OIF

Hey everyone. So it's Christmas. And I know it's still the eve to you all, but here it's about 4:00 in the morning so it Christmas here. Anyway, I stayed up late so that I could call the family while they were all together and get to talk to everyone for the first time since I've been back from R&R. It was pretty great. And I know the phones were bad when I talked to dad, but at least I got to hear everyone's voice.

Anyway, the way I see it, and I can't remember if I already said this, but it's not really Christmas here to me. Just another day closer to me getting to come home. I'll have Christmas when I get home and that'll be good enough.

As far as current events, we got to show the full movie to the company tonight. Huge success. It was great because all the hidden jokes that we had that were inside jokes for the company, they got. Well, most of them at least. So while you guys may or may not like it, our target audience loved it, and that makes me happy enough.

Also, my family got to see the trailer to the movie so that was awesome. From what I here they liked it too, so that's good enough for me.

Well, I don't have much to say. I've been up for about 20 hours now and my brain's starting to fry a little so I guess I'm going to go to bed finally. But it was GREAT getting to talk to you guys tonight. It was the best little piece of Christmas I could ask for from this far away. So God bless you all and thank you so much for your prayers. Peace.

Hey everyone. Well, first things first. I want to offer my condulances to the familes of the soldiers and civilians killed in the DFAC attack in Mosul. It's truely unfortunate and I hope they find out exactly what happened so they can prevent further attacks. The DFAC can be a scary place when you hear an explosion.

It's always hard to follow news as bad as that with anything else. All other news seems insignificant. I'm sorry, I will try to write tomorrow to catch you all up on the rest of things going on around here. But for now, I'll dedicate this post to those who lost their lives in the attack. God bless.

Hey everyone. Not much going on here now. Christmas is coming and we're trying to get in the spirit. I already told you about the decorations that we put up. Really, I think we all agree that Dec 25th is just a day this year. It's still a religious holiday but it isn't what it's supposed to be over here. Christmas is when you're supposed to get with your family and have fun and realize how dysfunctional everyone is. That's what makes it such a great holiday. But since this year we're without our families, then Christmas can be celebrated on a different day, in a different month, when we all get home and we can be with our families again.

I usually don't put my opinions in this thing. Normally I just put what's going on and stay out of the political events etc. And I know that this happened a long time ago but for some reason, everytime I posted I forgot to mention it. But I wanted to just give a hand to the soldier that stood up to Rumsfield in Kuwait. I have a buddy here who's father was actually at that meeting I guess you could call it. Too many times we as soldiers have complaints and then we don't express them when we get the chance.

Armor is a HUGE problem here. When my buddies were going to go to Kuwait to pick up the replacements, we spent two weeks gathering scrap metal and welding big rusted pieces of steel to the vehicle to make it safer to travel. Going to war with the army you have, not the army you want is a great answer. But even hinting that uparmoring a vehicle doesn't really protect you that much, or that you could be blown up just as easily in an uparmored tank as you can a truck with no doors is preposterous.

When we traveled up here we had a hmmwv that had no doors coming up here, but times were as dangerous then. Now rumors are going around that we may have to drive a couple of our vehicles down. We haven't had time to armor them nor do we have enough time now. I hope for the best. I will let you all know when we find out but as of right now, we still should be flying back down south.

On a lighter note, the movie is finished. We burned 10 or so copies of it last night to hand out to people around here after we show it. It's going to be great, I'm really excited. We even put up a website for the movie. It's only a test site right now, but once we show the movie it'll change a bit. The site is www.afbmthemovie.com.

Ok, that's it for now. Hope you're all doing well. God bless you all and thank you so much for your prayers and support. We're almost out of here.