I received the following message this morning from a friend in the Marine Corps who is fighting the good fight in Iraq. God bless and God speed our soldiers!
"Well to all how are ya doing? Many of you I did not get to say goodbye to, I'm sorry for that but its bad luck to say goodbye to everyone. Well as for me... I’m just a kid in a candy store, and despite those who care all I can say is that I love the challenge over here. The war and the game of it really make you be at your best.
I'll give you my last two days: I gave stitches to a kid who had a nasty cut, and gave out pencils, food, water and paper to an elementary school. Real good stuff right, then these people blow my Hummer up.... it was real close (don’t know how but everyone is alright... thank God for ballistic plates), we get into a fire fight with some punk teenagers who are just trying to be cool and oppose the coalition, find 5 artillery shells wrapped in detonation cord under our vehicle ready to go off, (engineers blew it for them... it was big) watched the local Iraqi police time beat some thief almost to death, then cap the 40 hour op off with me sitting down with the local sheik (who's full of shit and is totally against us but lies to my face for a couple of hours... ah I needed a laugh) drinking tea and smoking some clove cigarettes.
I find one gets the full spectrum of feelings over here... and my job really needs for me to be objective and present compassion... something that I’m slowly loosing.... well anyway i only have so much time in the day... so to all I’ll just say see ya soon."
Posted by publius at March 31, 2004 11:38 AM