Just wanted to share an email from one of my best friends who is in Iraq (only editted for formatting, no content changes):

Once again just a quick note from the land time forgot. I'm doing fine here in sunny "North Compton", things get more exciting every day. We go out on patrol, we blow things up, we come back inside the wire, we play X-Box. It truly is a glorious life. Apparently every bad guy in our area of operations is pissed off today, we've had more attacks today than in the last week combined. None of our people or vehicles have taken any damage though, so it's a good day, just a couple IEDs found on the road and a few rockets hitting open areas around the FOB. Today we stepped up our interaction with the Iraqi Army, we are now directly mentoring a counterpart in how a democratic military works. The good thing is most of these guys have plenty of military experience, they just have some bad habits that need to be broken. My commander and I had lunch with the Iraqi company commander today on our FOB. We talked about the praticalities of our relationship (how many men he has, what type of equipment, etc), but the truly stirring thing was listening to the nobility of the ideas that make this man show up to work every day despite threats to himself and his family, and the murder of his brother-in-law by terrorists. Listening to him talk about his sense of duty to the people of Iraq, his belief that "although they are now free, they do not know what this means ... yet", and his hope that this country will someday be a great nation of educated and cultured people, was an extremely powerful moment for me.

It made me realize two things:
1. Regardless of whether we invaded Iraq for the right reasons, we are doing the right thing and
2. Because of men like this Captain Adna, this country has a chance

He's one of the smartest guys I know (Philosophy and Physics double-major), so I look to him for views from inside the Army about events in the world and his (their) time in Iraq.