There was about four of us sitting around the fire if I remember correctly. It’s hard enough to recall the exact details of things like this, seeing how some instances occurred well over a year ago now. But it’s even harder to remember this particular night, even though it was Christmas Eve. I had received the best damn gift a young soldier deployed to Iraq could hope for on this particular holiday season. Two bottles of hard liquor were sent to me by a source I shall not reveal. They were concealed in all-white mouth wash containers and the plastic wrapping around the cap was hanging shabbily off after a poor attempt to re-wrap it. We were passing one bottle around; buzzed off our asses’ and only getting more and more hammered while sitting around the fire pit right outside our barracks building. Most of our NCOs were either at the MWR calling home or were already racked out on their cots, snug as bugs dreaming about candied plums and other merry filled Christmas shit. Or they were single like us and didn’t even notice the fact that it was the most celebrated holiday of the year.
It was around the fourth or fifth shot when somebody pointed out the fact that it was Christmas Eve. Up until then, we were all too pre-occupied with the fact that this was our first drink in months which, for a group of young soldiers’ who’d lived in the barracks together back at Hood for the past year and a half, was an enormous stretch of time to go without alcohol. So we sat around the fire and enjoyed the warming sensation the liquor gave us as it coursed through our veins. Damn, Iraq wouldn’t be so bad if they’d just let us drink from time to time, I thought. We sat around and bitched about our NCOs and officers, as privates often do, and remembered the few times we’d come into contact with the enemy. Since we were only about 2 months into our tour and our AO wasn’t all that bad yet (the “troop surge” had yet to push the muj into our area), there weren’t many wowing stories to be heard. Besides, if one of the four of us had a cool story to tell, chances were that the other three of us had been there as well.
But then some asshole had to go and point out the fact that it was Christmas. We all got quiet for a few seconds and let that fact sink in. I did the math in my head and figured out if it was 2300 (11PM) here in Iraq, then it was 1500 (3PM) on the East coast where most of my family was down in Florida, and 1300 (1PM) Mountain Time where the other portion of my family was in Colorado. I wondered what they were up to at that moment and hoped they were thinking about me. The conversation quickly turned to family and friends back in the States and we spent a good deal of time talking about the folks we’d left back home, wondering how they were celebrating their holiday’s and all that what-not. We wondered where exactly we’d be if we’d just done something simple like go to college or find a decent job instead of joining the Army. The conversation was quickly turning very depressing. We passed the bottle around some more, some of us staring with empty expressions into the fire, others gazing thoughtfully at the stars. We were just generally feeling sorry for ourselves and having our own little alcohol induced pity party when three mortar rounds landed not more than 100 meters away from us, just on the other side of the Hesco baskets in the Iraqi Army compound. By this time, we’d grown used to the indirect fire attacks around our Troop AO and none of us even flinched.
My friend just casually turned to me and said “Man… we fucked up.” There wasn’t much else to be said after that. We quickly finished the bottle, put out the fire and scurried off to bed since any minute there’d be an NCO coming to check on us all to make sure the mortars didn’t blow one of us into tiny pieces. I pounded two bottles of water before passing the hell out.
I spent the next day incredibly hung over, hiding in the motor pool lest some NCO notice the shadows around my eyes and pale color of my face or smell the booze leaking out of my pores. I labored away with the rest of the enlisted dudes, changing the worn out track pads of our Bradley fighting vehicles. And that my friends, is how I spent my Christmas in Iraq.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Mujahideen firefight with Government soldiers and USA
Here's the bank checkpoint in central Muqdidiyah. That place was a nightmare...
Ansar Al Sunnah (IED)
Here's another vehicle from my platoon hitting an IED on the LOC in Muqdidiyah.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Just Imagine This...
It’s another hot day, the kind of heat that seems to suffocate you. The sun bakes the earth and the wind blows warm air that offers no relief. To make matters worse, you are wearing an outer tactical vest (OTV, made of Kevlar and equipped with small arms protective plates in the front, back and sides) that weighs around 50 pounds with all of the loaded magazines, the small dismount radio, frags, smoke grenades, etc. On top of that, you are in the back of a Bradley with 7 other dudes. Ya know when you’re cramped up in a small area with another person, the body heat being generated will warm you up? Well, imagine that x8 in a metal box with the temperature outside reaching 135 degrees. Now imagine that you’ve been sitting in that Bradley for 12 hours. Your ass is throbbing since the bench you’re sharing with your buddies wasn’t designed for comfort. When the Bradley moves, the forward motion pushes all of your weight onto one cheek and no matter how hard you try to shift your weight to distribute it evenly along your aching ass, there’s never enough room to move around with all the other bodies in there so you just have to do your best to ignore the soreness. You can grab a hold of one of the straps hanging off the inside of the compartment and pull yourself up, temporarily giving your tender butt a reprieve but you can only hold it for 15-20 seconds because all the extra weight hanging off your shoulders beckons you back down onto the bench. You grab a bottle of water from the cooler, or have someone else grab it for you depending on where you’re seated. The ice inside the cooler melted hours ago and the bottle has warmed up. It’s likely that the original bottles of water that were in the cooler with the ice to begin with have already been consumed so the one you’re holding in your hand at this point isn’t just warm, it’s fucking hot since it had been laying on the storage space between the seats and the hull before it was thrown into the lukewarm, now very dirtied water (dirty from everyone sticking their filthy dick-beaters inside it). Someone says fuck it and pops the TOW hatch open just a foot or so to allow some air flow (the TOW hatch is about 1 meter long, ½ a meter wide and is centered over the back of the Bradley behind the turret, it allows for dismounts to re-load the TOW launcher if necessary). When the TOW hatch opens, all of the dust that had collected on the back of the hull pours into the dismount compartment covering everyone’s weapons, receiver, barrel, optics and all in a fine layer of soil. The dust that settles on your sweat soaked uniform turns into a thin layer of mud. The air stops circulating once again and if there is a breeze outside, all it brings is more warm air and dirt. The TOW hatch is then closed since it wasn’t having the desired effect and it would be hard to justify somebody getting fucked up by shrapnel or God-forbid some kid is able to throw a grenade inside all because we were uncomfortable. Somebody mutters “This shit was not in the fucking recruiting video,” and everyone nods in agreement. You sit there, staring at each other, smelling each other’s un-washed bodies and farts, too miserable to even think of anything but your own misery. Somebody notes “Man, imagine where we could be if we’d joined the fucking Navy or something… I could be like, on a ship somewhere in the Pacific about to go on port call to the Philippines or Australia or somewhere cool like that” and everyone thinks back to the days before they enlisted and wonders “Why the fuck did I join the Army?” The patrol moves out once the explosive ordnance disposal team you have attached to you clears a suspect pile of rocks on the shoulder of the road. The EOD guys you have with you now are being extra cautious since they just replaced the ones you had originally brought out with you after their vehicle was disabled by a couple of anti-tank mines equipped with a pressure wire. So far, they’ve already destroyed two other IEDs. The patrol continues and the only thing you can do aside from be incredibly uncomfortable is think. Your mind wanders back to something that happened only hours before. A Humvee gunner manning a .50 cal lit up a truck that was parked in a palm grove after he identified individuals moving around it with weapons. The armed men fled the scene and you were kicked out of the Bradley and ordered to sweep the palm grove in search of them. The .50 cal had been shooting armor piercing incendiary rounds that ignited the dry grass causing a brush fire. The flames were spread out along a 100 meter front forcing you to traverse the “line of fire” and sweep around behind it. The smoke from the fire was choking everyone out and you were becoming light headed. You push your body to its limits and get upwind of the fire, leaving the smoke behind as well as a cow who is apparently caught somewhere near the flames. As the fire grew, the unseen cow’s mooing grew louder and louder. It almost sounded as if the animal was shrieking, if that is even possible for an animal with such a baritone sound. All of a sudden, the mooing stops. While patrolling through the brush, a man wearing all black with an AK47 in hand leaped out of a ditch and tore off at a dead sprint, throwing his weapon to the ground in the hope that you won’t shoot him. He would have been better off just surrendering because he is promptly cut down by your platoon sergeant’s 5.56 and he crumples to the ground, gasping the last breath’s of air that will ever enter his now bullet ridden lungs. As you jogged past the dying man, you saw his eyes blankly staring into the sky, blood seeping out of his mouth and flowing from the holes in his chest. And you felt absolutely nothing. No joy, no sorrow, no delight, no remorse, no pleasure or amusement, no hatred or loathing, just nothing. He’s not even a real human being to you now. He is just another dead corpse. You vainly attempted to shoot three more individuals some 500 meters away fleeing into another palm grove but the distance to the targets and your heavy breathing caused your rounds to miss completely. You searched the area but found nothing more than nourishment in the form of the sweetest grapes you’ve ever tasted growing in a vineyard. You mounted back up into the Bradley and found out that the other dismount team found a bunch of anti-tank mines inside the muj truck. You sat in the back of the Bradley and watched the squad leader's display mounted by the turret and got to see the truck get blown into basketball size chunks and smaller. You’re now riding in the back of the Bradley thinking hard on your reaction to the dying man and wonder what it all means. You realize that you barely even reacted. A few months ago you would have stopped and stared in wonderment, maybe even gave your buddy a high five and snapped some photos. Now, you’re just numb to the sight of another dead body. You don’t get too deep into thought because you’ve finally reached your destination; some no name village dozens and dozens of kilometers from anything other than farm land, palm groves and other tiny villages just like it. You step outside the Bradley and the flow of blood that had been staunched by the weight of your body and the forward motion of the tracked vehicle resumes its natural course and your ass feels blissful. But you can’t soak it up for long because you’ve taken up a light jog through a muddy ditch. The vehicle’s stay behind as you head towards the village. You see why the vehicles can’t follow you into the village; a giant ditch has been dug out of the road rendering it un-passable. It’s just you and about 12 other guy’s on foot heading into town. The village seems quiet, almost as if it were abandoned. You’re there to find the locals and see if the reports that your headquarters had received were true or not. Supposedly, the all Shiite village was attacked by members of the Islamic State of Iraq dressed as Iraqi Policemen and Army soldiers. There were reports of a hundred people being murdered in the streets. You absolutely have to get there before CNN gets wind of the situation and assess what’s really going on in the village. As you approach the village, a couple of people carefully peer out of doorways and around mud walls. Somebody in your patrol points his M4 at a man in order to use the gun sight with its magnification to get better eyes on the individual. The middle aged, disdasha wearing man rightfully takes off down an alley after having a loaded weapon pointed at him. You and your buddies get excited and become more anxious. You enter the village and notice shell casings of various calibers littering the streets. There’s 7.62mm brass from AKs and from PKCs. There’s .51 caliber shells from a Durschka. You see blast marks on the walls from grenades and RPGs and even find a dud hand grenade of Belgian origin. You come across a brown stain splattered along a wall and realize that color was once red and belonged to somebody and it wasn’t put there for decoration. The oldest man in the village appears with an entourage of younger men all carrying AK47s and wearing ammo vests. There’s a brief moment of unease and weapons are raised yet not aimed because of the non-threatening posture they demonstrate. Your uncertainty is finally put at ease when your interpreter assures you and your buddies that these men are friendly and only carry weapons to defend their village. The old man takes your patrol to his home, a walled off compound with three or four houses inside and at least half a dozen families. He shows you one house that is riddled with bullet holes and pock marks from RPG blasts and you notice that the inside has been completely torched. You pull security at the gate of the compound while the XO talks to the people and finds out what exactly happened. An ex-FBI agent turned civilian contractor and weapons consultant who accompanied your patrol bumbles around snapping pictures of every little detail and points everything out to whoever happens to be near him even though nobody gives two shits about what the man has to say. The sky is now grey and the air smells like rain. You know this means the medevac status will soon turn red (meaning no helicopters will be able to come and evacuate any wounded you may have) and you dread the thought of having to ride the few hours it will take to get back to the FOB, knowing that if you get wounded, there will be no immediate evacuation available. Just as the XO finishes up with the locals, your squadron headquarters calls and orders you to move to the nearest friendly base and wait out the weather. You mount back up in your vehicles and head to a town a couple hours drive away (as long as you don’t hit any IEDs that is) where there is an Iraqi Army outpost. On the way there you find out what happened in the village. A group of Al Qaeda insurgents did enter the village dressed as Iraqi Army soldiers and proceeded to kill 27 villagers and rob the people to fund their resistance. Although you didn’t actually see any dead bodies in the village, you did see all the evidence of the fighting and for once, you don’t think the Iraqi’s are exaggerating. The gates of the IA outpost are too narrow to fit the Bradley’s inside so as you dismount to head indoors, you laugh at the crew of the Bradley who will have to spend however long this weather lasts still cramped in their vehicles. You enter the IA soldiers’ barracks and they generously make room in their meager living quarters and offer bread, cai and generic Hajji Pepsi. Since your cigarette supply ran out hours and hours before, you find a group of IA soldiers and bum a cheap Miami brand cigarette. They light it up for you and you start to BS with them. While communicating through broken Arabic and broken English you notice one of the IA soldiers snickering and whispering to another nearby. The IA soldier looks like a young boy though you can tell he is in his twenties. He appears almost feminine. You ask him what he’s talking about and another IA soldier, the one who speaks halfway decent English tells you that the feminine fella thinks you are very pretty. You glance around at the group of IA who surround your position and all of a sudden you fear for the virginity of your anal cavity. You quickly sack the idea as ridiculous since you’re there with your entire platoon and it would crazy for them to try something like that. You politely dismiss yourself from the group and back away, thanking them for the smoke and wishing them a good night. You glance over your shoulder at them and they are all snickering and whispering as you walk away. You relax a little but there’s still some unease because you are in Iraq and you know that crazy shit like that happens here. It’s chow time now so you break open a Jumbalaya MRE and soak the contents with Tobasco sauce in an attempt to give the very bland tasting meal a little more flavor. You contemplate mixing water with the vanilla dairy shake powder but know that if you drink it, you’ll have to take a massive dump in a few hours. You’re still hungry so you drink it anyways. You’re exhausted at this point and after gorging yourself on the 3,000 calorie MRE you have a severe case of ITIS so you spread out your OTV (remember? that’s your ballistic vest), run one arm through your MOLLE gear (the vest that holds all of your mags and frags and such) so no IA soldier can swipe anything off of it, wrap your hand around the sling of your weapon and quickly pass out. Around 0345 in the morning someone comes and walks you up and tells you it’s your turn to pull guard on the roof. As you sit up an immense urge to defecate right then and there overpowers you and you tell the guy that just woke you up that you may be a few minutes late for your shift. With weapon in hand you hurriedly shuffle to the latrine, clenching your ass cheeks along the way. After stumbling around in the dark hallways you find the shitter and are less than pleased to see the small hole in the ground is almost filled to the top with other American dookie (Hajji “toilet’s” are just little holes in the ground shaped like old fashioned key holes). You know it’s from Americans because of the shit stained baby wipes and tissues that lay amongst the heaping piles of poo and you know that Iraqi’s wipe their asses old school; with their left hand. You don’t let any of this hamper your progress though because the turtle’s head is poking and the situation has turned into an emergency. You undo your belt and drop trouser faster than you’ve ever done in your life and as you drop down into the Hajji squat position, a colossal movement takes place along the way. While emptying your bowels you curse yourself for eating that damn dairy shake but your attention focuses elsewhere when you see the pitcher of water against the wall that Iraqi’s use to clean their hands with after they’re done. God that’s disgusting, you think to yourself and then you remember how the IA soldier you bummed a smoke off of earlier handed you the cigarette with his left hand. THAT MOTHERFUCKER! You don’t dwell on this thought since you’ve now realized that you’ve forgotten your baby wipes in the other room with your gear. You curse yourself some more. You weigh your options and even contemplate wiping Iraqi style. There IS water in the pitcher after all, and When in Rome… Negative. You quickly stifle that thought and use your Gerber multi-purpose tool to cut your shirt into strips that you can then use. It’s rough and the sweat that has soaked your shirt all day long stings the sensitive skin but at least you haven’t demeaned yourself to their level. You rush to get your gear on and jog up to the roof to relieve your buddy who is severely pissed off at you for being 10 minutes late. He doesn’t say a word as he brushes by, eager to get some sleep of his own. The next two hours are spent walking around on the roof with one of your buddies and a couple IA soldiers. After about an hour you start to get a headache from staring through your night vision goggles but you keep on scanning the surrounding buildings and streets for signs of any muj that may try something sneaky. You get a radio check with the Bradley’s and they both respond sounding completely drained. You know they’re worn out and you feel sorry for them. After you get relieved you head back downstairs and resume the sleeping position as the sun begins to rise. Just as you're about to nod off the earsplitting call to prayer echoes off the walls and startles you completely awake. You recognize the wails and awful singing for what it is and quickly pass out. You awake on your own a few hours later. Well, you don’t really wake up on your own; it’s the flies that are buzzing around your head and constantly landing on your face mixed with the repressive heat of the mid morning that wake you up. The sun is shining through the clouds as you crack open a beef stew MRE and you look out the window up at the sky and wonder why the hell the medevac status hasn’t changed yet. Before you even set in on the pineapple pound cake you get the word to mount up. All of a sudden you’re full of energy as you throw your gear back on and everyone is in brighter spirits. You wave goodbye to the IA and thank them for their hospitality and are actually very happy to be getting back inside the Brad. The patrol races back to the FOB, IEDs be damned, and arrive in record time. After clearing your weapons and refueling your vehicles you head back to your barracks. The first thing you do is drop off your gear and take off your ACU top. Everyone laughs at you because you’re only wearing half of an undershirt but they don’t ride you too hard since they’ve all been there before. You find the to-go plates from the chow hall that are waiting for you and devour the pizza and jalapeno poppers in no time. It’s time for personal hygiene now so you go shave, brush your teeth and take a cool shower. After cleaning away the filmy grime that accumulated in your under region your skin becomes raw and you are severely chaffing as you waddle your way back to your cot. You put on a PT uniform and spend an hour or so cleaning your weapon. You then stretch out on your sleeping bag, wrapping yourself up in the soft Hajji blanket you bought for 10 bucks of off Moe (short for Mohammed) at his little shop on the FOB. You roll over and see somebody is watching Stick It again. The viewer is wearing headphones but you don’t need the audio anyways since you’ve seen it a dozen times and know the lines by heart, it being your platoon’s favorite movie and all. You rack out and sleep the sleep of the dead until somebody comes to wake you up for a shift on the observation post outside the south gate or tells you to get your vehicle ready for QRF, or tells you to go to the motor pool to help change track pads or to let you know about an upcoming mission you need to prepare for. Hopefully though, you wake up on your own and find out you have some free time for yourself. You work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and have been doing so for over half a year and have half a year left to keep doing it. And after a long ass mission like the one you just came off of, a day off would be nice.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Bitch Bitch Bitch
As if we weren’t all miserable enough as it was, CPT R- had to make one of those remarks that always make a situation worse. “Well, at least it’s not raining.” Sure as shit, not more than a minute after his comment, guess what? It started raining. The fighting position we were laying up in was large enough to fit a tank. The bottom turned to mud and made us all that much more uncomfortable. We were already freezing our balls off, now we were wet to boot.
Six of us laid low in the ditch while SFC Sal carefully peeked through the shrubs he rimmed our position with. He had his eyes locked on an intersection where two major highways met and where the combat engineers routinely got blown up. (Note: combat engineers main purpose in life in Iraq is to drive up and down the main supply routes clearing them of IEDs, god bless ‘em, I wouldn’t want their job). The ditch was about 100 meters from the road and out in the middle of some wide open farm land. I had wrapped my poncho around my body and was smoking a cigarette, careful to slowly exhale into the poncho and swat away any smoke that escaped and rose to the sky, lest we got compromised due to my nicotine addiction. It was about 40 degrees outside and the sky was overcast gray and thanks solely to CPT R-‘s comment, it was now raining. Seriously, if he hadn’t made the remark, we’d have stayed dry. That’s just how it works.
Our Bradley’s were about 10 kilometers away standing by at an IA checkpoint in case we came into contact with something we couldn’t handle ourselves. We’d left the vehicles at zero dark thirty in the morning and patrolled through the farm land being sure to avoid the villages with their loud ass barking dogs. Traversing the bumpy terrain of the farm land can be difficult enough during the daylight hours since you’re constantly on the look-out for some muj asshole setting up a machine gun that he could then cut you in half with since there was practically no cover to be had. But doing it at night is a real bitch since you’re wearing night vision devices that limit your peripheral vision and have no depth perception. What might look like a very narrow waterway that can be easily crossed with a simple hop is, 9 times out of 10, larger than it appears through your NODs. So when you try to make the jump, you end up landing just shy of the far side, standing knee deep in water, left thinking Goddammit motherfucker shit cock balls! Your feet and socks would now be thoroughly soaked for the remainder of the mission which usually led to blisters forming on your feet and some sort of nasty fungus that won’t go away (seriously, out of the 14 months I was in country, for about 11 of them I had this reoccurring fungus right on the arches of my feet, I think it was from stepping in the sewage water in downtown Muqdidiyah mixed with poor hygiene, sometimes it actually caused me pain so the medics gave me Motrin and told me to drink water…that seemed to be their solution to everything, Motrin and water… oh well).
For the first kilometer or so my shoulders and back didn’t hurt so much despite all the weight hanging off of them. Before mounting up into the Bradley, I would adjust and readjust all of my gear to make it fit just right so it’s as comfortable as possible. The vibrations of the Bradley coupled with poor driving skills that throw us dismounts around in the cramped compartment in the back shifted all of my gear every which way making it pointless to have adjusted it in the first place. Once I got out and got moving I would readjust my straps, my belt, my knee pads while on the move but since I remained in motion the straps would slowly loosen and my gear would start sagging and rubbing against my body causing bruises and severe chaffing. Oh, I can’t forget to mention the chaffing of the balls. Since all of the crotch stitching on all of my ACU trouser’s had ripped open, I had to wear underwear so my balls didn’t flop out every time I took a knee (this happened once right in front of this old Iraqi woman while I was searching her house, I thought she was going to have a heart attack when she caught a glimpse of this infidel’s ball sack…or maybe she was just that impressed). Underwear always bunched up around the nuts and rubbed the inside of your thighs completely raw. Unless I wore tight fitting boxer briefs on long dismounted missions, then the next day I was always walking around like I’d been raped by a donkey the night before. I have to give a shout out here to my Aunt Laura for hooking it up with a couple pairs of very chic and very snug Structure boxer briefs while I was over there. I wore those more than any other undergarments in Iraq, so, thank you. By the time we got about 3 kilometers into the movement, my shoulders would start to throb a little and I’d have to shrug them real quick like in order to keep my assault pack as high up on my back as possible (it caused less strain that way). After about 5 klicks, my shoulders were screaming and my lower back would start hurting because I’d be leaning far forward trying to keep the straps of my assault pack from cutting off the blood flow to my arms. On every long dismounted mission we went on, I got to be the lucky bastard that carried the radio with its extra batteries which added to the load considerably. At least I didn’t have to hump the machine gun though, that guy was always sucking. Oh, I forgot to mention that we were all rolling our ankles every couple of meters because of the short rows of dirt that were dug for the crops.
It all becomes one big mind-fuck in the end. I know it sounds totally cliché and completely un-original, but, if I didn’t mind the pain, it didn’t matter. I’d let my mind wander and would think of things like home, family, friends. I thought about past sexual experiences. Thinking about those always worked to numb my brain from the signals my body was sending. I would sing songs in my head. At the time, I was going through a very brief Ska phase so I was singing the hell out of Streetlight Manifesto on this particular mission. Hell, I even sang some motivating cadences in my noggin to try and get myself pumped up. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
By the time we reached the tank ditch, I collapsed on to the bottom, pounded some water and stuffed my face with a power bar while trying to get a radio check with our Bradley’s. I couldn’t reach either of them. I extended the antennae completely up (about 15 feet) but still couldn’t talk with the Brad’s. Somehow though, I managed to reach our patrol base that was a further two klicks past our vehicles. I could barely make out what they were saying due to the static but I managed to give them our 10 digit grid coordinate and a brief sit-rep. Extending the antennae up that far was no problem for now while it was still dark out, but once the sun came up, I’d have to be real careful not give our position away. It’s a pretty thin antenna so I figured we’d be all right. The rest of the team placed some tumble weeds around the edge of the ditch and SFC Sal took the first watch. That was about the time CPT R- decided we were a little too dry and needed some rain. Fucker. I had to get radio check’s with Bandit Mike ever hour on the hour or else our CO would have a shit-fit and dispatch the QRF thinking we’d all been killed or captured. I would slowly raise the antennae up at a low angle at first and try to get comm’s with the TOC (tactical operations center, think of a war room with maps, radio’s and a coffee pot). Sometimes I wouldn’t have to raise it all the way, sometimes I did.
At about 1100 hours we heard an unmanned aerial vehicle start circling over our heads. I called the TOC and told them to call whoever was in charge of flying that gay ass thing to get it the fuck away from us since having it up there pretty much made it pointless for us to be there at all. If some muj was going to try and plant an IED then he sure as shit wasn’t going to do it with that thing buzzing around in the air. The idea here wasn’t to keep the muj from placing their IEDs, it was to catch them doing it so we could then kill them and not worry about them doing it anymore. Bandit Mike called back and reported that the UAV was flying at X amount of feet and I can’t hear it when it’s at that altitude. Riiiiight. I called back and told them to tell whatever POG douche bag was flying that unarmed over-priced piece of shit that he knows nothing about his own equipment because I can fucking see the damn thing and there’s no way it’s flying at X amount of feet and YES, I can hear the motherfucker, how else could I have known it was there? A few minutes later, the electronic buzzzzzz of the UAV faded off to the south.
After about 6 or 7 hours of staring at the road with practically no activity whatsoever, we’d decided to move to another location. I was freezing cold and looked forward to get my body moving again even if it meant throwing that damned radio on my back. Moving through open farm land during daylight hours is not the smartest or safest of things to do in Iraq. In fact, it can be downright hazardous to one’s health. I pointed out the fact that we would be severely fucked if a machine gun with a half decent gunner behind it opened up on us. I told the dude’s to spread out the intervals between ourselves even wider than regular. CPT R- acknowledged that his biggest fear, being blown up by an IED, had recently been replaced by getting caught out in the open by a machine gun. This time he didn’t start his sentence with “Well, at least…” so I hoped for the best.
We headed towards an abandoned brick foundry. If you’ve ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket and can remember the last scene where the grunts are patrolling through the city and there are these wide open areas they have to cross to get to the buildings, then you can kinda picture what the rock foundry looked like. I started to sing the Mickey Mouse club song in my head but replaced the letters with F-U-C-K-E-D-A-G-A-I-N. I had the antennae still fully extended into the air and I knew that if we came into any small arms contact, I would be their first target. Needless to say, this made me slightly uncomfortable with the situation. The 10+ pounds of mud that had caked onto each boot added to the misery. This time, singing didn’t help take my mind off of my misery. The radio antennae swayed back and forth with the wind causing me to face plant or slip and fall on my ass every few feet. I pulled myself up and cursed God, the Army, SFC Sal for wanting to move, and most of all Iraq and everything about the place. We crept around the rock foundry but just as it had been every other time, it was completely abandoned. I’m willing to bet that somewhere in or around that place there’s a huge weapons cache, but we never were able to find anything. There were these little brick shacks built and we all took up a spot in separate rooms and watched in every direction for any signs of enemy activity. When I was moving, I just wanted to stop somewhere and sit down because of all the aches and pains and that goddamn radio antennae. But once we did stop, I just wanted to keep moving because I was so damn cold. I was fucked either way and by this point, I’d given up fighting it and feeling sorry for myself. Wishing I was somewhere else didn't help so I just stuffed all those thoughts away as best as I could. I was here, I was sucking and absolutely nothing was going to change that fact so I sucked it up. I cracked a smile and lit another cigarette. SFC Sal pulled out his digital camera and snapped a photo of me as I hid my anguish with a grin.
We watched and waited. Waited and watched. Nothing. Seemed like Hajji liked to come out and play in this weather about as much as I did. Once the sun had gone down, we headed back towards the Bradley’s. About midway there it started pouring real hard and the earth turned into a muddy slush. SGT Jax was behind me and I heard him laugh each time I busted my ass and then as soon as he got to the same spot, he’d slip and bust his ass. Then it was my turn to laugh but I was too fucking miserable to do anything that remotely resembled happiness. At one point, about a klick away from the Brad’s, I slipped and did a complete somersault. I stood up, not caring about a damn thing anymore, threw my pack off and yelled “Fuck this shit! Fuck it! I fucking quit! Fuck this!” Aside from SGT Jax, no one even heard me or noticed my little fit. When SGT Jax came up and offered to carry my pack I realized I was acting like a little bitch and felt totally embarrassed. I mean c’mon, really, you can’t just fucking quit in the middle of a patrol. It’s not like I could call “time-out” and explain to the next muj that comes my way that I’m just not playing anymore. I was being ridiculous. I denied the offer and put that heavy bitch back on and slipped and fell the entire rest of the way back to the Bradley’s. When I mounted up, I put the CVC (combat vehicle crewmen’s helmet) on that we had in the back for the dismounts and SGT Schmidt immediately started ragging on me for my lack of balance. He’d been watching me bust my ass through the gun sights for the last couple of kilometers and had laughed the whole time. Fucker. I took off the CVC and looked at SGT Jax who was as completely caked in mud as I was and miserable as hell. I pulled out a soggy cigarette and lit it up. We stared at each other for a few seconds and slowly started nodding. Tight lipped smiles started creeping across our faces and before we knew it we were laughing our asses off. “How much did that shit fucking suck!?”[Laughs]“Dude, I saw you bust ass at least like 30 fucking times!” [More laughs] “That was the most miserable shit ever, I’m gonna be chaffin’ like a motherfucker tomorrow!” [Hysterical laughter continues…].
We headed home to our patrol base and went to our rooms, changed uniforms, grabbed some chow and sat around and bitched about how much that sucked.
And that, my friends, is what going out on a small kill team and setting up an ambush in Iraq is like. Sometimes you found hostile intent or witnessed some muj committing a hostile act and you got to shoot them in the face (neck, abdomen, hip, whatever, take what you can get) but a lot of times you went out for 18+ hours and spent the most miserable time of your life in the most uncomfortable of circumstances only to come back empty handed. Somebody came by and asked me if we’d come into any contact out there and I told them no, we didn’t see shit. He then said something to the effect of “So it was pretty much a waste of time then, huh?” I wanted to punch him the face but instead I said, “No, it would have been a waste of time if we didn’t try.”
Six of us laid low in the ditch while SFC Sal carefully peeked through the shrubs he rimmed our position with. He had his eyes locked on an intersection where two major highways met and where the combat engineers routinely got blown up. (Note: combat engineers main purpose in life in Iraq is to drive up and down the main supply routes clearing them of IEDs, god bless ‘em, I wouldn’t want their job). The ditch was about 100 meters from the road and out in the middle of some wide open farm land. I had wrapped my poncho around my body and was smoking a cigarette, careful to slowly exhale into the poncho and swat away any smoke that escaped and rose to the sky, lest we got compromised due to my nicotine addiction. It was about 40 degrees outside and the sky was overcast gray and thanks solely to CPT R-‘s comment, it was now raining. Seriously, if he hadn’t made the remark, we’d have stayed dry. That’s just how it works.
Our Bradley’s were about 10 kilometers away standing by at an IA checkpoint in case we came into contact with something we couldn’t handle ourselves. We’d left the vehicles at zero dark thirty in the morning and patrolled through the farm land being sure to avoid the villages with their loud ass barking dogs. Traversing the bumpy terrain of the farm land can be difficult enough during the daylight hours since you’re constantly on the look-out for some muj asshole setting up a machine gun that he could then cut you in half with since there was practically no cover to be had. But doing it at night is a real bitch since you’re wearing night vision devices that limit your peripheral vision and have no depth perception. What might look like a very narrow waterway that can be easily crossed with a simple hop is, 9 times out of 10, larger than it appears through your NODs. So when you try to make the jump, you end up landing just shy of the far side, standing knee deep in water, left thinking Goddammit motherfucker shit cock balls! Your feet and socks would now be thoroughly soaked for the remainder of the mission which usually led to blisters forming on your feet and some sort of nasty fungus that won’t go away (seriously, out of the 14 months I was in country, for about 11 of them I had this reoccurring fungus right on the arches of my feet, I think it was from stepping in the sewage water in downtown Muqdidiyah mixed with poor hygiene, sometimes it actually caused me pain so the medics gave me Motrin and told me to drink water…that seemed to be their solution to everything, Motrin and water… oh well).
For the first kilometer or so my shoulders and back didn’t hurt so much despite all the weight hanging off of them. Before mounting up into the Bradley, I would adjust and readjust all of my gear to make it fit just right so it’s as comfortable as possible. The vibrations of the Bradley coupled with poor driving skills that throw us dismounts around in the cramped compartment in the back shifted all of my gear every which way making it pointless to have adjusted it in the first place. Once I got out and got moving I would readjust my straps, my belt, my knee pads while on the move but since I remained in motion the straps would slowly loosen and my gear would start sagging and rubbing against my body causing bruises and severe chaffing. Oh, I can’t forget to mention the chaffing of the balls. Since all of the crotch stitching on all of my ACU trouser’s had ripped open, I had to wear underwear so my balls didn’t flop out every time I took a knee (this happened once right in front of this old Iraqi woman while I was searching her house, I thought she was going to have a heart attack when she caught a glimpse of this infidel’s ball sack…or maybe she was just that impressed). Underwear always bunched up around the nuts and rubbed the inside of your thighs completely raw. Unless I wore tight fitting boxer briefs on long dismounted missions, then the next day I was always walking around like I’d been raped by a donkey the night before. I have to give a shout out here to my Aunt Laura for hooking it up with a couple pairs of very chic and very snug Structure boxer briefs while I was over there. I wore those more than any other undergarments in Iraq, so, thank you. By the time we got about 3 kilometers into the movement, my shoulders would start to throb a little and I’d have to shrug them real quick like in order to keep my assault pack as high up on my back as possible (it caused less strain that way). After about 5 klicks, my shoulders were screaming and my lower back would start hurting because I’d be leaning far forward trying to keep the straps of my assault pack from cutting off the blood flow to my arms. On every long dismounted mission we went on, I got to be the lucky bastard that carried the radio with its extra batteries which added to the load considerably. At least I didn’t have to hump the machine gun though, that guy was always sucking. Oh, I forgot to mention that we were all rolling our ankles every couple of meters because of the short rows of dirt that were dug for the crops.
It all becomes one big mind-fuck in the end. I know it sounds totally cliché and completely un-original, but, if I didn’t mind the pain, it didn’t matter. I’d let my mind wander and would think of things like home, family, friends. I thought about past sexual experiences. Thinking about those always worked to numb my brain from the signals my body was sending. I would sing songs in my head. At the time, I was going through a very brief Ska phase so I was singing the hell out of Streetlight Manifesto on this particular mission. Hell, I even sang some motivating cadences in my noggin to try and get myself pumped up. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
By the time we reached the tank ditch, I collapsed on to the bottom, pounded some water and stuffed my face with a power bar while trying to get a radio check with our Bradley’s. I couldn’t reach either of them. I extended the antennae completely up (about 15 feet) but still couldn’t talk with the Brad’s. Somehow though, I managed to reach our patrol base that was a further two klicks past our vehicles. I could barely make out what they were saying due to the static but I managed to give them our 10 digit grid coordinate and a brief sit-rep. Extending the antennae up that far was no problem for now while it was still dark out, but once the sun came up, I’d have to be real careful not give our position away. It’s a pretty thin antenna so I figured we’d be all right. The rest of the team placed some tumble weeds around the edge of the ditch and SFC Sal took the first watch. That was about the time CPT R- decided we were a little too dry and needed some rain. Fucker. I had to get radio check’s with Bandit Mike ever hour on the hour or else our CO would have a shit-fit and dispatch the QRF thinking we’d all been killed or captured. I would slowly raise the antennae up at a low angle at first and try to get comm’s with the TOC (tactical operations center, think of a war room with maps, radio’s and a coffee pot). Sometimes I wouldn’t have to raise it all the way, sometimes I did.
At about 1100 hours we heard an unmanned aerial vehicle start circling over our heads. I called the TOC and told them to call whoever was in charge of flying that gay ass thing to get it the fuck away from us since having it up there pretty much made it pointless for us to be there at all. If some muj was going to try and plant an IED then he sure as shit wasn’t going to do it with that thing buzzing around in the air. The idea here wasn’t to keep the muj from placing their IEDs, it was to catch them doing it so we could then kill them and not worry about them doing it anymore. Bandit Mike called back and reported that the UAV was flying at X amount of feet and I can’t hear it when it’s at that altitude. Riiiiight. I called back and told them to tell whatever POG douche bag was flying that unarmed over-priced piece of shit that he knows nothing about his own equipment because I can fucking see the damn thing and there’s no way it’s flying at X amount of feet and YES, I can hear the motherfucker, how else could I have known it was there? A few minutes later, the electronic buzzzzzz of the UAV faded off to the south.
After about 6 or 7 hours of staring at the road with practically no activity whatsoever, we’d decided to move to another location. I was freezing cold and looked forward to get my body moving again even if it meant throwing that damned radio on my back. Moving through open farm land during daylight hours is not the smartest or safest of things to do in Iraq. In fact, it can be downright hazardous to one’s health. I pointed out the fact that we would be severely fucked if a machine gun with a half decent gunner behind it opened up on us. I told the dude’s to spread out the intervals between ourselves even wider than regular. CPT R- acknowledged that his biggest fear, being blown up by an IED, had recently been replaced by getting caught out in the open by a machine gun. This time he didn’t start his sentence with “Well, at least…” so I hoped for the best.
We headed towards an abandoned brick foundry. If you’ve ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket and can remember the last scene where the grunts are patrolling through the city and there are these wide open areas they have to cross to get to the buildings, then you can kinda picture what the rock foundry looked like. I started to sing the Mickey Mouse club song in my head but replaced the letters with F-U-C-K-E-D-A-G-A-I-N. I had the antennae still fully extended into the air and I knew that if we came into any small arms contact, I would be their first target. Needless to say, this made me slightly uncomfortable with the situation. The 10+ pounds of mud that had caked onto each boot added to the misery. This time, singing didn’t help take my mind off of my misery. The radio antennae swayed back and forth with the wind causing me to face plant or slip and fall on my ass every few feet. I pulled myself up and cursed God, the Army, SFC Sal for wanting to move, and most of all Iraq and everything about the place. We crept around the rock foundry but just as it had been every other time, it was completely abandoned. I’m willing to bet that somewhere in or around that place there’s a huge weapons cache, but we never were able to find anything. There were these little brick shacks built and we all took up a spot in separate rooms and watched in every direction for any signs of enemy activity. When I was moving, I just wanted to stop somewhere and sit down because of all the aches and pains and that goddamn radio antennae. But once we did stop, I just wanted to keep moving because I was so damn cold. I was fucked either way and by this point, I’d given up fighting it and feeling sorry for myself. Wishing I was somewhere else didn't help so I just stuffed all those thoughts away as best as I could. I was here, I was sucking and absolutely nothing was going to change that fact so I sucked it up. I cracked a smile and lit another cigarette. SFC Sal pulled out his digital camera and snapped a photo of me as I hid my anguish with a grin.
We watched and waited. Waited and watched. Nothing. Seemed like Hajji liked to come out and play in this weather about as much as I did. Once the sun had gone down, we headed back towards the Bradley’s. About midway there it started pouring real hard and the earth turned into a muddy slush. SGT Jax was behind me and I heard him laugh each time I busted my ass and then as soon as he got to the same spot, he’d slip and bust his ass. Then it was my turn to laugh but I was too fucking miserable to do anything that remotely resembled happiness. At one point, about a klick away from the Brad’s, I slipped and did a complete somersault. I stood up, not caring about a damn thing anymore, threw my pack off and yelled “Fuck this shit! Fuck it! I fucking quit! Fuck this!” Aside from SGT Jax, no one even heard me or noticed my little fit. When SGT Jax came up and offered to carry my pack I realized I was acting like a little bitch and felt totally embarrassed. I mean c’mon, really, you can’t just fucking quit in the middle of a patrol. It’s not like I could call “time-out” and explain to the next muj that comes my way that I’m just not playing anymore. I was being ridiculous. I denied the offer and put that heavy bitch back on and slipped and fell the entire rest of the way back to the Bradley’s. When I mounted up, I put the CVC (combat vehicle crewmen’s helmet) on that we had in the back for the dismounts and SGT Schmidt immediately started ragging on me for my lack of balance. He’d been watching me bust my ass through the gun sights for the last couple of kilometers and had laughed the whole time. Fucker. I took off the CVC and looked at SGT Jax who was as completely caked in mud as I was and miserable as hell. I pulled out a soggy cigarette and lit it up. We stared at each other for a few seconds and slowly started nodding. Tight lipped smiles started creeping across our faces and before we knew it we were laughing our asses off. “How much did that shit fucking suck!?”[Laughs]“Dude, I saw you bust ass at least like 30 fucking times!” [More laughs] “That was the most miserable shit ever, I’m gonna be chaffin’ like a motherfucker tomorrow!” [Hysterical laughter continues…].
We headed home to our patrol base and went to our rooms, changed uniforms, grabbed some chow and sat around and bitched about how much that sucked.
And that, my friends, is what going out on a small kill team and setting up an ambush in Iraq is like. Sometimes you found hostile intent or witnessed some muj committing a hostile act and you got to shoot them in the face (neck, abdomen, hip, whatever, take what you can get) but a lot of times you went out for 18+ hours and spent the most miserable time of your life in the most uncomfortable of circumstances only to come back empty handed. Somebody came by and asked me if we’d come into any contact out there and I told them no, we didn’t see shit. He then said something to the effect of “So it was pretty much a waste of time then, huh?” I wanted to punch him the face but instead I said, “No, it would have been a waste of time if we didn’t try.”
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