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reed

night mares I deal with at this time

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This is from my son in Iraq. kind of raised the hair a little.

"Now the fire fight. I was sitting on a Traffic Control Point when i got the call to chase a vehicle. I pulled out of my hide position and started chaseing the car. We fired 3 warning shots then all of a sudden we were getting rained on with bullets. Tracers were flying everywhere. I saw bullets riccocet off the pavement in front of my truck. I decided to pull off the road to get out of the field of fire. I pulled off the road and hit the low ground. We stoped takeing rounds for about 30 secs, when i turned arround and faced the way i just came, more bullets starting pouring in on us. So, i used my expert driveing skills and evaded the fire and sped us to safety. One of the guys in the back of the truck was hit in his arm twice. It blew out both arterys. he bled like that for about 3-5 minutes before we did anything to him first aid wise. Cause we were in a fire fight. We ended up getting back to our base and got a med evac for him. His pulse was 78 before he got on the bird. So, he was at good pulse for takeing two to the arm. I ended up getting credit for saveing the lives of three people not includeing my own. The next day we went out to the truck and examined it. It turns out that when i was turning the truck i was leaning forward and that saved my life. There was a bullet indentation in the front of the truck between the two windshields on the inside. We traced the impact angle and point and determined that the bullet came in 3-6 inches behind where my head was while i was leaning forward. if i were sitting in the normal spot my head would have been gone. We also descovered that the bullet was in fact a 7.62mm fired out of ,get this, OUR 240B. it turns out that there was another humm-v chaseing what he thought to be a car. It turned out to be me. And they lit me up after we shot warning shots. The higher chain of command knows about it....but it was initialy reported as an ambush...so that is how it went down in the log book. So the guy that was shot, was shot by friendly fire...but according to all the books, it was an ambush...so he is getting a purple heart. Well, this is a lengthy letter, so i am goin to take off now. I hope to hear from you soon.

love always

mike"

reed

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Wow Reed! Glad everyone made it through this okay for the most part. Their minds are frazzled a bit and one guy will be hurting for a while, but at least no one got killed.

Friendly fire is getting more and more common, but this was one of the better cases of it.

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Heck of a way to earn a Purple Heart.

At least all came out ok.

Reed ask your son if they don't use two way radio's so one can verify if friend or foe, seems to me they would have some way of knowing that before letting loose with firepower.

Jon

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Reed,

I'm glad your son is ok. As a parent myself, I would be sick with the fear that my son could be taken from me so easily.

I've just about had enough of this Irag business, it's time to re-evaluate why we are there, and what we are really trying to do.

Some time back it seemed so many in this country were gung-ho to go blast the he|| out of Irag, but it's just not that simple. There has been a horrible toll in loss of lives of our young men and women over there.

A lot of people have lost their loved ones' and my heart goes out to them.

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Wow. You hear about things like tihs happeneing but it never hits home until it happens to you. I'm glad he's ok! Personally if it happend to me, I'd have thought about cleaning the clock of the guy who was responsible for it. (wouldn't do it, but would think about it - seeing red) That's just careless.

I agree with Tony. I'm getting sick of all of this too. I'm a patriotic American, but in addition to the loss of lives of Americans, there are little children and other innocent people over there who are now gone.

Beth

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In todays modern and high tech military, you would think that soldiers would be trained to recognize a HMMWV, whether it be day or night. They are very distinctive in size and shape and if it were night, then night vision would solve this.

Multiple units in the same area should always be in contact and if your son got a call to chase another vehicle, then it shows that he had good commo.

The driver and gunner on that other HMMWV should be disiplined to an extreme point for their close to fatal error.

Friendly fire has been getting more and more coverage in the past few years, so you would think that they would be putting more emphasis on training our troops not to fire on each other. Bad enough going over there and getting hurt or killed, but when it is from friendly fire that just is not acceptable regardless of the stress of war.

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