.

Lines can be long, especially starting at around 6 p.m., when the nine-hour time difference allows soldiers to reach their families in real time.

In Mosul, computers are old.

Keyboards sometimes add an “s” to an “a” and an “x” along with the “c” — making sentences hard to follow.

“She just let me know what is happening at home and what she has been doing,” said Sykora, who is a manager supervisor for Dawn Foods in Crown Point.

Some of the soldiers with the 113th Engineering Battalion have begun purchasing Internet phone accounts.

Soldiers with the Virginia National Guard sit with headphones and a microphone and talk for an hour with their families over the computer.


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