Update from my son in Iraq...

May 12, 2007, 4:19 PM

Keep him in your prayers please...

The weather here is just now starting to get pretty hot. We were only at 112 degrees today (lol) but it is getting worse by the day! By July and through September the temp will be as much as 145 on the hottest days! But what's really bad is we are in Humvees with no AC and inside the Humvee it gets even hotter because of the heat the engine blows inside! If you're in an Air Craft during a mission it gets up to 200+ I've been told because the AC in the planes don't work until it's in the Air. Right now though, it's already in the 90's at 0630 in the morning! Everyone I work with is CLS (Combat Life Saver) certified including me because we work outside the wire away from medical so we can give each other IV's if needed or if someone falls out!

My worst experience so far on this trip was last week when I was suppose to go on that flyaway that was cancelled. The first plane had an issue and was fixed so we took off and then 10 minutes had to turn around because one of the engines had a fire light going off in the cockpit! Ever since we had taken off I noticed we were flying kind of wobbly. During landing, we were coming in too fast and all over the place (the load master was telling everyone to put there sit straps on and hold on). It felt worst than a combat landing because we were swaying back and forth a lot. We bounced off the runway twice really hard, I honestly thought we were crashing! Once we landed I was fine and ready to go again though. We switched planes but never took off after waiting another 6 hours on repairs that never got finished so the Air Craft commander scrubbed the locations that required Ravens. 2nd worst was the first bomb I found off base because we almost ran over it with our vehicle which would have set it off (EOD told us that)!

oh yeah, I found two 130 milimeter bombs yesterday morning and I got picture with them after EOD came out and defused them. I'll send that to you as soon as I can!