Happy Fuckin Birthday

Me and Setz ballin. Hell no we didn't take any the shits worthless anywho. I'd rather use it to put bad guys in jail.

4 out 2 in, a lot of shit can happen in 4 days. I celebrated my 30th birthday during one of those 4 days. It was spent doing 3 on 3 off in a guard tower. At least there was a breeze. My men hooked me up with a piece of birthday cake with a napkin rolled up and set on fire to represent a candle. I snaked out of my birthday ass whipping by telling them I didn’t feel good. I’m not stupid. I’ve been doin this for a while. I noticed that sometimes the 4 days blend together and it is hard for us to distinguish what happened during which 4 day excursion.
On this particular 4 day it started out great. We went out on an actual raid. No soft knock here. I briefed my men on the plan and we rehearsed. We rolled up to the target house dismounted and stacked outside the wall. We beat on the door. No answer. The humvee drove up, my platoon sergeant hopped on the hood to pull security in the court yard. I then hopped on the hood and over the wall and opened the gate. I barely had the gate opened and it was like a dam opening flood gates, my men did as trained and pushed through with weapons at the ready. I jumped back into the stack between my two teams, we moved swiftly across the courtyard to the front door of the house. A military aged male came out of the front door and was greeted by my men yelling “Get the fuck down!” shoving him out of the way and passing him to the breach team who was in charge of detainee ops. We entered the house, cross talking, the #1 man calling out “DOOR FRONT! ROOM LEFT!” I go into traffic directing mode “Alpha take the room front, Bravo lock down the open room to the left. My Alpha team leader calls out “5 women and 1 child comin out!” “Get out MOVE!” I yell. I call out to the detainee team more civilians coming out. Everything is like a choreographed mayhem. It is flowing smoothly. My teams are moving in and out of rooms. “1 up, 2 up, 3 up, ROOM CLEAR! Coming OUT!” “COME OUT!” An old woman is pushed out of a room with a younger lady, she is trying to argue with me, and I’m guessing about giving the younger lady time to put her head dress on. We argue back and forth neither one of us understanding what the other is saying, so I try a different approach, I raise my voice and tone to that of a Marine Corp drill instructor and tell her to get the fuck out and point at the door. She complies and leaves. We clear the 1st floor, and move to the next floor, with that floor clear we move to the roof. I call down house clear. It takes us no longer than 10 minutes to completely clear the home. Now the searching of the house and tactical questioning of the personal found in the house begin. We find large amounts of money, and other evidence. The man we are looking for is not in the house. An explosion shakes the house, I immediately move my men to the roof to find the source of the explosion. It’s an IED that blew up on the Main Supply Route (MSR) about 400m away from us. It was a big one. We go back down and exfil. We hit 3 more homes, no joy. I honestly can’t remember what took place for the rest of the day and night. The next morning we roll into COB security and man guard towers. I turn 30, it’s hot.
Later we are told that the Golden Mosque in Samarra (my old stomping grounds) has been blown up and Moqtada AlSadr is trying to blame the U.S. like it’s our fault. The night is filled with sounds of Apache Gunships shooting and blowing the shit out of something in the distance. I can actually see them firing rockets and bullets through my night vision goggles. It’s pretty far from us though. I see the flames then hear the report seconds later. The next day the Mahdi army is in full swing, attacking Coalition outposts throughout Baghdad. A curfew beginning at 3pm is employed throughout the city. We are told to hunker down and wait for attack. Bring it! What I do know is that taking our patrols off the streets for 24 hours will only give them free rein to employ IED’s throughout the AO. I’ve seen this before its nothing new to the combat vets that have been here before.
Finally it’s our turn to go back out on patrol and come off that gawddamned roof. I tell the boys expect to get blown up today. They ask me how I know. I tell them that 2+2 is always 4. They find 11 IED’s before noon on the MSR adjacent to our sector. I hear reports of fire fights from our sister companies. It seems like AlSadr’s militia are trying to fight from mosques and schools trying to get us to destroy them and then blame us for the destruction of infrastructure. That’s not an official report that’s me analyzing the situation and then again who am I? Later that day we respond to a report that insurgents have fired an RPG at our COB. The RPG was fired from a corner and sailed through one of the positions and impacted safely away from the Soldier manning the OP. We hauled ass to the location of where the RPG was fired. “Dismount!” “Stack up 2nd move!” The gate opened and my Alpha team burst through the gate, an Iraqi man stands between us and the door. “Get the FUCK DOWN!” He is run over and we enter the house. I tell the men you can’t get hung up in the fatal funnel. I realize how good they remember these things as they don’t hesitate and just pummel the man and get through the door. We clear to the top and inspect the home for RPG’s. Nothing. We go through the damn block questioning the residents. Amazingly enough no one has seen anyone shooting RPG’s in front of their homes. Nobody will talk they are afraid of the militia.
After coming up with jack shit, we mount up and roll out. We start heading towards the same road that we got hit on last time. I tell the boys “If I was a terrorist I would hit us here.” 24 hours of no patrols like I said 2+2 is always 4. We make that right turn, 50m from the original blast sight; an explosion ends the silence of the night. Once again the vehicle in front of me is hit. The air is acrid with the smell of explosives and burnt metal. Our view is obstructed by smoke and dust. This explosion was a bit bigger than the last, but not as big as I’ve seen them. My good friend SGT. Murray an Iraqi combat vet was driving for me. He hit the brakes and we immediately put distance between us and the kill zone. “Fucking pussy ass IED” SGT Murray says coolly as he backs the truck up. I go into assessing and calling our sitrep up to the PSG. “This is two-two; we are still mobile backin up!” I then assess my men. “Everyone good?” I run my hands over the gunner to verify he is alright. While all this is taking place we are trying to figure out the status on the vehicle that got hit. The initial report was that they were all good-initial reports are usually wrong. The smoke had cleared and I followed a trail of fluid that veered off to the right where the truck had come to rest. The vehicle that had been hit their radio was hot mic’ed. Which means the transmit button was down. “Gunner! Gunner are you alright! Our gunner is down and he is not moving!” “Calm down and assess the casualty” “He’s not moving- wait he is coming around, I think the blast knocked him out.” We can hear the gunner moan and groan that he is alright. “Put your hands on him and check for bleeding” “He is good, it just knocked him out, he’s good” “Roger!”
We then went into recovery ops and towed the vehicle back in. The vehicle was hit with an EFP. You can Google that I won’t talk about that to much. You can get all the info you need from Google on an EFP. It passed all the way through the engine of the truck. Fuck that. You can have an EFP. I hope never to see one again. Those guys were lucky. Three men within the battalion were not so lucky this month we suffered 9 causalities 3 of them KIA. 6 will never return to duty. Our Alpha Company had some pay back and killed 20+ insurgents in a fire fight. They lost 1 and had 6 WIA. This EFP is the 2nd that our Company has had. One hit 1st Platoon a little over a week ago. Those soldiers only suffered minor injuries and were returned to duty. Our Company has been pretty fortunate and has suffered no KIA or WIA that aren’t RTD.
God bless those soldiers that paid the ultimate price. They gave all for their country.
RuarkOUT!!!