Warm Welcome for Our Troops
Believe it or not, it gets cold in Iraq. Real cold. The winters have been especially tough lately, because fuel has been so hard to come by. Blame the extremists.who have proven to be very adept at destroying infrastructure but have yet to actually build anything. That's how the cowardly terrorists work - they are destroyers, not builders.
To help the Iraqi people understand that concept a little better, U.S. and Iraqi army soldiers went out on a special kind of patrol in the Doura neighborhood of Baghdad recently. Instead of going out looking for insurgents, these soldiers' objective was to help the people get warm.
When the troops arrived, they were greeted by over 150 enthusiastic Iraqi families - some of whom had been waiting since before dawn. Each family was allotted 100 liters of kerosene for home heating.
First Lt. Aaron Hall was the patrol leader. He was encouraged by the results. "Every time we conduct a mission like this, we get positive feedback from the community," he said. "We always have citizens asking us for phone numbers, which they call later to report extremists in their neighborhoods. They obviously want to see conditions improve."
And the conditions are improving, because of heroes like Lieutenant Hall and his team. These are the kind of stories you SHOULD be seeing on the evening news. Until that happens, keep checking here for more good news from the front lines.