A Soldier's Journey: Michael Mundell

Recruiting and Hamburgers
8/31/06  4:46 AM

Hi to all and sundry,
Things here in Fallujah still suck, just so you know.

We had recruiting here in town for IA soldiers. We got an entire 35 volunteers. It seems that the Imams said that we Americans are not nice and working for us is working for the devil. Hmmmm. The recruiting sucked, as we had constant rifle fire by the Iraqi Police, who were running the traffic points outside the base where we were. They shoot at everything. On the way there yesterday, we saw that they had killed a water tanker. No kidding ... it was sitting on the side of the road, leaking water from about twenty holes in the side. It's pretty bad when that is the funniest thing you see all day.

All else is as well as it could be. They have cut us off from drawing frozen hamburgers and lunch meat and so on. It seems that none of us is a trained food handler. Funny, we can make decisions about shooting people every day, but we arent big enough boys to decide if meat is bad or not. One of our guys wrote his congressman. Maybe I will too. Worse, the people that make those decisions get to eat in the mess hall everyday, the bastards. All I want is a burger now and then. Is that hard?
Stay well, everyone
Mike

West of Awful
9/19/06  1:58 PM

Dear Everyone,
These past few weeks have been somewhere west of awful. We have had the usual round of unexplained firing, and all of that—that's normal. Bullets whizz around here and no one knows where they come from or who in particular they are aimed at.

My friend, Maj Brian Hoffman, has lost nine marines WIA [wounded in action] in the past week to IEDs. He is not happy at all.