Please continue to pray

My cousin Ben is in the Army and has been in Iraq since last Thanksgiving. He still has no idea on when he's coming home. I know that several of you reading this are in the military and have served our country in the Middle East, and you are no stranger to the situations described below. Once again, my profound thanks goes out to each of you. Ben wanted this to get forwarded to as many people as possible, so I figured what better way to forward it than to put it on the blog. Please remember to keep our military personnel in our prayers.

so i'm not one to purposefully write emails to be forwarded, but this one i would like forwarded to as many people that can stomach it. this is in no way a justification for the war, but more like some positive press that we'll never get.

keep in mind, as i write this, i'm staring at my gear and clothes from last night which is covered in blood. my room still has the acrid smell lingering. i've slept 2 hours in the past 2 and a half days and i'm getting ready to go out again. last night was a night no different than any other. typical stuff. well we're making our way through sector and we see all these people flagging us down. we see what they want. they're talking about a body and bombs or something. so we make our way over to see what they want. all i see is a group of people and lots of blood. it was roughly midnight. we were told the guy was working on a generator and a bomb went off which made no sense to since there's a curfew. well i get called in with another sar buddy. we start working on this guy who is burnt, bleeding, bones everywhere. he's a mess. as we worked on him for the next 30 minutes, his heart stopped twice. both times we brought him back. it's obvious by his injuries that he was setting in an ied that was meant for us. another element in our team followed a trail of blood down the road. they found this guy's bomb buddy with his head blown off and other injuries indicating that he too was a bomb maker/placer. so even as we worked on him, we knew that this guy was responsible for the majority of the bombs in sector. even when we brought him back twice, we knew that all this guy wanted to do was to kill us.

we loaded him up in a national police truck and they took him to a hospital. i don't know if he lived or not, but he was alive when he left us. after that we followed some leads and gathered some more intel. we heard another boom. another unit got hit. we reacted to it. something wasn't right in the whole thing. we moved to link up with the other unit. i stopped my humvee in the middle of the road. as i moved to get out as well as three of my friends, an ied went off two feet in front of the humvee on my side. all i heard was screaming. i grabbed my gear and went to treat. another coalition member was rolling around screaming. i noticed first off he was missing a leg and was close to losing his other. i won't go into detail in describing anything else. we worked to stabilize him for 15 minutes when we found out they wouldn't bring in a bird to evac him. (area's too hot) so we threw him in our humvee and ran him to the csh(hospital) i was praying our humvee would make it, since it took the big part of the blast. we made it and got him into surgery and we were told that he was gonna make it.

my point here is that the next time you hear about a soldier killing detainees, raping iraqis, or doing anything else that seems wrong, understand that they are a few out of hundreds of thousands and that there are some of us, who do more than the right thing.

i'm also amazed that i'm unscathed from the whole blast. i was the closest of us to the blast and i have the least amount of damage...actually i have none.

thanks for the prayers. i felt them last night.

ben