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.”