Just another day...

It’s time for another blog entry, although you might be wishing I would just shut up. Things are still going well. The lines for the internet have gone down some, as most of the people that were here have now left. We had 30 times more personnel here than normal, which meant that everything took longer (chow, working out, and internet) Some of those personnel have started to go back to their own bases, allowing us a little more space, which is nice. I think this mission will wrap up soon and then it’ll be back to normal. We have been very busy as a team, which has been nice. We have had some excellent successes these past few days. I’d love to tell you all about them, but I can’t on a blog that is open for anyone who wants to read it. I watched a video put on by the church called “Let Not Your Heart be Troubled”. One of the speakers quoted the Book of Mormon phrase “the work of death” from Alma 43. It certainly is an accurate description of what the soldiers we are supporting go out to do. We have dropped so many bombs and fired so many mortars over the last few days that I have been living in my Peltor hearing protection. They were definitely one of the better purchases I made! Unfortunately, it looks like that mission has been canceled, which is a little sad. Jones and I were looking forward to the air assault insertion to top of a mountain in a helicopter. I guess there is always next time. We were going to be going with the headquarters element. We were told to bring 4 days food and water (about 14 liters of water and 8 MRE’s) along with all our equipment. We all had our huge rucksacks that weighed 115 lbs ready to get out of the helicopter, while the headquarters people only had their small assault packs. They claimed they had enough food and water, but they didn’t. Most of them took about 6 liters, which isn’t enough. But the pilot couldn’t find a place to drop the bird down, and so we didn’t get off. Good thing, I guess, because we weren’t going to share our water if they didn’t have the wisdom to bring along their own. I guess we learned from running out of water with the scouts that you really want to have enough water. This was going to be the first real march for a lot of the headquarters people, but I’m sure they would have remembered next time. Well, I am including a few pictures from my last mission. Some of the pictures are of the mountains that we climbed. I’m not sure the camera really does them justice, but I’ll post them anyway. It was a lot of fun, now that it is over and I didn’t pull any muscles or break any bones! Well, I’m off, so I’ll talk with you all later!