Dear Mr. Hirsch and all the students of Frelinghuysen Middle School, Thank you for your recent donations! My name is Captain Mike Miranda and I am currently stationed at Forward Operating Base Lightning, Afghanistan with the 503rd Military Police Battalion (Airborne). Receiving mail from home while stationed half-way around the world is one of the best feelings imaginable, and your generosity brought smiles to the faces of several homesick paratroopers. I grew up in Morristown and attended Frelinghuysen, so you can imagine my surprise when I opened a box with letters from my old alma mater! After graduating from Morristown High School, I enrolled in Rutgers University and began my Army training as part of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), where I had the opportunity to attend training in New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Washington, and Germany. Upon graduation from RU, I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Army as a Military Police Corps Officer and immediately went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for further training. Six months later, I finally arrived at my unit, the 21st Military Police Company (Airborne), at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I spent the next year training with my Soldiers on everything from firing weapons to jumping out of planes as we prepared for our deployment to Baghdad, Iraq. In Iraq, I learned the true meaning of friendship and understood what it means to have "brothers" and "sisters" place their lives in your hands, and your own in theirs. A year after returning from Iraq, I deployed again, this time to Afghanistan as part of our Battalion Headquarters. Like in Iraq, our mission in Afghanistan is partner with the local police force and help mentor and develop them into a legitimate law enforcement capable of providing their country with much needed stability and security. It is not an easy mission, nor one that can be completed quickly, but it is vital to the success of this great experiment in democracy.