From the front lines

Anyways, so yeah, besides work I lift and grapple. That's about it. As far as work goes...wow. It's a whole lot of craziness. It's got it's ups and downs though. I have a ton of responsibility here. Right now I'm the company (120 dudes) executive officer which is in charge of well... damn near everything. An example of what I do is like yesterday I took a convoy (organized and led) to a nearby forward operating base (FOB) to get better armor installed on a couple of our HUMMV's, and turn a blown/burnt up truck in to the scrap metal yard. That was the truck from our company that got blown up and was the first 2 KIA's in the battalion. We've had 7 people killed in just over 2 months in Iraq. We've also had about 50 people wounded where about 30 will not return to duty. It's pretty scary.

Lately we've been finding a LOT of stuff which is good. We mostly find home made explosives (HME), RPGs, Mortars, AK's and other small arms and machine guns, and other IED making material. Recently we found a bunch of rockets though, which I'm glad we found them before they were fired.

I haven't been doing as many combat patrols as the rest of the guys because I'm the XO. I've done 16 combat patrols since I've been here. One of them we got hit with 2 IEDs, but neither of them were on my truck. The other exciting time we went out we had to re-occupy this Iraqi police (IP) station that the IP's abandoned. It was looted and blown up, but half of the building was still standing. The day we occupied it was the day I was first shot at (and missed), they also fired mortars at us but missed.

We were getting shot at from a house about 400m away and we leveled it with 25mm high explosive (HE) from a bradley fighting vehicle and then a hellfire missile from an apache helicopter. That was pretty cool because I was the one on the radio talking to the pilot and asking for the missile and telling him which building to hit. I have it on video, but it's like 10 megs and can't send it over this email. I'll figure out how to send it some day though.

My spirits are generally high though, considering the situation. I should be coming home for 2 weeks in March or April. Then we're supposed to be done with the deployment in september, unless we get extended, which would suck.

I'm looking forward to being back in the states and having freedom again. I hope to do more traveling and just taking advantage of not being here. Maybe we'll come to Hawaii again someday. Lemme know your plans and how long you think you'll be in Hawaii.