July 4th update

Hi Everybody
Its been a while since I last wrote, and since I have a little time before my next mission, I thought I'd try to send out an email and let you all know what we've been up to.
As we all knew would happen, the weather here has gotten extremely hot. Since we don't have a thermometer here on our little base, we don't have a day-by-day report of the weather, but it has been over 120 on more than a few occasions. Typically the temperatures are between 115 and 120, though it can easily climb higher. Even with all the heat, we still are keeping a high operations tempo; we've been running missions day and night, and on a number of occasions have been out walking through town during the hottest part of the day. The local population has a better idea regarding the heat than we seem to; during the most intense part of the day, they close down most of the shops and they go home since very few people are out at that time anyway. The shops reopen sometime in the late afternoon and remain open till after sundown. We are sure that we are the butt of jokes when the locals see us walking around wearing all that gear in the middle of the day; we usually just joke about being able to speak Arabic when we walk past them, and even though we don't know for sure what they're saying, it can't be far from "Stupid Americans...only they would be out walking in this head." Oh well...at least they know we're tough, if a little lacking in intelligence. At least we haven't had any heat injuries.
Read an interesting article in the newspaper we receive over here; it had to do with the rumors that are going around Iraq regarding the American troops. Some we're sure are the propaganda spread by the insurgents, such as Americans eating babies and stealing children, or that the airborne troops dye their berets with enemy blood (their berets are maroon). Some rumors we're not sure where they got their start. My favorite is the idea that Americans have a "cold pill." I thought this was a pill for the common cold, but I was wrong; apparently a lot of Iraqis believe that we take a pill that keeps our bodies cold and enables us to wear all that gear out in the sun. Boy don't we wish!!! Another rumor is that we all wear x-ray glasses that allow us to see through cars, walls and even people's clothing. We're not sure if they are referring to our sunglasses, or if they're talking about our night vision; I suppose if you didn't know what our night vision goggles were, it could be easy to think that. However, we don't mount our NODs on our helmets until it gets close to sundown, and we usually don't see the crowds of people at night like we do during the day.
Over the last month we were in the midst of a struggle to move us to a different area of the Anbar Province. My battalion of about 1,000 Soldiers is "on loan" to the Marines, and the Marine general in charge of this area wanted us moved out of this city and closer to the Syrian border. They wanted us to be running border patrol missions, trying to stop the flow of arms and combatants from Syria into Iraq. Our Army bosses didn't think this was a good idea, especially since we've got a pretty good relationship with the local Sheiks and the city council. In the end, we won; this means that we'll be staying here for at least a couple more months. We're pretty sure that we'll end up moving before our tour is finished over here. There's good and bad to moving; it won't be a lot of fun having to pack up everything and move out of this area, but if/when we do move it'll mean that this city is up and running on its own and doesn't need our direct supervision. For now we're happy with staying right here where we are. We heard that if we had moved to the bases closer to the Syrian border we'd be without AC, phones, internet or showers...definitely a step backwards. Our home may not be much to look at, but at least its home. Its dirty, it smells, and we don't have a lot of creature-comforts, but at least we can call/email and take a shower every once in a while.
Things around town have been quiet for the most part. There've been a couple incidents, but for the most part the town is doing pretty good. All of our guys are still doing very well and have suffered no injuries apart from the usual bumps and bruises. The big obstacle that we're trying to fix is the electrical supply to the city. In a neighboring town, some insurgent blew up the power plant that supplies all the power to the city. So for the last couple of weeks the locals have been living without AC or lights. Some of the bigger houses have generators, but its usually only the wealthier families that can afford those. Most of the population have taken to sleeping in their courtyards or on the roof (they're all flat roofs over here) since its a lot cooler outside at night, plus they don't have to worry about dew. A couple of nights ago we went into a house and I was checking to make sure the courtyard was secure; it was dark and as I was going around the corner of the house I almost tripped over a sleeping child. Thankfully I didn't wake her, as I'm sure that would have been a rather frightful awakening. Always something to keep us on our toes.
About a month ago we had to give up one of our medics to cover for another unit that was short; that left us with 3 medics instead of 4. We've definitely been "earning our keep" with all the missions we've been on. I just hit my 200th mission this afternoon, and we're not yet half-way through our tour. So far we haven't had any problems covering all the missions that have come up, and have all been sharing the increased load. Brown (the medic retasked for a month) left in early June, and from then until November we'll be running with 3 instead of 4 medics. He was working in the aid station through June, and is now on leave, and the next three months in a row we will have one of our medics rotating back to the States for R&R. I think we're more than happy to take on a little extra work because we know that our break is coming up soon. Usually we can even out the schedule to make sure no one medic gets swamped, but there have definitely been days where I've gotten back off a mission at 4 in the morning and had to get up two hours later to head back out again. At least it makes the time go by quickly.
I was helping out our Marine counterparts with some screening physicals for the Iraqi Police applicants. We got to chatting during a break and one of them said that they'd be Stateside within 90 days; I did some quick mental calculations and told him that I had more than 90 days before I went on leave! Most of the Marine units here do 6 to 7 month deployments, and then usually come back after 6 to 12 months off. We keep giving them grief because with the new rotation the Army has handed down, all of our Active Duty units do almost 3 of their deployments in a single go. They usually counter with something along the lines of "I'll drink a beer for you guys when I get home...and you still have 8 months to go." Point taken.
We had another incident with a humvee last night, but thankfully I wasn't sitting in it at the time. All of our vehicles have internal fire suppression systems, which is nothing more than a big bottle of Halon and an activation switch. (I can hear all the fire and hazmat guys cringe at that one) Halon is the gas used in the system to put out the fire, but its not something you want to be around when it goes off. Last night as guys were loading their gear into a humvee the Halon system somehow got activated. Thankfully we were still inside the wire and not cruising down the road. It wasn't a full purge of the system, but rather a partial discharge; unfortunately one of the guys took a blast right to his face. He was lucky, though, and after I flushed his eyes with a couple bottles of water he was still able to go out on the mission. He's just really lucky he didn't take a big breath of it, as we probably would have had to medevac him out of here.
The city is slowly getting its feet under it. We've been doing a lot of missions with the Iraqi Police in the hopes that someday they will be able to stand on their own. During one of our missions we ended up in the house of a city council member, and since we weren't on any time constraints, we sat and had a long conversation with him. He said that the general attitude in the city is good; shops are open that haven't been in business in over a year, new homes are being built everywhere, the schools have good attendance, and the people feel safe walking down the streets. He said that this wasn't possible more than 6 months ago; he said that they are lucky our unit was the one assigned to this town, because he feels we have taken a genuine interest in rebuilding his city. He said that there are still people who don't want us here, but that they want even less for us to leave. Baby steps...
We just finished another mission; we've been doing pretty good at locating people on our "bad guy" list. Either they're getting complacent, or we're getting better at it. We're also starting to see a lot of information coming in from the local people themselves; just last week someone tipped off the IP's about a weapons cache in a cluster of houses by the river. Sure enough, there was a large stockpile of weapons; normally our bomb squad likes to blow it up in place, but since the neighborhood was friendly to us, we didn't want to give them any reason to change their minds. They took it back to one of the other bases and later that night they shook the sandbags we have in lieu of windows. Its definitely nice to see some positives steps being made.
Its 5:30am, Happy 4th of July! Not sure if theres anything special planned here, but I'm sure they'll come up with something. Since we were out so late, I'm hoping to get a chance to sleep; right now I'd take sleep over festivities. One of the lieutenants was joking with a bunch of lower enlisted guys saying that they were going to be able to shoot off flares and rockets and throw grenades and all kinds of stuff that goes "boom!" They got so excited and were about to run off and prep their stuff when he told them he was just kidding. It'd be fun, but we'd probably scare the town pretty good if we started going through our arsenal...best not to chance it.

I think thats about it from my end. My 25-hour day is finally at an end, so I'm gonna go rack out, or at least until someone kicks my bed and tells me to get up for our next mission...we'll see how long this actually lasts.

Best wishes to all
Troy