Good Times! ( Received December 30, 2009)

Hello Everyone!
Well this last weekend at our strong point was a very exciting one. Hopefully I get everything in this email and don't forget anything important.
Our first patrol started out like all the other ones had except that I volunteered to trade my M4 for an M14 with a scope on it for the day. Its bigger and heavier than my M4 but the better optics made up for the weight.
We walked out to a little mountain town to talk with the locals like we usually do. We passed out a lot of candy to the kids in the town which they gladly took. I'm not sure they knew what to do with it though because they were just chewing on the wrappers! Anyway, nothing too exciting happened in that town. We threw grenades down into a canyon where we saw a small cave but nothin happened except a large "boom".
We decided to take a new path on our walk back to our strong point. It is a very regular thing to hear a few gun shots here and there so when we heard some to our North we didn't' really pay much attention. Not until we heard the snapping of the bullets passing over head.
Immediately everyone dove into cover. The fire increased as we all started shooting back at them. They were pretty far out, probably 500 to 600 meters away so it was difficult to see any actual people, we could only tell where it was coming from.
So we fired back and forth for about fifteen minutes while the other AF guy and my self were calling up the attack helicopters. No more than five minutes later they were buzzing over the top of us. Soon after we had about 30 rockets sunk into the sides of a few grape huts where the fire was coming from.
The guy shots stopped and we kept the helicopters overhead while we moved forward to check the areas we had fired into. We found nothing but a few abandoned bikes, some changes of clothes, and a completely empty town. We assumed they managed to change their clothes and escape before the rockets or bullets could catch any of them. As soon as we finished searching we walked back to our strong point and called it a day.
I'm sure to the dismay of most of you I thought it was a really exciting experience. one thing I will say it that the rush you get from something like that is nothing like I have ever been through before. None of the good guys were hurt at all, and nobody knows for sure if we hurt any of the bad guys.
So the next day we decided to go the opposite direction from our last fire fight. People were a little more observant I noticed because of the events from the day before. As we were passing through a large open field, sure enough, shots started gettin fired and bullets were flyin over our heads. We ran to the nearest cover and started shooting back into the tree line. We couldn't see them but we could sure tell where the shots were comin from. After about 15 minutes things got quiet except for the occasional random shot. we spotted some better cover across a large field and decided to move to it two people at a time. A few guys got shot at as they were running but the American return of fire was much more accurate and much stronger.
So we got into our cover and the first thing I did was set my video camera up in the back and hit record ( I have bout 40 minutes from this fire fight). We started working up the chain to get some aircraft on station. While we were doing this the army guys were firing back and calling the 155mm artillery from FOB Wilson. You could hear the artillery whistle as they came in to hit, about 100 meters in front of us, very close for artillery.
The worst thing that happened was while were were waiting on aircraft, and firing back, the other Air Force guy, Smith, fired a few rounds and the empty shell from one of his shots bounced perfectly off my helmet right down the back of my body armor. If any of you have never picked up freshly fired brass I will tell you it is very hot. And when you have about 60 Ibs of gear holding it against your back, it is painful! I immediately stand up and start jumping around. you can hear everyone laughing on the video and yelling "get down man ha ha!" They were lovin it, it rolled down my back and managed to get off my skin. A few more twists and rolls and i got it to fall out, the video is so funny! I can't wait to get it out to you all.
So to get on with my story. The A10s checked on fairly quickly and we had their eyes in the area in no time. While bullets are still flyin we talked them on to the target and lined up to do a few strafe runs with their 30mm GAU 8. For those of you that have never seen one of those in action I highly recommend you go to YouTube and look up that aircraft and that gun. It is absolutely amazing. If I remember correctly it shoots about 7000 rounds a minute! Needless to say when they were shooting right in front of us the sounds were awesome! But the Taliban kept on shooting! Through the artillery, through our grenades and fire, very determined. There was a few quiet times you could actually hear them walking in the brush on the other side of the trees. Kinda crazy. Anyway, they kept fighting through the first two A10 guns runs. After the next two however things got quiet, and stayed quiet. We waited a few more minutes then decided to pull out since we didn't want to swim across the rover to get to where we were shooting.
One thing we didn't know at the time was that while we were fighting our strong point actually got attacked as well. Not sure how many were shooting at but some people said they saw up to six moving around in the fields. None of our guys were hurt though and if we didn't kill any Taliban (which I doubt) then we sure left them scared.
So that's what happened out here. Pretty fun stuff and I have a lot of good videos now. I hope you are all doing well and I thank you for your thoughts and your prayers. As always, feel free to send this email around. I love and miss you guys!
Michael