Yes, my son is now out of Iraq and will return to Ft Bragg this week. For this my wife and I are very thrilled and relieved.
This was his third deployment to a combat zone, and while a comparitively short one, it has been the most dangerous to date due to the operations his battalion has been involved in. This whole deployment was spent in the area west of Baghdad out to the Syrian border. As I have proudly mentioned before, he is a Paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division.
He earned a purple heart this deployment due to a close call with an IED. I will post his note about it here.
We were walking to the pickup site after a 3 day mission that was going pretty good up to that point. We stopped to do a map check and cross a road. We saw 2 man walking along to our right side about 200 meters off. We started walking down the road to a crossing point near the river when we got hit by a IED (Improvised Explosive Device) buried in the road. It went off about 5 to 7 feet behind me to my left side. All I remember it feeling like I was shot by a 12 gauge shot gun and feeling really hot. Not having any idea of what just happend to us, I came to in the ditch next to the road. The air was full of dust and falling rocks and sand. I could not hear anything at all and was really dazed. I just sat up and was looking around to try to figure out what had happend. Across the road I saw one guy laying face down, and my buddy was to my left face down. I crawled over to him and pulled him off the road into the ditch to get him off the road as fast as I could. The rest of the guys I was with were running around and yelling but I just sat next to my buddy. Some one came over to us and checked us out, we were both still alive but could not hear a thing. The other guy across the road was all bloody and deaf as well, he caught alot of gravel in the face but he walked out ok. After looking at the blast hole we found it to be a shaped charge the blows straight up and not out to the sides. That's the only reason we made it out alive. We called in air support and they saw 5 more IED's within 100 meters of us. We pulled off the road into farm fields and walked out. I could not hear at all for about 4 to 5 hours. We got back and checked out, I walked away with a badly blown right ear drum and thats it. Luck was on our side that night. All three of us are getting the Purple Heart for this.
The Battalion Commander sent out a Christmas note and I am enclosing a part of it here.
As you know already, the Blue Devils have completed the mission here in Iraq. I can not tell you how proud I am for what they have accomplished. This Battalion truly contributed in an important and measurable way to the fight for democracy. As I said in my first letter, no easy missions went to the Blue Devils, every moment spent outside of the wire was spent forward in areas where other units would not go, areas where the insurgents had taken control of the local government, controlled the people through terror, kidnapping, and murder, cashed weapons, and planted IEDs on all roads in large numbers to keep the coalition out. Despite 160,000 troops in Iraq, thousands of separate units all doing great work, Gen Casey, the commander of all forces in Iraq, individually recognized the Blue Devils for setting the example on how to fight the insurgency. This is in addition to the praise received from our headquarters. The enemy has even weighed in (unknowingly) with praise by saying of our troopers "...these guys are special, they aren't Marines, These are crack troops, you cant get close to them, they are everywhere...they really have us by the ba**s here...they are merciless". I take exception to the characterization "merciless", but I am sure that is what it appears to be when he is confronted with an aggressive, determined, and unflappable force.
The Commander also included this note from an Iraqi Interperter working with them during this deployment, understand the spellings and phrasing may not be perfect, but the message comes accross.
favour
in fact, we cant desicribe all you did for us, but all we can do is to say to you thank you and we really appriciate all you did for us specially the bloods wich flow for the Iraqi people and his freedom and democrecy and for liberating him from the oppression and repression and tyrany.
and I would like to pay my respect to those families who lost their sons for us and we owe them with all we have and I would like to say to those families that their sons stood for the real symbol of courage and dignity and that they had really honerble death, that is how is the A. ARMY and here we are feeling freedom and democrecy we did not have long time ago and here we are having a Government elected by us and finally our dream has come true and we are proud of being the second democratic state in the middle east, and inspite of all that, there are a lot of people around the world specially arab people who are saying that there is no point of this war and all what happened was in vain, so to hell with them and what they talking about and go head american army.
and I wish you the best and hope you to get to your home in safety
We can debate forever the reason we went to war, the good we may or may not accomplish in the long run, but I do not believe anyone can debate that our military forces have and continue to be the best military force in the world and we should be very proud of them.
dago
