Message from Mark...

Below is an email that I received from Mark. I thought it was fitting to share with ya'll. This picture was taken on a family outting just before he left. Enjoy!

Thanks so much for passing this on and for praying for me. I am feeling much better, but the conditions persist. We are pretty cold, that is for sure. I don't think the temps have been above freezing outside since we got here, day or night. We brought some water bottles from outside that were frozen 10 days ago. We put them in our tent to thaw them out but they are still ice, 10 days later. The tents have 1987 on them for the date of original issue... 6 years before I became a Marine, so they are not in that good of shape. The heaters we have in them don't do much, as what gets heated quickly escapes. The work tents are newer and retain heat much better, but we are not supposed to sleep in them or store personal gear in them. We also have lots of high profile people coming through so they have to be clean and look like work-spaces. We walk about a mile to chow unless we can catch 1 of 8 vans that are shuttling Marines back and forth. We have to shower at the gym and shave either at the gym, chow-hall bathroom or from one of the aforementioned frozen bottles of water. Laundry is either from the laundry mat or with a service that comes twice a week.

Considering how uncomfortable this is, I can only imagine how those Marines did it back in the day of the Korean War. Their gear was much less suited for this environ and they didn't have a chow-hall or gym or these heated work tents to fall back to. I guess it is all about perspective, right?

Contributed by: Mark Francis