0300

Two nights ago we were attacked at 3am by mortars from the same guy. We call him the "mortarman". He sent 9 mortars into the AF housing area. He's not too precise with his mortars but then how precise do you have to be to get inside a small area. He got off these 9 rounds and escaped before our counter fire could return the favor. But the whole attack took less than 3 minutes. It is a strange feeling to wake up to explosions all around outside your bedroom. Each one either getting closer or farther away and you wait to hear the next one because you know it didn't come thru your roof if you hear it somewhere else. It did come thru the roof of an AF hooch. In fact it was a room with two guys. The picture today is from these guy's hooch. One guy at just got called to work at 0230 to work an urgent issue and the other guy stayed in his bed asleep. When the mortar hit their hooch, it detonated at contact with the roof, spraying shrapnel onto the next hooches in an up and out kind of blast pattern. Luckily it didn't spray down and in or else the guy sleeping would have probably been killed. Most of the blast damaged happened on the side of the hooch of the guy that went to work. It's an amazing thing to see, the damage from a 82mm mortar. The guy that went to work had photographs of his family taped to the wall beside his bed. The wall had damage from pieces of shrapnel but amazingly his photographs were not touched. I can only believe that a higher power is watching over us when so many of these things happen in a location that a higher probability of casuality should have resulted. This is to me a physical touch of God, the results of prayer from people all over this world praying for us to safely do God's tough work for the people of Iraq that can't or don't have the ability to overpower these evil people. Of all the 9 mortars there was only one person hurt. He had minor injuries to his arm and side, when one of the mortars hit right near him as he was walking to the bathroom. No one else was hurt. Keep the prayers coming and I'll keep the good reports coming home. That is that.