Today was a terrific day for us! The loadmaster of the Sleigh-130 came by with another delivery.

It looks like the Minnesota National Guard has begun sending our replacements over! Hooray!

It will still be a couple of weeks before my unit goes home. First we need to do what the US Army calls a “relief in place.” This means that we’re going to take a couple of weeks to go through our missions together with the new unit, to teach them about the area they’re in and to show them some of the things we’ve learned over the past 18 months. That way they’ll be ready to conduct missions on their own when we leave.

I started out with some classroom instruction, going over some of the most important lessons I’ve learned here in Iraq:

We’re one step closer to going home now! Hooray!