December 4

Hello everyone,
The past two days have been a whirlwind of activity and business. We have spent the two days playing with our primary weapon, in my case this is what is called an M-4 which is a modified M-16 which has a shorted barrel and a collapsable stock. The stock can adjust to five different lenghts and makes this weapon really nice for all sizes. Anyway the best thing is that we have
what is known as the red dot. Once we have sighted in the M-4 we go a bit farther and sight in our red dot and then basically use the red dot for any firing actions after it's sighted in. So we had two days of getting to know this amazing weapon in everyway. Pop up targets, short range tragets, urban tactical situations. I have to say that all in all though the funest was the night firing as we totally used tracers which of course are visible at night so that you know where your rounds are headed. That was just cool.

Anyway, we have also trained on what is called the 249 which is known as the SAW (squad automatic weapon) it's a machine gun. A lot heavier than the M-4 but it fires the same kind of ammo. The difference is that it can fire 800 rounds of ammo per minute. By the way, that's a lot and oh does it send out the lead. All of this info is oh course commonly known or it can be found
if someone googles it but we thought it was fun and exciting to go through the training and get to shoot up a bunch of targets. I'm no longer the marksman I used to be but qualifications were no problem.

Well, today the sun finally came out. It has been raining since we got here so it was nice to see some sun. With the sun and the clear skies we could also see Mount Raineer. It is one of the tallest mountains in the US and dominates the horizen around here. I have to say it was neat to see it with all of its snow covered peaks. I think that the hardest thing so far has been the long days while wearing all of the gear that a person is required to wear. We wear our helmet, body
armor, web belt with M-9 (that's a nice weapon which we get to carry everywhere), our ammo, canteens and gas masks. Wow, we've figured out that with our M-4 we are carrying over 65 pounds. If a person does that all day from 0600 to 2200 one gets tired. But they feed us well, far more than I'm used to.

Well that's it for now.

Love all of you and hope you are all fine. Talk to you soon.