A half decent type of camera to get would be a Nikon Coolpix variation. Although they are incredible little cameras if your looking to get SLR quality in a point and shoot, they are finicy when it comes to dirt. I got some dirt in the guillotine style retracting lens cover on my P4 and it wouldn't open until I accidentally dropped it on the ground whilst taking it to Henry's to have it fixed, which I don't recommend anyways, dropping is bad. Worse case if you cant get any good ideas from here stop into a mom and pa camera shop and ask what can take weather. Sun and dust. Something with a nice zoom would probably preferable to you over there since some of the pictures you might be taking will have some distance. I run a Nikon Coolpix P4 and the zoom leaves something to be desired. Excellent for under 100 foot shots as you can (if you have photo editing programs available) crop them down to just have your details in the picture. A Nikon Coolpix S4 however has a 10x digital zoom so that would cover distance shots for sure. (My camera, the P4 has a 3.5x Zoom and it does fairly well, 10x would be incredible for distance.)
As for memory cards and battery's and the likes. Stock up on the battery's. Try to get something with Lithium Ion, as they seem to hold a fairly good charge for a fairly long time. Try to get something with a smaller LCD screen on the back though, as my Coolpix P4 has a very large screen which can gobble juice. One tip I can give you is your camera will eat power if you are constantly turning it off and on, so try to keep it on if your planning on using it every few minutes. Most new digital point and shoots have a power saver timer that will put the camera into power save untill you press something after a minute or two.
I run two Twin Mos Ultra 1GB SD cards (Got them from a sale at Vistek) and they can hold about twenty five minutes of 380x120 video, or about 400 pictures at 8.1 mega pixels. If you are not going to have access to a computer very often and you don't want to carry ten cards with you, invest in 2gig cards.
To some 8.1mp may be over kill, to me its high Res with a capital R. I'm not exactly a professional, but when I am wheeling I like to have a lot of room to play when editing my pictures, so with 8.1 you can crop your picture down to count how many hairs make up a Col.'s stache if that's your thing as a 9 MP is a picture about 3264x2448 pixels big which is really big.
You can crop your picture down like so, or you can resize the full picture like so.
In the end, it does not matter what camera you get durability wise, but how hard you use it. Drop it, jam it up against the inside of a LAV3, throw it in a dump pouch with a few mags, bad things will happen. Get a hard plastic case(or an underwater case), keep it somewhere on your persons where it will not take blunt force and it will provide you with thousands of pictures.
Also; try to avoid having bullets hit the camera. I don't think warranty's cover that kind of damage.
