American at heart

9July2005

We’ve been busy, busy, busy. Early mornings, long days, and hot weather (135F on Sunday) were my companions these past few days. We are now going on missions with the IA. They do raids with coalition forces help, and we watch them to make sure they don’t mess up. Our goal is to approve them as “ready to go on their own” so that coalition forces can leave the country to the Iraqi security forces. We performed around 4 raids these past few days, back to back. We searched around 12 villages, some as large as 8,000 people. We cordoned them off and searched each and every house. We found LOTS of stuff. I’m sure we have prevented countless deaths throughout the country. We blew up a cache of weapons the first day that consisted of a dozen RPG’s, over 200 mortar and rocket rounds, 3 AK47’s, thousands of rounds of ammo, Motorola radios for detonating IED’s, spools of wire, and other IED making materials. The next couple days were more of the same. I’m not sure how many people we detained, but it should have been a lot more. It’s tough with the IA because they will tell their buddies we are coming, and we find that a lot of terrorists are long gone by the time we get there. You know how quickly word spreads in small towns. We are working to rectify the situation though, so it won’t be a problem for long.

I’m still uninjured and our battery has faired extremely well. Not a single injury yet. We have had some close calls, but so far, your prayers and well wishes have done us good. Keep them coming please, I’d like to see us end our deployment just like we got here.

That’s really about it. It’s been quite boring besides the weekly action of a planned raid, or cordon. Most of us enjoy the action, but we all are just anxious to get home. Our primary mission is finished. We have trained and equipped an entire battalion of Iraqi soldiers. I can attest to the fact that the 4th Iraqi Army Battalion is the best trained battalion in the Iraqi Army. They are doing well, have lost no one, and have a couple kills and many arrests. Let’s hope they can keep this country like it is, and finish off the rest of the crazy terrorists.

One more plug before I finish. Things are good here. Regardless of what you hear on the news. The terrorists are losing, and losing bad. If you can’t see that, you need to open your eyes. They have resorted to such cowardly tactics as suicide bombers targeting civilians. Civilians! What did the civilians ever do to the terrorists? Nothing. But it doesn’t matter. The terrorists are only here (from other countries mind you) to create havoc. It’s not working too well. For every huge explosion you see on CNN, there were probably two dozen that were prevented by quick thinking, hard working soldiers. You don’t hear about that on the news though. You don’t hear about the 18 year old machine gunner who shot a suspicious vehicle trying to enter their convoy which turned out to be an attempted suicide bomber. This hero is not on CNN for saving the lives of fellow soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike. You don’t hear about how many lives were saved when the Iraqi army raided a small village and destroyed hundreds of would be IED’s. No, that is not news my friends. But when some pus nuts friggin terrorist blows up innocent people in the middle of a market, you are told by the media that we are losing the war and that we shouldn’t be here. Well, we should. When you work with these people daily, you see what the hard work is doing. When the kids are anxious to go to school to learn about the world around them, you realize that we should be here. I hope the trend continues, and that the terrorists run out of cowardly suicide volunteers. Can there be that many stupid people around? Iraq doesn’t have any left. Neither does Iran. These terrorists are from Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, ect. I hope the people fight back. They are starting to, believe me. Yesterday we were tipped off by a man in the village about a house that had already been searched. When soldiers went back inside to search more carefully a cleverly hidden sniper rifle was found. How many people had this terrorist killed? How many would he have killed had we not been tipped off? A big thanks goes out to that civilian. That Arab wants to see his country make something of it’s self. I do too. And you know what, I think it will.

I hope those of you that disagree with me take a moment to realize how right I am. If you still don’t agree, I’ve got a spot here for you. You can be an E-4 in the US Army. You can work with these people every day. You can drive around and fire my machine gun. Please do. I’d like to go home and see my family.

"Look what we found!"


"A shot through my NVG's (night vision goggles)"


"Iraqi Army soldiers"


"Myself on the right with two of my good buddies"