January 24th, 2011 was the first time I ever stepped outside the wire for a mission. It was a pretty unique experience, going to Sinjar and Qataniyah along with DOS colleagues for their mission, I don't think I had a huge role to play in the whole thing. I'll finish this later... gotta sleep early!
One of the things that stood out to me was the large number of children in the local villages - seems like every street we passed had a couple of kids on it, and I had two big thoughts:
1) Al Qaeda in Iraq had targeted Qataniyah in 2007 with dump truck suicide bombs - essentially, they were targeting children. Absolutely disgusting.
2) Why weren't the kids in school?
Can't imagine living like this...
Something else that was kind of interesting - a lot of the locals had never met an Asian American soldier before, so one of the guys who spoke English translated a conversation for me, and a couple of them whipped out cell phones to take pictures with me. Kind of weird, I wonder if that's what celebrities deal with... haha.
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