Couple of "thank yous" from Afghanistan

LTC Steve Osterholzer, 3rd BCT, 10th MTN (TF Spartan) near FOB Shank in Logar Province, Afghanistan. Have you ever seen a bluer sky?

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting all of us serving our country. My heart stirs with pride each time I look at the U.S. flag flying right next to the Afghan flag here at our base and I am proud to be doing my part in helping to give these wonderful people the basic liberties and essentials that I took for granted in the United States.

These young kids, these soldiers, setting aside their X-boxes and college parties, sleeping in on Saturday mornings and designer clothes, these soldiers have traded them in for exhausting and dangerous duty, cold food, no showers, dirty uniforms. All in the name of making this world a better place. They truly are the best our country has to offer and I am so honored and blessed to call them comrades.

You, in your very own tangible way, make a tremendous difference to these soldiers… and you have my deepest gratitude and thanks.

Lead From the Front,

Steve

Steve ready to leave the FOB.

Next up, VAMPIRE 06 who is currently serving as a Team Chief for an Embedded Training Team with the Afghan National Army at FOB Bermel in Eastern Afghanistan.

Supply lines out his way are not great, and as he wrote on his blog, "the food here at the FOB was almost non-existent and of extremely poor quality. Crap would be a generous term to describe its consistency, quality and desirability."

That's all we needed to hear, and his readers, Soldiers' Angels, Web of Support, and Operation Cookiejar starting sending packages. Lots of packages.

Operation Enduring Freedom has been going on for about eight years, and the war in Iraq for about six. So the American public has been supporting a huge number of troops for quite a while. Food, hygiene goods, movies, and books; lots of stuff has been sent to show deployed troops that the American public supports them.

Enter Team Vampire and our food dilemma.

It is ABSOLUTELY amazing the amount of stuff we’ve been sent. As you can see from the photos below we could open a 7-11 in our house, in fact we received so much stuff that we’ve been passing it on to the rifle company located with us here on the FOB. AND IT JUST KEEPS COMING!

I don't want to spoil the surprise, but you absolutely have to go to his blog and see the pictures!!

While you're there, look for this image and click to find out how you can order your own Vampires t-shirt. Not only is it a very cool shirt - $5 from each purchase is donated to Soldiers' Angels.