A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. ~Shelby Foote

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Email from Iraq

My nephew Nick sent out an email over the weekend-- I'll spare you the nittygritties of the family stuff and just pass along these two paragraphs:

I am taking a little break at Navistar now; I must file some paperwork and do various maintance jobs on my vehicle. When we were north of Baghdad, there was an IED buried in the middle of the road and just before we drove over it, the trigger man blew it up. It missed our engine block but shattered the windshield and took out our headlights. After we all got through the blast site, we got towed out to the closest military base- Camp Taji. We were lucky, even though it hit us, it could have been worse. I just count on my driver to be spontaneous and unpredictable behind the wheel, this way we keep the enemy guessing. This will be the second time that we've had a close call now. The first time was 3 weeks earlier when our convoy was ambushed and mortars rained down near our vehicle and machinegun fire peppered some trucks in the convoy, but missed our vehicle. Crazy stuff over here

A few nights ago we were on a highly traveled ASR in Iraq and we saw an IED blow up a fuel truck. The fireball was huge. The truck was part of another convoy ahead of us. One of the non military drivers in the convoy got scared as this happened and jumped out his truck and just started running around crazy while the tanker burned. While we were waiting to get passed this burning truck, we took sniper fire again. Despite what the media portrays, there are far many attacks on troops over here than reported. According to my intelligence brief, there are an average of 50 attacks on troops every day. Most of the attacks are IEDs.


So far, so good-- but keep Nick and the rest of our forces in your prayers.

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Contact your Senators and Representative and ask them to put pressure on the Pentagon to get the JIN pushed through for use in Iraq. It won't remove the IED threat entirely, but it will reduce the threat (possibly significantly).

Take care of yourself, Sgt. Hitt. We're praying and pulling for you on the home front.
 
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