Civil Affairs in Iraq

This maybe should have been one of my first posts, but somehow it “passed by the wayside” (for lack of a better expression).  Some people have asked me about the APO AE + the zip code in the last line of my address.  What does it actually mean?  Well it is quite simple really, which goes against the military way.

The first part:

Two “City” equivalents:

APO, which stands for Army Post Office (land)
FPO, which stands for Fleet Post Office (sea)

The second part:

There are 3 Military “States”:

AA, which stands for Armed Forces (the) Americas (goes through Miami)
AE, which stands for Armed Forces Europe (goes through New York)
AP, which stands for Armed Forces Pacific (goes through San Francisco)

The third part:

The zip code:

Identifies the camp or base where it is going, just like in the US

So in conclusion, anything that gets sent my way goes to New York, then gets sorted for Europe, then gets sent to the nearest incoming mail center located near my post.  From there, it is then again sorted and distributed to each of the specific camps and bases. 

You may say how come Europe when you are in the Middle East?  Well, remember now, I said the military has kept this process simple.  When you only have 3 “military states”, you choose the closest one.  As you can see, there is a ton of mail going through the same pipeline to get to Afghanistan and Iraq.  It’s no wonder a few boxes come up missing once in a while!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 5:19 pm Filed under Daily Blog and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.