Captain Cook's pre-Christmas Brief to the Homefront

Captain Cook speaking of Crazyhorse Troop's latest, the below excerpt direct from northern Iraq:

...I am extremely proud of the toughness and humanity your Soldiers are displaying every day. We have been conducting missions day and night to help get acquainted with the population. I can tell you that there is a genuine groundswell of support for the U.S. forces compared to the last time I was here. I think the people are finally tiring of the brutality of Al Qaeda. On our first major Troop operation, we conducted a search of a small village and spent a long period of time there looking for weapons and enemy fighters. As the sun came up and the population came out, we spoke with them about why we were conducting the operation. We told them it was necessary to conduct such an operation to find the people causing so much trouble in the region. You could tell that they were very scared of the people who had been terrorizing the area, and that was frustrating. However, they seemed genuinely glad that we were paying attention to their area and trying to help the Iraqi Security forces regain control of the area. By the end of the day, we were playing soccer with the children and teaching them to throw their new toys courtesy of the U.S. Army Civil Affairs team – a Nerf football. A man who was there with his wife and children during the search came up to me the next day and told me that after we left the village, the people all came together and said that they thought our unit was very professional and kind towards the people. They knew we were there to help, but they could tell the enemy should not take us lightly. I think more operations like this will compel them to come forward and help police their own communities. When this man told me what the people thought, I was overcome with pride for the Soldiers of this unit. All the hard work they have put in over the past year and a half is paying off for them as we tackle this tough problem. The overall momentum and reduction in violence in Iraq is encouraging. But Al Qaeda in Iraq still presents a threat to our forces and threatens to break Iraq apart if we do not defeat them now. We have a lot of hard work and long missions ahead of us to rid our area of this threat...