One of the guys is going home soon, it's kind of sad. He’s being kicked off the mission. I wish him the best of luck. He’ll be with us on this mission in sprit.

We woke up at 0200 hours this morning. This has been a pretty long day for me. This was to be the last day of our CQB training. I think we’re getting there. It looked pretty good today and there’s just a few things to work out with the leadership and planning. As for the Joe’s, they did a fine job today. A few mistakes here and there but everything went all right.

We left here at 0300 to head to the set up town of Leshi. It’s about a 30-minute drive from the barracks. I didn’t mind because it gave me more of a chance to sleep on the drive over there. Once we dismounted the trucks we had a plan for the platoons to take up their sectors and establish an assembly area. That went ok. It helped out this morning because we had a full moon and lots of night illumination. It would’ve been harder to walk around in the dark if it were pitch black.

One of the Sergeants that were responsible for ammo detail misplaced our smoke grenades. That was a big mess up because later we had to give away our position by turning on our flashlights in the darkness and start searching for those smoke grenades. It didn’t take us too long to find them.

From there we moved to our objective rally point. The whole process took a couple of hours. We were ready to attack our objective. It was to secure two of the buildings in the town. Other platoons had their own objective and together the company, as a whole would liberate the town and re-establish order. The movement into our first building went smoothly. 1^st squad was the first one in and they did a fine job of securing our first objective. After that was the next building which were two stories. 3^rd squad would take the bottom floor while my squad, 2^nd, would take the top floor.

After 3^rd squad cleared the bottom floor we were given the signal to head into the house and take the top floor. We took a lot of fire in the stairwell but Alpha Team managed to make their way upstairs. My team, Bravo Team, headed up the stairs and assisted Alpha Team in securing the rooms. My team then got set to enter the last room in the building. When we entered we encountered some hostiles and we began to engage our targets. Our first guy in, Holzer, was wounded and I had to end up treating him.

All in all we ran thru the town twice today. It made for a pretty long day. Tomorrow is combatives. I can’t wait for that. It looks like it’s going to be fun.