Please Pray for Our Soldiers

I was going to post tonight about my Bead Fest adventures from this past weekend. I will do so hopefully tomorrow. In the meantime I'd like to talk about an e-mail I received today.

As some of you know, my 20-year high school reunion is coming up in November. Being the token graphic designer of the class, I am in charge of preparing a booklet updating the whereabouts of our classmates. In the process of doing so, e-mails have been going back and forth and classmates have been sending me their updates.

In mid-September I received an e-mail from a guy that I was friends with in high school, but haven't really been in close contact with over the years. He was at the last reunion and we chatted and got caught up with each other. We kept in touch a bit afterwards by e-mail, but lost track of each other again. Anyway, I digress. I get this e-mail from him in September and come to find out he's in Tikrit, Iraq with his Army reserve unit. He's been in Iraq since last December. His first child was born a month before he was deployed. They had a girl.

We exchanged a couple more e-mails. He sent me photos of his baby girl and I sent him photos of my boys. Then I didn't hear back from him until tonight. I think it's been 2 or 3 weeks. The e-mail that he sent to me and several other people contained a link to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. A staff reporter is reporting from Iraq along with a photographer. My friend referenced a soldier mentioned in the article as being the gunner on his truck. In the article the soldier talks about counting the days until he can go home. He has been keeping track of the days by using the usual group of four slash marks with a fifth slash through the four on their Humvee. On Oct. 4th, there is an arrow pointing to the corresponding slash mark. The arrow memorializes the IED (improvised explosive device) that hit their truck. The truck was not damaged and everyone is OK. Please pray for our soldiers.

My friend is one of those guys that is just the sweetest guy you could know. He is at war far from home. He misses his wife. He's missed most of the first year of his daughter's life. I have no concept whatsoever of what that is like. All I know is that the men and women of our military are making sacrifices that none of us can ever come close to understanding unless we have been there ourselves. Please pray for our soldiers.

Every night before I go to bed, when I check on my beautiful, sweet, innocent little boys and kiss their sleeping heads, I say a prayer to God that they may always be safe.

Please pray for our soldiers. They are not safe.