Email from the Front

I'm stationed in Baghdad, and we are a National Guard Unit from Kansas. I must say that our troop morale is much higher than I ever expected it to be. When I was on active duty, stationed at Ft. Sill, OK, the unit morale was in the toilet. We worked late nights and through lunch and it drove morale down even more because we didn't see the point in it. When this unit deployed I thought that I had seen the highest that our morale would be for the next year. However our morale only seemed to go up. Once we got to Kuwait we were anxious to get to Iraq. The low point of the deployment so far was at Kuwait where the training seemed tedious and redundant. Once we got to Baghdad our morale only went up from there. After being here for 9 months our morale is still high. Just today there was a group of us on the bus headed back to our Hooches (trailors) and someone got a package. The package contained a funny hat, a stick on mustache, and a bouncing balloon with the rubber band on it. Suddenly a song came on the AFN (Armed Forces Radio) station and just like that it became a party bus. The balloon was being bounced all over the bus everyone was dancing, and joking and singing along. There isn't one day that goes by that someone doesn't do something to make everyone laugh and smile. I can't speak for every unit, but as far as this unit goes we are very much a family. We count on each other for every thing. Especially our good spirits.

Robert D. Truitt

SGT

U.S. Army