Email from Eli

Dear Friends and Family,

Well, I am not the best about writing these group e-mails, but I figured I would write one before I come home for leave. Seth and I are both back safely at the base and have been officially taken off of missions as we await our flight to Kuwait for leave. Our projected date to fly out is the 25th (could not think of a better Christmas present then that) but it could be a day earlier and it could be a day later….who knows? Leave is sung to the same tune as everything in the military, nothing is definite until it happens.
Seth and I have been in Iraq for 91 days now. I have been keeping a journal and was reading over it the other day and counted up the number of days I have spent away from Al Asad out on missions. Out of 91 days I have spent 31 days out on the road. I thought that was an interesting fact.
I just got back from a three-day mission where we went to Baghdad and then to Al Taqqaddum, and then back to Al Asad. Here is how the mission went:

We left Al Asad in the afternoon at 3:00pm on Sunday and then over 12 hours later made it to Baghdad. It does not usually take this long, but we had some trouble with the trucks we were transporting, and at one point we had a truck slide off the road and get stuck. The roads we drive on are not the best and some are just non-existent.

We got to Baghdad and slept in a tent on cots beside the staging point for our convoy. We all slept late into the day as it had been a very long night. The First Sergeant (the non commissioned officer in charge of our company) had come along on the convoy as he is trying to go on a mission with every squad at least once, and he had not been out with this squad yet. He came and grabbed me at one point as we were two of the only ones up and told me to come grab some pizza with him and that he was buying. How could I turn that down? So, we went to the pizza hut on base and then sat around eating and chatting.

That night we hooked up with some transport vehicles who are stationed at Al Asad and had been outside the wire transporting tanks around Iraq for three weeks straight. We were escorting them on the last leg of their trip as they were dropping off supplies at Al Taqqaddum and then going back to Al Asad for a much deserved rest.
We left at 10:00pm and then after 4 hours we arrived at Al Taqqaddum and racked out immediately.

We spent the next day hanging out around base and then that night (actually the next morning if we’re being specific) at midnight we left Al Taqqaddum and after 5 hours on the road we made it back to Al Asad. When I walked into my can Seth’s alarm was actually going off for him to get up for a mission…perfect timing!

So, for the mission we were gone 62 hours from Al Asad and spent 21 of them riding around in the ASVs. I also got some chai tea at a green bean’s coffee, ate pizza at a pizza hut, watched a couple movies on my portable dvd player, and finshed my book, Ernie Pyle’s War. Its a rough life being in war...let me tell ya!

My wonderful in-laws sent me some WWII books, one of them being about Ernie Pyle. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and really enjoyed reading some of his columns. Ernie Pyle is famous for writing about the common man. He spent his time on the front lines and in the foxholes with the enlisted men rather then in the rear with the high-ranking officers. This won him and his column immense popularity. One of his columns talked about how the war was fought not by career soldiers but by perfectly normal men and women who were asked to put on the uniform and serve their country in a time of need. This war, to me, is much the same as the way Ernie Pyle described it because of the huge number of National Guard and Reserve troops used. I had a lot of good conversations with the guys I just went out on a mission with, and every one of them I asked what they did back home. We now have some Illinois Guardsmen attached to us, and so I was able to talk to them also. Here is just a sample of the diversity of common men and women we have over here serving our country.
A teacher from Illinois
A mailman (this is our first sergeant)
A manager at the Sheetz in Franklin County
An inventory specialist at a factory
A machinist
Two policemen
A manager at an outdoors store in Roanoke
And here’s the big one, 6 different people in that squad are in college and younger then I am!

Ok, enough rambling. If you have made it this far in the e-mail thanks for staying the course (no pun intended). Anyways, I thought you would find some of this stuff interesting; sorry for being so long winded. I can’t wait to be home soon and see many of you during my leave. Take care and have a great Christmas!
Love,
Eli