E-mail from Mike Lamon

Gary,
Hey, sorry I havn't been able to get back to you yet. It's nice to know that you guys are thinking about us back home. You may be interested to know that my squad leader was in the Gulf War with first AD. His name is SSG Chilson, probably didn't know him, but ya never know.

We don't really work with the Iraqi's too much over here. I've worked with some of the locals that come into base to work, some of them are ok, but more than half of them would steal your clothes if you weren't wearing them. I just got done with a month of patrolling. We had a pretty large area to patrol, we had to clear around 5 different routes, and partol 5 different towns. Patrolling in July and August was no fun at all, the temperature was around 140 every day, and we'd be out any where from 6-14 hours at a time. Normally it fell towards the latter though. Obviously the roads are dangerous, they don't always seem like it though. The first 2 weeks were completly quiet, then the last two were pretty eventful. In a three day period, we got blown up, found a huge IED making cache and then found a live IED (roadside bomb) So some parts were good and some really bad. We were lucky that the truck that got hit, nobody got seriously injured. Only one of the guys had to go to the hospital in Germany. He just got back tonight and he said he had a blast, minus the whole getting blown up part. I never thought I'd say that my whole squad has CIB's and 1/4 of it has purple hearts. Weird. But now we're working nights at the ECP which is almost like a vacation compared to patrols. So we have 5 weeks left of that, then we patrol again for a month. But somewhere on that next patrol set I get to come home for leave!!
Well I should get going, I don't think I have a public site that I put stuff on. I have a few pics on myspace, but I mostly use facebook.
I'll talk to you all later,
Mike