This is Part III in a continuing series by my friend "Mike", a Navy SEAL who spent most of the last couple of years in Iraq as both an active-duty participant and a private contractor. "Mike" explains the war in Iraq to his young sons, and has graciously allowed me to share his letters with you.

IRAQ PICTURE LETTER TO MY SON
PART 3. WHY WE INVADED IRAQ & WHY WE ARE STILL HERE

In Part 2 we learned about how Saddam Hussein was an evil and crazy ruler of the Iraqi people and that he had bad intentions for the world and especially Israel. However, Israel is quite capable of defending itself. We also learned how cruel he was to his own people. However that doesn’t explain why President Bush sent us into Iraq when he did.

One reason is because we believed that Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists who attacked our country on 9/11. Saddam is now saying that he had nothing to do with it. Well if Saddam Hussein didn’t directly help the terrorists he shouldn’t have been so arrogant as to have paintings like these made after it happened. Several paintings of Saddam celebrating the attack on America have been found in his Presidential Palaces.

But the main reason we had to free Iraq is so that we could go in and find and destroy the massive weapons he was building up so that he or other terrorists could not use them against us or other countries.

Do you know how much a ton is? That’s right, 2,000 lbs. Well everyone knew that Saddam Hussein had many tons of special weapons that are illegal and kill people in most horrible ways. He actually used some of these awful weapons against some of the people in his own country that he didn’t like. He is saying that he got rid of the really horrible weapons years ago, but what we don’t know yet is where they all went.

What we do know is that his country has more ammunition than almost any country in the world. Every year he kept buying more and more ammunition mainly from Russia and France and China. Helping to find and destroy ‘Captured Enemy Ammunition’ (CEA) is the mission that Daddy has been serving in Iraq.

But what do we mean by ammunition?

When we talk about ‘ammunition’ we aren’t just talking about bullets for guns that you can carry. We are talking about almost anything that explodes, including bombs, missiles, rockets, mortars, tank rounds, artillery rounds (big guns), and land mines.

When Daddy first came to Iraq it was estimated that there was more than 2 million tons of ammunition stored in hundreds of storage places called ‘caches’. We may not have that much ammunition in our own country.

Most of this ammunition could not even be used by the Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein and most has no use to the new military of Free Iraq. Saddam’s corrupt government sold or gave lots of it away to terrorists. Today terrorists try to steal the ammunition, so they can use it to kill innocent people.

Some of it is used to make bombs that they plant in places where there are a lot of people. Other ammunition, like this rocket, is ready to launch right out of the container. These kinds of rockets are launched on our bases and convoys by bad people every day.

So Daddy’s team goes to where the ammunition is and we keep it safe until big trucks come. Then we go out to the desert far away from people and stack the ammo close together, we ‘prime’ it with special explosives ... and then we blow it up.

The explosions you see were what we call planned “detonations.” Some of our planned detonations destroyed more than 100 tons of Captured Enemy Ammunition (CEA) in one shot! They all happened at different remote places in Iraq called Forward Operating Bases or FOBs. Daddy has worked out of FOBs near cities from as far south as Al Basrah and as far north as Tikrit and as far west as Fallujah and others in between.

The CEA (Captured Enemy Ammunition) project will take many more months or even years to finish. It is an example of only one important project that will help the people of Iraq and all of the nations of the Free World to stay safe. None of the information you just learned is a secret. It very sad that the people who report the news choose to report on things that go bad in Iraq, instead of these projects that are so necessary and are going so well.

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