“The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone.” ― Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

Road Warriors

July 2007- August 2007

All the excitement was over by late summer, everyone was on autopilot, everyone wanted to go home. August marked 10 months in country, and I was going stir crazy. With how calm the AO had become, we stopped pulling guard as teams to try give everyone as much down time as possible.

It was a double-edged sword for me personally. I welcomed the down time, but lonely nights were when the demons began whispering in my ear. When I had no one to talk to, my mind would wander to places it should not, second guessing decisions, beating myself up for mistakes— doors I thought I had closed violently kicked back open. I would relive the close calls we had and somehow walked away unscathed. A small part of me felt guilty about that for some illogical reason. Many better soldiers died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it is not fair if you look at it objectively. It is luck or fate or God, or whatever you choose to call it, but I was ambivalent.

I am a nincompoop that bumbled my way into a gigantic chasm, and I walked away relatively fine. Buford was unfortunate enough to hit a tiny pressure plate on on a big road and dies, where is the justice in that? The IED he drove over was triggered by a pressure plate and the one we drove over a few weeks later was command detonated. That is just the way it is. No rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes, when I replay the events in my head, things would play out worse than they had— Cazinha taking a bullet to the head instead of the graze off his helmet. This is where my vivid daydreaming started becoming a liability. Sometimes it would elicit actual tears, even though it is a scenario that only occurred in my head.

Another part of me wanted to relive the firefight on OP South or get into another one. That could have gone badly, but it did not, and whenever I have thought about it afterward, I wished I had been more present in the moment. It was a one-of-a-kind experience— as Winston Churchill once said, “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Another part of me knows that defending from well-built defilade is the absolute best-case scenario in a fire fight and I did not enjoy myself so much down on the street getting ambushed. It is important to keep things in perspective; but it felt good to be able to hit back at least one time. I was currently around the few people on the planet that could truly relate, but Joes do not discuss our feelings or insecurities. If you want to cry, go call your girlfriend.

The internet and phones were on almost 24/7 at this point, which was also both good and bad. Obviously, it is good that we were not taking casualties anymore, and it made communication with family more frequent and predictable; but focusing on home more made time slow even more. Ilana had created a message board where I could leave messages for my extended family and vice versa. Most of my communication in the first half of the deployment had come through leaving sporadic updates on there and reading messages from whomever. It was a very efficient system.

I had made the occasional phone calls or chatted on AOL instant messenger with Ilana, but there had been a four-to-six-week period in January-February where every trip back to COP was during a communication blackout. When we could talk, it was always brief.

There were time limits on the phones and computers. Our conversations started feeling awkward and distant after so much time. A year is a long time, especially to kids. We were growing apart, I could feel it, and I did not know what to do about it. She was the only one I ever opened up to about my feelings, so I internalized it and let it eat me alive during those lonely nights on guard.

I had changed a lot, and I am sure it did not seem for the better seeing me from the outside looking in. It felt like we were stuck in stasis here while the world moved on without us. Day after day of staring at the same buildings, same fields, same goat herders, driving the same roads and hoping nothing blows us up.

Drive west to Camp Ramadi or driving East to TQ. I am Bill Murray in Groundhogs Day. I am the narrator in Fight Club. The days felt so much longer on the back half of the deployment. The walls of Combat Outpost were the bars of our prison cell. Everything started to wear on me. The heat, the dust, the sleep deprivation, lack of running water, lack of privacy, freedom of movement. The chow hall served the same food on a weekly schedule. We got surf and turf every Friday. It was garbage to begin with, it did not improve with repetition.

I escaped this hell to Ancient Greece with a few historical fiction novels about ancient Sparta and the Peloponnesian war. American history is still the best history in the world. I continued working my way through W.E.B Griffin OSS novels.

Some of the Joes created Hot or Not accounts. For the uninitiated, Hot or Not was a website where you could post a photo of yourself for people to rate anonymously on a 1-10 scale based on physical attractiveness; or you could post your ugly friend's picture for a couple of yucks, that was fair use, as well— the mid-aughts were a better time. I started lifting weights seriously for the first time in my life. I tried to start this memoir, but I was not ready. Anything to pass the time. Anything to break the monotony. This is what winning looks like— bored Joe.

One gloomy night on gate guard at COP, a stray dog approached our position growling at us. After several attempts to shoo it away failed, a Joe walked up and shot it with his M4.

The shot was not fatal, and the dog bolted. It got far enough away that he could not pursue it to put it out of its misery, but not far enough away that we could not hear its cries as it bled out. It took an uncomfortably long time to die. This was one of those moments where I could feel regret emanating off someone just from body language alone.

The Sergeant of the Guard came over demanding to know what happened and he was furious. Both, because the dog was suffering and because no one told him they were going to shoot beforehand. He berated the entire gaggle of us collectively for a minute before storming off. The rest of the night we sat in silence listening to a dog bleed to death. It was a dreary night, even for Ramadi.

The convoys to Camp Ramadi and TQ we did were usually nothing more than ferrying officer types to and from the more civilized FOBs for staff meetings. These missions are what Army aviators in WW2 would have referred to as “milk runs”. I have no idea how many we did— a goodly sum. Many score. Battalion knows, but I would say between 50-100 would be a good guess.

While I am sure they served a worthy military purpose, my situational awareness does not extend far from the gunner's turret, and it was starting to feel like a lot of rolls of the dice for nebulous reasons. We had worked ourselves out of a job with EOD and rarely got calls to go out with them anymore. The COP was a ghost town by this point. Most of the units that were attached to the task force were long gone and we were planning to turn over the COP and Corregidor back to the Iraqis when we left. Slowly, but surely, amid the convoy operations and guard shifts, work details formed to clean out buildings and ship equipment out of the AO. Sometimes we were laborers, sometimes we guarded locals who we paid to be laborers.

Buford’s mother Janet reached out to me on social media. Someone from Dog company had told her about a video of Buford on facebook. I shared a video and pictures of him from our first field problem with Dog Company. I regretted not thinking to take any pictures the few times we ran into each other at Eagles Nest. She had been reaching out to and offering support to anyone who knew him. She offered to send us care packages and invited me to visit their family in Texas for the one-year anniversary of his death where they were planning to celebrate his life. It was clear to see where his generous spirit came from.

Battalion sent us a new platoon leader to reestablish good order and discipline. We got the former XO of Charlie Company, Lieutenant Hood. He was knowledgeable, professional, and experienced; but I did not get the feeling that he was happy to be with us.

LT Hood was a non-smoker and apoplectic to find that some of the Joes— and a couple of the NCO’s— were smoking in the porto-potties. The consensus seemed to be that the smoke was the least offensive odor emanating from there and everyone let it slide all year. LT Hood was not buying that bill of goods and moved to quell this gross violation of valuable military equipment. He made us start posting armed sentries at the porto-potties with a logbook to sign soldiers in and out of the shitters. He had Joes out there in full battle rattle next to the shitters for days.

I do not think he ever used those Porto-potties; he just made us do it on principle, which amused me. I always appreciated creative punishments in the Army. Making someone do push-ups has no style, no panache. If you make a Joe wear a tow chain with two license plates attached to it because he forgot to wear his dog tags to work sends an unforgettable message to everyone in the Battalion.

LT Hood was A-okay in my book after that. He only made us do it for a week or two; it was a gentlemanly warning shot across our bow.

Soon after, SSG Carter became the new platoon daddy. Our section was obviously incredibly happy with the choice. SSG Carter is one of those NCO’s who takes a pink belly like a man. He was right there in OP Central with Knight during the big fire fight at Eagles Nest. He would take the gunners spot occasionally when we convoyed. He was always right there with us, keeping a watchful eye on the Joes. He was a soldier's soldier. He was the obvious pick to be the new Platoon Sergeant in my mind. Our squad was happy despite losing him as section sergeant.

Guard shift, convoy, rinse, and repeat. The drive to Camp Ramadi felt very safe at this point. When we drove down Michigan in that direction, it was smiling locals clearing the debris and bringing their city back to life. No one was planting IED’s there.

The big stretch of unattended highway driving to TQ felt dangerous. We had crushed AQI in the city, but they still existed in other parts of Anbar province. There was a lot of open road left unattended for someone to drive up and plant an IED. At this point, it was better to just try to put it out of your mind and trust in the force.

We had successfully lowered the threat level in Ramadi to the point that big Army could find us again. If there was no indirect fire threat anymore, then we did not need to wear body armor walking around the FOB, and so we could not hold a for record PT test on Camp Corregidor.

The Joes were not amused, but not because we were out of shape. We were going to the gym a lot. This was one of my higher scoring PT tests. It was just the principle of it. It was 130 degrees and we had not been taking it easy for very long. The kinetic phase had only ended a month or two ago, why can’t the Army ever relax and smell the roses?

In hindsight, it was depressed Joes like me that they were doing this for. Instead of being sad, I was now mad at the Army for having standards. Before we knew it, they were going to want us wearing clean uniforms again I reasoned. I could see which way the winds were blowing. Angry Joe is preferable to sad Joe. No one likes sad Joe.

The Battalion had other morale boosting tricks up its sleeve as well, they held a mandatory Fu-Manchu mustache growing contest to help keep up morale. I grew a sick pencil mustache that honored Army Aviators from a bygone era.

In August, we went to Battalion HQ on Corregidor for a ceremony where, those of us who got them, received our Combat Infantryman Badges from Manchu and Hotel 6. The combat Infantryman badge is the badge. It is the most coveted and prestigious badge in the U.S Army. I did not get many awards in my time in the Army, and I did not particularly care, but this I cared about. It was the most important distinction in our profession. As I said earlier, an Army uniform tells you exactly who someone is. I looked up to anyone who had a CIB, and I was immensely proud to be among them.

“This is the most prestigious badge in the U.S Army, how do you feel?” Manchu 6 asked me while he pinned my CIB on my chest. “I feel proud, sir.”

It was the only time I spoke to Manchu 6. He looked genuinely proud to be awarding these to his Joes and I was genuinely proud to be receiving it. It is one of my fondest Army memories.

Sergeant Cazinha and SSG Carter watched from the side like proud dads. Think of the scene in Forrest Gump where he sees his childhood doctor again as an adult. “We sure got you straightened out, didn’t we boy.”

It was a great experience, other than the fact that it was 130 degrees and Battalion Headquarters did not have air conditioning for some reason. I do not know if they were hosting hot yoga that day, but it was unbearably hot during the ceremony. I could not believe we were currently living more comfortably than the Battalion Headquarters element, which was pretty baller for a lowly mortar squad. This is what happens when everyone in the building has a Ranger scroll, everyone is too hooah to complain about the air conditioner breaking.

I promoted to E-4/Specialist on September 1st on my two-year anniversary in the Army and Cazinha was already pushing me to begin studying for the promotion board. It is strange because I had no problem memorizing the soldier's creed, the infantryman’s creed, or the Army song; but for some reason I was struggling to memorize the full NCO creed. I took it as a sign that my heart was not truly in it.

Eleven months down. Four more to go.

https://imgur.com/a/GkTiEgw

By the time November rolled around, our platoon had become a well-oiled machine in urban combat. We’d been running security missions for ODA teams—those "secret squirrel" Special Forces guys—for high-value targets (HVTs) long enough to know our roles inside out. Every operation felt like clockwork, and every squad member was a precise part of that timing. Just thinking back on it gets my blood pumping.

Once we were out the gate, it was like we’d flip a switch. Everyone moved swiftly, silently, and with absolute certainty of their role and sector. Clearing houses became second nature, like water flowing over rocks. We didn’t need to talk; it was all muscle memory, rehearsed to a science. The ODA teams noticed our rhythm, our unspoken coordination, and started requesting us specifically to handle their security needs on these raids. And we were more than willing to keep at it.

A standard ODA raid started with an OPRD from our PL, followed by the PPCs and PCIs. When it was time, we’d slip out of the gate, moving as a single, fluid unit on foot toward the objective. We had it timed so that as soon as we breached the door (my job), the mounted platoon rolled up, heavy weapons locking down all avenues of approach. The door would go down, and we’d flood in, rousing everyone, securing the site as the ODA crew arrived.

Then, like clockwork, they’d pull up in their unmarked, tricked-out rig, rolling out casually in their signature baseball caps and polos. With a nod, they’d identify the HVT. Usually, it went something like this:

“Hey, Greg, is this the guy?”

“Yep, Bill, that’s him.”

Within minutes, the target would be zip-tied and loaded up. As quickly as they arrived, they’d disappear into the night, leaving us to collapse security and make our way back to Corregidor.

One night, we hit a target house, and I got called down from my rooftop post by one of the ODA guys. He motioned for me to follow him into a side room where the target—a middle-aged man, hands zip-tied behind him—stood under the dim glow of a single light bulb. The ODA guy looked at me and said, “Watch this guy for me,” then stepped out of the room.

I stood there, SAW ready, with this terrified man in front of me, not knowing what he’d done or why he was here, but knowing it was big enough to warrant a visit from ODA. After a moment, the ODA guy returned, speaking to the man in Arabic. Whatever he said must’ve pissed the ODA guy off because his calm demeanor turned on a dime. Without warning, he sent a right hook that would’ve dropped Rocky Balboa, connecting cleanly with the target’s jaw. The guy crumpled instantly, hitting the floor in a heap. With a deadpan look, the ODA guy turned to me and said, “When this dick bag wakes up, yell for me.”

I was stunned but managed to nod. It was a scene straight out of a movie, and for a moment, I felt a flash of respect—and envy—for the straightforward justice of it. How many times had I wanted to do something similar to some smug insurgent lying to our faces?

Eventually, the target came to, so I called out, and the ODA guy returned, thanked me, grabbed the guy by the collar, and walked him out to their rig. No more words, just action. They drove off into the night, leaving us to wrap up and head back to the Corregidor.

Raids like these felt real. They were gritty, urgent, and had a purpose you could feel deep in your bones. “Cordon and Knock” missions were different; they felt like bait, designed to draw out fighters and rack up body counts. But the ODA missions? Those were the real deal. Each one was like being a part of the war in a visceral way, and they left a mark on every one of us.

Back stateside, though, you could spot the guys who let these missions inflate their sense of self-worth, spinning tales like "they were practically Special Forces themselves". Most of us knew better and kept these stories to ourselves, content with the fact that we were not SF or Delta, just some finely tuned Infantrymen. We knew we were part of something bigger - supporting a deadly, efficient, and surgical strike force. And that was enough.

Standard Army story preface. No Sh.. No lie I was there .......

A while ago I had this happen.

I was having a conversation with an acquaintance and he came out and stated that I must have been in some deep sh—t combat...

!?!?WTF?!?!?

We were not talking about combat, we had not to my knowledge ever done so. We had never traded (No shit) stories.

I was flabbergasted, I was a Ronald Reagan Cold Warrior (metal) and a Good conduct (metal) “No body saw a thing, all charges were dropped” troop

E5 when I ETS-ed

Now I had participated in many battles on (Insert German street Name) Straße and at a few Guest Houses Bars and once at the EM club. Some other places that I never went to and there were no records there of...

NOTE (Always move to the Jukebox in the advent of a bar fight, do not bring your beer bottle or drink glass as someone may think you are going to use them as a weapon). No one wants to pay for a broken Jukebox.

I had been shot at three times while in the army tho not during a military action. One friendly fire and two of questionable origin.

Anyway. I am not a super militarily man. It's not an everyday topic with me.

I have spent my life doing security, was a 97B and Clerk typist because I was dumb enough to take that test. I will say I was red pilled long before it was called Red Pilling.

I have been through a basic police academy Civilian, worked in aerospace had a few clearances. I have some few computer skills. (Long ago and far way I handled e-mail escalations for a tech company that included any where that spoke English world wide.) Not real hard and not as many as you would think.

But trust me I am not a John Wick or Liam Neeson even tho I do have a certain set of skills. First time I fired a handgun was in the army and it was a 45. Because I am left eye & right hand dominate I can shoot just as well with either hand. Fired Expert.

So I was silent for a few beats and then I just flat out asked why he would think that.

I was told that I was a direct speaker, I always seem to be aware of my surrounding and very observant, I always sit with my back to a wall and I never have anything in my right hand.

I always seemed to think before I spoke and if I didn't know the answer I stated that straight out or I stated that I didn't.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@?

I laughed for five minutes straight. I told my friend who was single, to get married, have kids, have it last for 20 years plus and he TOO would be paranoid.

I literally had tears in my eyes. To this day if I think of that conversation I give out snort or suppress a giggle.

It begs the question what an ex Green Beret, Navy Seal or Ranger would be like who has been married for 20 plus years and has kids ....

[If they sense fear, indecision, hesitation they will close in for the kill.]

Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack. - Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

Combat Infantryman Badge

January 27, 2007

Despite gunfights breaking out near me constantly, I had still been walking through rain drops up to this point. Other than the IED when I was with Sergeant Donnelly’s squad, I had narrowly missed the action every time. Always adjacent, never in my lane. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

The sound of a rocket is horrifying. It is otherworldly— demonic. It is the pained scream of a dying animal. It puckered my asshole so bad that it gave me a fissure; it is an animalistic shriek followed by a tinnitus diagnosis. I did not even know what had happened until Cazinha explained it to me later.

It took me a few seconds to realize that it had not hit our vehicle. It was so loud that it sounded like it was coming at my head. We are already turning around. I can hear voices yelling, but it is muffled and unintelligible.

I am spinning the turret to the left towards where the threat is as we move. Thick black smoke billows out of the humvee as Joes spill out onto the street, and someone is in flames— this went catastrophically bad so quickly.

We screech to a halt in the kill-zone next to the burning truck and I already have the safety off the M240B. I depress the trigger, and I hear the familiar metallic click of the weapon jamming— FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!

Rocket attack “pucker factor” did not have shit on ‘weapon jamming in the kill zone’ pucker. This is the absolute worst-case scenario in our line of work. If professional soldiers were springing this ambush, I die right here, right now. Luckily for all of us, these guys are not professionals, and they rarely stick around to fight.

I have tunnel vision, and my hands are shaking uncontrollably. I cannot steady my hands long enough to depress the levers of the feed tray to clear the jam. Every time my fingertips contact the tiny metal latches, they slide off, instead of pressing in. It feels like my hand will not cooperate with what my brain is telling it to do— panicking only makes it worse.

Cazinha is yelling at me to shoot, and I see a guy turkey-peaking in my peripheral. This is bad, I need to suppress the alley so my buddies can move, I cannot even speak.

I have my M4 wedged into the turret next to me for this exact contingency. It has been milliseconds or minutes; I have no idea— I feel like I am moving in slow motion. I am desperate to put rounds down range, so I go for my M4 and as I do, I finally spit out the word “jam” but Cazinha starts shooting right as I speak.

I think I see movement as I go to raise my weapon— I am mag dumping as fast as my finger will allow. I see a man cross the street where we are shooting, but he appears to stutter, as if he were lagging in a video game. I blink and the alley is empty. I am not even sure if that guy was real or not.

SSG Carter’s humvee pulls up and their gunner starts firing their automatic weapon. After I finish firing the magazine in my M4, my hands have steadied enough to clear the jam on the 240 and join in firing alternating bursts with the other gunner, making the weapons “talk to each other”.

Machine gun fire in Iraq is the equivalent of a shotgun cocking in America — a sound instinctively understood by all to mean “we are not receiving gentleman callers at this time.”

Cazinha calls for us to cease fire. Only then do I notice that a massive convoy of vehicles has appeared and was now setting up a defensive perimeter around us. Cazinha tells me it is the Brigade commander's convoy. They just happened to be a couple blocks away when insurgents hit us with the rocket. He had a massive PSD with him.

It is possible that the enemy had scouts who spotted the convoy at the last second and they bailed on a secondary ambush because of it. It is a ‘what if’ that cannot be answered. That event was both the luckiest and unluckiest moments of my life and it occurred in the span of a couple of minutes.

They had used an improvised rocket launcher created with a PVC pipe tied to a metal base of some sorts. They angled it to fire diagonally out of a courtyard and hit the truck as it passed the intersection. Whoever did the direct action timed it perfectly, they showed skill and discipline.

Cain was in the commander's seat of the humvee, and his door took a direct hit from the rocket. The rocket jammed his door shut and caused the humvee to go up in flames. He had to squeeze by the radios with all his gear on to get out on the drivers side. If you have never been in a humvee, you cannot appreciate how difficult that would be. He had to stop, drop and roll to put the fire out, which is also basically impossible with that gear on. He had third degree burns and I caught a quick glimpse of him when a medic sat him down to look at him. Cain had been with me since day one of basic training and he was a better soldier than me by far. Seeing him wounded was sobering.

A QRF from Eagles Nest and another from Corregidor had arrived and the road was brimming with vehicles now. The convoy evacuated Cain to Charlie med on Camp Ramadi. We pulled away from the burning truck and parked down the road. The rest of that afternoon passed watching the truck melt down to the frame. We had no means to extinguish the fire, and the air became acrid and hazy as the literal fog of war set in around it.

I had a pit in my stomach. I felt guilty for not preventing the rocket attack, and for almost getting everyone killed after it happened. The weapon jamming was not my fault, but I had failed in a common soldier task when everyone else was relying on me to perform and even though it did not affect the ultimate outcome, it weighed on me— it still does.

I knew that adrenaline would cause our hands to violently shake. Our training told us that it would happen, and the Army tried to help us overcome it. It was not enough in that moment. My body had never shaken so violently before.

Watching the truck burn, I remembered an event that happened in my childhood. When I was around five or six years old, my brother and I had been playing near a small fire pit, throwing sticks into the fire. A few seconds after I had walked away to get more sticks, a can of spray paint that was in the fire exploded and sprayed my brother with boiling black paint. I remember it was black, because to a child’s mind, my brother was blackened like overcooked food.

This was a serious case of Déjà vu. We had passed that road less than a minute before and for the second time in my life, a random explosion occurred a few seconds after I cleared the blast zone. The parallels were very on the nose. Of course, I would be the guy in combat having flashbacks to childhood trauma.

After that day, we were out for blood. Any time we caught a whiff of enemy, our vehicle went from 0 to 60 trying to engage before they ran away. We wanted payback, but it was elusive.

It was frustrating that the civilians clearly knew when an attack was coming but would not warn us. I tried to not to take it personally. They were afraid of reprisals, and rightly so.

First posted about three years ago. Thought of this while drinking some mead tonight. As always, lightly edited. Enjoy.

Setting: Sometime in early 1989 before I left for Korea. We were in the day room of our shitty ass barracks at Ft. Bliss, TX doing aircraft ID slides. The room is a mix of Stinger gunners and M163 Vuclan crew. [NOTE: The fact those barracks are still standing and being used 35 years later, and they were at least that old when I got there, is nuts.)

You had to be able to recognize any NATO or Warsaw Pact aircraft and identify it in seconds, because that is all you get in combat. They were black and white silhouette pictures on a slide projector. It goes up, you yell out "F16!" or whatever, hopefully before the slide disappears. And you had better be right. They expected us to be right 100% of the time - you don't want to shoot down a friendly. Realistically, any score is the mid to high 90's was good though. But we were super competitive about it, especially between the Stinger and Vulcan guys.

So we are doing this and talking about air defense things when someone asked the NCO leading the activity "Can we kill a pilot who is parachuting down?" I guess this one secretly wanted to be infantry or something - killing aircraft wasn't enough for him.

According to the 1949 Geneva Conventions you can shoot airborne forces, but not a pilot who has bailed out. That is the answer we were given by the E5 leading the activity. Although, I think he said something like "No, don't be stupid" and someone else chimed in with the reason why. That is when our super aggressive platoon sergeant who had served in Vietnam jumped in.

I can't remember exactly what was said, (30 years ago remember) but it was something like this:

"Fuck that. That guy was just bombing your buddies and shooting down the ones protecting us. Kill the pilots! You have that 20mm on the Vulcan - spray their asses!" His logic was killing a multi-million dollar aircraft does no good if the pilot gets back in another one somehow at some point. I mean, he isn't wrong.

Now, another NCO said: "You CAN shoot at equipment being dropped. Just say you are shooting their equipment they are holding." It was of course complete bullshit, and saying you are shooting equipment on a falling pilot (who doesn't have anything really besides maybe a small survival kit) isn't going to fly in a war crimes court anyway. We eventually got back to the task at hand, and I forgot about it.

It came up again in Desert Shield. We were sitting around talking during a poker game before hostilities started. Our gunner said he would do it (kill pilots who had ejected) if given the opportunity. Our team chief was all for it. I'm just the driver, and the new guy, so my opinion didn't matter as much. I was conflicted. On the one hand, they are the enemy trying to kill us. On the other, wiser men than me (I hope) came up with those conventions for a reason. Then you start playing mind-fuck games with yourself. Would the Iraqis show our pilots mercy? Does it make it OK to do it to them if they do it to us?

We never had to put it to the test though. The one fighter that went down near us exploded after the F-15 stole my kill, taking the pilot with him. Now that I think about it all these years later, I wonder if our crew really would have committed a war crime just because some salty NCO told us to. And if our gunner decided to do it, what could I have done from the driver seat besides yell at him over the headset not to do it?

War is some fucked up shit.

#OneLove 22ADay Slava Ukraini! Heróyam sláva!

I was 19 years old joining the Navy. It was a goal of mine for years to make my life style built around being a Navy Seal. Unfortunately I had not passed my color blindness test, and became an engineer instead. I always hit the weights pretty heavy, ate very well still, and made the most of it. I loved being in the Navy, did three very different deployments, and worked to the best of my ability. After 5 years of career building, I decided to not get my Covid vaccination for many different reasons. And then last minute I had been forced out and unable to reenlist after even receiving special orders and a MAP package to the next rank for my next tour.

At the age of 23, all was done and I was processed out of my career. I worked hard and dedicated so much blood and sweat into my job and would comfortably get paid around $2,300 bi-weekly. You could say for just a guy and his new puppy that’s living pretty good! However, the government sure did not want my hard work and commitment anymore.

Post Navy, my dog and I are headed home for good. I knew I would have to figure out something that would pay good and it seemed promising that I would get a great job seeing that I was a supervisor in the military. (It does make a decent resumé I’d say)

A lot has happened while I was serving, my parents divorced, and my mother became a blistering alcoholic.

I move into the house where only my mother and sisters live. Within a week I guess I reminded her of my father too much so she called the police and told them something I still don’t know to this day that seemed to have brought 3 patrol cruisers including a K-9 unit to the lot. I walked out and talked to them, they of course said I have to leave. So I did and so did my dog, living out of my car until my Pastor took me in.

It was a lot to realize she had put my father and siblings through living hell with her drinking while I was gone for 5 years (I took leave a few times but no one would really talk to me about anything that was going on throughout the years)

It’s probably been about a year since then in 2023 and I had built a better relationship with my mother. However, I myself had started to struggle with the drinking quite a bit like over-averagely any vet or military guy does, she had finally quit for a few months after 5 rehabilitation attempts. She started doing well, I would even visit after work sometimes to stop in and see how she was doing. My drinking was at night time here and there and then onto an everyday basis while I had started to live at my grandmother’s house whom my mother hates.

My grandmother is very weak and she said she couldn’t handle having my dog around, so I had to make the hard decision to put her into my sisters hands which is a better option, because my sister takes care of her better than I ever could at the moment. Afterwards I became even more depressed and drank carelessly still just going day through day while I was trying to figure out a good enough job to even make a living. I’ve been through several different jobs and nothing has seemed to pay even a fraction of what I made in the Navy on top of the benefits I recieved while in active duty.

April this past year I had drank myself into a seizure and then medically induced into a coma for four days because my blood pressure was through the roof, I can’t remember the exact number but it was around 220/180. I was indeed very depressed and careless whilst attempting to find a job to make enough for my own place.

Now, I haven’t drank at all since and never really felt the need to, my reason for drinking was because I was just careless. In the meantime, my mother had started drinking again. After my seizure, my grandmother said it was too hard on her so she had me move back into my mother’s house where everything had all began because she didn’t want to risk possibly watching me destroy myself again in the process I would lie to myself and call “getting better”.

I enjoy being sober, and I’ve began to study for my CDL so I can go cross country again soon after the holidays and make a solid living off that. My mother has been in and out of the hospital the past four years and even now, since I live with her, I am the blame for everything that’s going on in her life. When she’s not drinking she’s great, but when she is she’s the biggest bitch and liar you can think of, finds reasons to bother you, ruin your sleep, yell at you, threaten you, and is one of the most dirtiest humans I have ever seen become. She had also recently gotten into edible THC gummys that she has been mixing with drinking and just lays in bed all day. She’s also very in denial, and will start arguments over anything and talk over you until you want to pull your hair out when you try to explain yourself.

Early today, she was sober and very nice, and then a switch flipped. She had been drinking, and I guess maybe took an edible, because she drew a lot of attention feeding one of her caged rodents food and water talking to them for minutes straight. I look over and she has no pants or underwear on, I asked her to go put pants on and she starts to try to argue about things. I typically leave it and let her rant her way back to the bedroom, but I told her I do not want to see her like that and she needs to be a normal mother. She lied and said she wasn’t drinking, nor high, as she stumbled to bed.

Though I feel like the last two years after what I went through have been a lot, in fact my mother is on her way to the liquor store again as I’m writing this, I’m trying my best to get things straightened out. Dealing with all of this and told it’s my fault all the time is quite the pain in the ass to handle while building your life from the ground up again.

A lot of veterans go through things when they get out that most don’t see, and I figured I’d speak out on my experience if anyone wanted to read about it. Hopefully things look up from here, as far as my mother goes idk what I’m supposed to do about it, but after I get my CDL I’m gonna live in the truck, and hope to succeed in my future endeavors from that point.

To this day, at times when I’m alone or not busy. I still think about everything I accomplished and built for my future in the military, and sometimes how quickly it was taken from me while thrown into a hell of a bad family situation at home. But I’m thankful for the time I was able to serve, I miss my job and all the close brothers and sisters I’ve made over the years. I still talk to 4-5 of my closest guys from the Navy on a daily basis, they’re the only friends I have other than my father who served in the Army at this stage in his life as well.

I hope you all have a wonderful day. Thanks for reading 🦅

A Support Area is where units position, employ, and protect base sustainment assets and lines of communications required to sustain, enable, and control operations. Support area operations include sustainment for the echelon and relevant security operations. Support area operations enable the tempo of deep and close operations. - FM 3-0

Eagles Nest

I once heard SSG Carter describe living at COP Eagles Nest as “great POW training”. Eagles Nest was a group of shot up buildings with fighting positions erected on the rooftops of buildings in the heart of Mula’ab. There were no walls, only the threat of a bullet kept people away. Every part of your day was uncomfortable living there, existence was privation and violence.

Eagles Nest’s command post was in the middle an odd triangle shaped grouping of buildings a couple of blocks away from the soccer stadium. Eventually, the battalion would use Eagles' Nest for its attack into the Mula’ab and Iskaan neighborhoods; but for now, this was the TF’s Forward Line of Own Troops or FLOT in the city. Dog Company was holding down the fort at Eagles Nest while the TF massed combat power in the Shark Fins. This is a “economy of force” effort where you must expose yourself to risk in one area to have the force necessary elsewhere. It is a military necessity at times, but it sucks to be on the short end of that stick.

Worse still, the area Dog company was holding down was one of the worst areas in the city. They needed reinforcement and we were the only surplus infantry the TF had left. So, just like that, Dog Company became the only line company in the Battalion that had a Mortar section. The ways of the force are a mystery to all of us.

I did not know or care about the bigger picture of what we were doing out there at the time. It was just a new and exciting place to pull guard duty. You really had to be on your toes out here because Eagles Nest was in contact with the enemy regularly.

There were four towers. OP’s South, West and North were in separate buildings creating a ring of security around the CP. On the roof of the CP was the Central tower— which covered a blind spot in an intersection between OP’s South and West. The vehicle patrol held down the road to the east. Able company had another combat outpost to our North somewhere. To our West was the Iskaan neighborhood which was enemy controlled, but had an Armor battalion operating out of COP Grant right down the road from Eagles Nest.

We would spend six hours in the guard towers, six hours on patrol, six on the Quick Reaction Force, in case anyone needed help. We would get one “hot” meal a day delivered in mermites from Camp Corregidor; if you were lucky enough to be off duty at the time, and an IED did not blow it up on the way.

I survived on a diet of Special K cereal with strawberries, Marlboro reds, and rip it energy drinks— orange preferably. I would bring a small pouch of cereal from a single serve box with me in a grenade pouch and pour it into my mouth dry— like a gentleman. One of Platoons sections would go to Eagles Nest for four day rotations while the other remained on COP doing fire missions and security.

At the same time as we got orders to COP Eagles Nest, Sergeant Ortega received orders to go to one of the Military transition teams that embedded with and advised the Iraqi Army. HHC was filling in gaps all over the place. Hotel 6 was running a Police Transition team. The Scout platoon was Manchu 6’s personal security detail. Our company was the jack of all trades, and we wore whatever hat the mission required.

The squads shifted around again, but Ortega told me that he arranged for me to be in Cazinha’s squad. I was disappointed to lose Sergeant Ortega, but Sergeant Cazinha’s squad would have been my first choice, so I considered myself fortunate.

2 Gun, at this point, consisted of Sergeant Cazinha, Spc Glaubitz, PFC Williams, and PFC Garcia, I was now the fifth and it was still an undermanned mortar squad. I had already become friends with all these guys, since Ortega and Cazinha were best friends, our squads worked together a lot.

Williams was another unlikely friendship of mine. On the surface, we do not have that much in common. We did have similar senses of humor and that is what you need in a battle buddy.

We had several running inside jokes. We would get near each other running during PT and call our own made-up versions of the cadences. They were usually mocking the Army’s obsession with Rangers. R is for Ranger, A is for Ranger, N is for Ranger, and so on.

There was also a Chuck Norris meme that was popular at the time, and we started to replace Norris with Ferry in the jokes. The boogeyman checks for Chuck Ferry under the bed at night. This eventually evolved into us crossing out Norris and writing in Ferry on the Chuck Norris graffiti we found in various locations throughout Iraq and Kuwait. It was our GWOT version of Kilroy was here. It tickles me to think of some staff officer from Ranger Regiment who knew him seeing that in a shitter on Camp Buehring.

We were a little juvenile sometimes, but in the words of fictional character Tim Gutterson “I was probably too young to be blowing the heads off Taliban, so I guess it all evens out in the end.”

The platoon went bowling and got more drunk than was reasonable or necessary during a mandatory fun night before a Brigade run, Williams and I fell out to vomit together as battle buddies during the run. A time-honored Army tradition that goes back to Valley Forge— an Infantry version of blood brothers.

We had all the time in the world, run is a bit of misnomer at the Brigade level. Seven out of ten of us were stumbling around like the town stiff, yet no one struggled to keep up.

Our Section Sergeant was SSG John Carter. He was a silver fox, and he had the wisdom and calm that comes with years. I do not know how old he was at the time, but he was older than your typical E-6. He had been in the Army and gotten out prior to 9/11 and then re-enlisted after the attacks. He looked older than my father, and out-PT’d most of us. He was a beast and everyone in the section admired him.

I cannot think of a time I saw Sergeant Carter angry or flustered. He had everything under control, and he exuded that. He was affable and knowledgeable. He did not have to yell at anyone to get compliance, you simply did not want to disappoint him.

At Eagles Nest we were crammed together in close quarters, living in miserable conditions, and facing serious risk to life and limb, and morale had never been higher.

Our first rotation, we were with my old platoon. That first rotation we were going to need to loan them one of our guys, so I was the obvious choice. I reunited with Sergeant Donnelly’s squad, although it was a completely new squad by that time.

I was driving for Sergeant Donnelly on my very first vehicle patrol out there when one of the other vehicles hit a small IED.

Fortunately, only the vehicle sustained damage. We pulled up and covered them while they exited the disabled truck.

Eventually, Sergeant Donnelly had me move the truck into a better position and then exit the vehicle. I took a knee on a street corner, and kept watch down a road until the deadlined vehicle was recovered. This is a process that I will come to know all too well, and it can easily consume the rest of your day.

Muj would sneak out IED’s, and we would try to change our patterns of movement to be less predictable. It was not hard for them.

The road was only a few kilometers, but there were dozens of streets and alleys on both sides of the road we patrolled. It was a densely populated area and there were too many avenues of approach to cover with three vehicles. We had a fourth vehicle up on a bridge over watching some railroad tracks to the south of our position.

The patrol were sheep tethered to a pole, just waiting for the wolves to come out of the tree line to devour us. It was not a desirable place to find yourself, but if we did not patrol it constantly, insurgents would have time to put 155mm artillery shells into the road and do real damage. This was necessary just to keep that tiny supply line from Corregidor to Eagles Nest open.

The road we patrolled was accessible to civilian foot traffic only, each cross street or alley had a concrete barrier to block vehicles. This kept VBIED’s away from Corregidor and Eagles Nest and gave us a secure supply route between the two. The civilians could cross the road we were on, but not mingle on it. When we saw someone waiting to cross, we would stop about 100-150 meters away and wave them by.

They mostly minded their own business, but one time a group of younglings threw a rock at our humvee while an older Iraqi man was approaching from their rear, unbeknownst to them. I watched this old man slap the shit out of this kid and send the whole pack fleeing— I gave the old man a thumbs up. I do not know if this was a war time measure, but smacking random children in public was still kosher over there. If my kid were throwing rocks at a man behind a machine gun, I would want someone to smack him as well.

We would come off patrol and enjoy the sounds of a firefight while eating dinner chow. These Combat Outposts are the TF’s complaint department; come on down and tell us how you feel.

Firefight in Mula’ab. Firefight in Iskaan. Firefight in the Souk. Firefight in Tameem. It did not matter, if a firefight were happening, you could hear it from your position in Ramadi. It did sound a lot closer when we were at Eagles Nest, however.

Buford and I ran into each other at Eagles Nest for the first time since Kuwait. He was their Platoon’s radio operator now. He excitedly told me about how we had supported them with mortar fire during an earlier firefight in the shark fin. “What the fuck is the shark fin?” I asked.

“It is the town near the river. We were in an all-day firefight and SSG Donnelly said to me “here comes Fletcher to help’ when y’all started dropping rounds.”

I had no idea which fire mission he was talking about, but it was the first time I felt any type of pride in my mortaring skills. “Happy to help, dude.”

There was nothing to do at Eagles Nest. The command post and sleeping quarters were in one small Iraqi house, and around the corner was the war. One morning out there, an errant RPG hit the concrete barriers outside our bedroom wall during a little skirmish, and no one bothered to get off their cot. The Dog Company guys had already seen a lot of combat, they were unpeturbed.

Freedom of movement was limited for us on and off duty at Eagles Nest. You could go to the dining room, or into the courtyard outside the CP’s doors for a smoke, but that was it. It did feel a bit like being in prison.

Free time was a luxury we could ill afford out there. When you were on QRF, you were on QRF. The QRF activated often. If the towers were not in contact, the patrol might hit an IED, or a foot patrol might get into trouble nearby and off you went.

One time I was in the dining room alone when one of Dog Companies Platoon Sergeants rushed in and ordered me to grab my shit and get ready to move. His name was SFC Robinson. I did not know him yet; he was a virtual stranger to me, and it can be nerve wracking to go out with someone unfamiliar.

In theory, any leader should be able to grab any soldier and carry out the mission, but it is not ideal. You cannot let perfect be the enemy of good when lives are on the line, so you grab the first few soldiers you can find. Good soldiers follow orders, so I grabbed my weapon and followed him.

We went out on foot to reinforce one of the MiTT teams that was in contact. We could hear the small arms fire in the distance and were hauling ass. This was only my third or fourth time moving around the city on foot, and the first time I was moving to contact. My heart felt like it was going to explode as we ran. The good thing was that I did not have time to overthink anything, I was just following the NCO.

When we arrived, we found the MiTT guys holed up in a courtyard, watching for the enemy that had just engaged them. A Sergeant from the MiTT directed me to a corner of the wall next to a random Jundi to keep watch. The Jundi smiled and winked at me as I joined him. “Ali Baba” he said. I could not help but crack a smile at the silly bastard.

We lingered for a few minutes until they were satisfied that the enemy had broken contact and then we walked back to Eagles Nest at a brisk pace. Sudden adrenaline and chaos, followed immediately by blue balls— that is the GWOT that I remember.

At Eagles Nest, it did not matter what platoon or squad you were in. If the QRF was called, consider yourself hired. Our doctrine called for us to meet enemy contact with immediate and overwhelming force. We were not looking for a fair fight. We followed the ancient code of the street; “if our friends don’t win, we all jump in.”

Maintaining security at Eagles Nest was an ordeal. To get to OP North, you had to pass through a series of buildings and courtyards, which had holes knocked into the walls with sledgehammers to make passages that avoided prying eyes.

OP North faced towards the stadium and was the furthest tower away from the CP and felt the most vulnerable to me. There was no way the path there was completely secure from intrusion; or at least you could not have convinced me otherwise at the time.

Walking there alone at night was terrifying. A lack of ambient light in the buildings made it pitch dark and hard to see even with night vision on. It seemed like a perfect place to lie in wait for an ambush. Boogeymen were waiting around every corner to drag me off to be tortured and beheaded.

I walked through there ready to fire my weapon at every ominous shadow. I could see how fratricide happens in situations like these. You should not run into anyone on the way there, and if you suddenly did, I could see how split-second mistakes could happen. It was not long before the policy changed so that the Sergeant of the Guard began escorting the Joes to and from OP North at night during guard changes.

I hated OP North so much, that to avoid going to it, I usually volunteered to go to the objectively more dangerous OP South. To get to OP South, you had to hug a courtyard wall until you got to a four-way intersection and then sprint like hell to a house across the street and hope a sniper has not figured out the guard schedules yet.

Directly to OP South’s right-side window was a building that was in the Central tower's lane. It had a hole in the wall of the second floor so big that you could drive a car through it. I suspected it may have been used by insurgents to attack Eagles Nest at some point.

I have heard Ramadi’s state of disrepair compared to Beirut in the 80’s, or Stalingrad in WW2. In future wars, I assume Joe’s will use Ramadi as a point on the measuring stick for how fucked up a city is.

The West tower was inside the building directly across the street from the command post and to get to it, you simply rolled out of bed and took a leisurely stroll across the street in complete cover and concealment. No threat of being sniped or kidnapped. The Jundi’s up there were always smoking a hookah and having a grand old time. The Central tower was on top of the CP and was the Princess tower. You could just roll out bed and walk up a flight of stairs with bed head— you were barely on duty being up there. Experiences may vary in the GWOT.

I mostly pulled guard in OP South, but one of the few times I was in OP West, Bird Dog randomly appeared with an M-14 and told me to get some sleep. I had heard urban legends of the Bird Dog randomly assuming duty for Joe’s on missions or guard during the 503rd deployment, but it was the first time I had seen it firsthand. I can attest to all the Joes, that legend was true.

We always pulled guard at Eagles Nest with at least one Jundi. Most did not speak a lick of English, and we sat there in silence. Some were overly friendly and would try to engage no matter how little English they knew. At night, some would try to coax me to take a nap. They would fold their hands up and put them to the side of their face in the universal gesture for sleeping. I presume they wanted to take turns sleeping and were gauging my reaction— there was no way in hell I would go to sleep out there. Especially not with a Jundi as my battle buddy. I barely trusted them as it was.

A random shot would pop off somewhere in sector. An IED would explode a short distance away. Angry sounding Arabic blaring from the mosque. The 155mm Howitzers on Camp Ramadi lobbing harassment and interdiction fires into our AO. All if it adding to the general ambiance of this combat zone.

Joes from guard shifts past left ominous warnings written in sharpie for posterity; “Sniper in building with loophole on roof, building 109 or 110, check it out.”

That was life at Eagles Nest. Mandatory overtime and starvation rations for all. We would then four days back on the COP doing mortar stuff. COP was not the vacation we hoped for, though. Now with half the battalion mortars gone, our guard duties at COP had effectively doubled.

We had ceased doing fire missions almost entirely by this point. If they called fire mission at this point in the deployment, it would be mostly NCOs taking control of the guns. We did not even have a Platoon Leader anymore. Lieutenant Camp had become Baker Companies XO early in the deployment.

One night we were coming back from Eagles Nest, having just finished the twelve-hour tower/patrol cycle when SSG Carter told us that someone needed to relieve two guys at the front gate so they could leave for Eagles Nest. Crickets

“To hell with it, I live to serve.” I thought to myself. I glanced towards Reynolds, who had been on OP South earlier in the night with me.

“Yea, fuck it. Why not.” He said and hopped out of the Amtrak when we got there.

While Reynolds and I had not been close prior to the deployment, we figured out that we suffered well together over dozens of hours pulling guard. We had similar tastes in music and would start to share one earbud each when we got our hands on an iPod later in the deployment.

Shortly before dawn on that night, I was sitting in the Amtrak that blocked the entrance, I saw an unidentified soldier crossing the street from Corregidor to Combat Outpost when a bat swooped down out of the sky out of nowhere and passed close to his head— the dude spazzed and hit the dirt as if we were taking indirect fire.

He lingers on the ground for a minute, and I am starting to wonder if I hallucinated the whole thing, then the guy jumps up and sprints to the Amtrak.

“Did you fucking see that?” He yells at me as he passes us and keeps going. That gave us the jolt needed to stay awake for the rest of the shift.

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I served five years active duty Army. During that time, Navy and Marine Corps aviators had a convention which ended up behind called the Tailhook Scandal in late 1991. Without going into a lot of detail on it, there was a huge investigation into aviators assaulting women at the conference. As I recall no one actually got in trouble for anything but it led to a massive change in policy in regards to women serving in all branches of the military. Sorry for the long introduction, but it becomes relevant in my story.

After I finished my enlistment in the Army, I started college and decided I wanted to go back in the military as an officer. I started doing Air Force ROTC. The first two years weren’t that bad. I didn’t really get along with the Major that was XO of the program.

During my third year, our cadet wing commander was a female. She was very competent and well respected by everyone. Shortly before our mandatory Christmas party, the rest of the cadet staff get us all in a meeting without her. They had a “brilliant” idea of how they were going to prank her at the Christmas party. They had set up a present game, where a gift could be stolen by someone else. The gifts would be unopened until after everyone had received one. They were rigging the game in advance because they had purchased a very large sex toy and wanted to make sure she got it as a joke. I protested stating it was a horrible idea because it was a clear case of sexual harassment. Especially in light that Tailhook was still being investigated and actual officers were being court martialed.

I was told to shut up and that it had already been cleared with the XO, who thought it was a hilarious plan. The CO was at a conference so there was no way to further address it. I told them and the XO that if they were going through with their plan, I was not attending regardless.

I skipped the party. I found out they had videoed the whole thing and I got a copy of it (yes, I’m paranoid like that). About a week later, I got called into a meeting with the CO and XO. I was told I was going to be disciplined for intentionally skipping the event. As he was preparing the paperwork, the CO finished chewing me out for missing it. He had not been at the party since he had been at a conference. I asked him if anybody had told him why I had not attended, then went on to explain what had happened during it. I continued on to advise him that if I was disciplined for skipping it, I would be contacting the Air Force Inspector General’s office with the video. I could see the blood draining from his face as he started tearing up the paperwork and dismissed me.

I learned that every copy of the video other than mine was destroyed. I was edged out of everything and a couple months later, the XO managed to get me dismissed from the program on a technicality. Looking back on it, I wish I had gone ahead and filed a complaint and regret that I didn’t. That’s why I say, there were no heroes here, except perhaps the cadet wing commander. I was mad at the time for being put out, but quickly realized that I probably would not had a successful career as an officer.

Standard Army story preface. No Sh.. No lie I was there ....... This is a nothing story and nothing really happened. Or did it?

For Halloween.

1978 F.R.G. Federal republic of Germany, mid November in central Germany. Wet and cold, had snow it melted snowed again and melted again. The ground was wet soft, ice cold and stuck to everything. I was in Hanau on another lovely TDY.

What is Hanau, Germany famous for?

Its station is a major railway junction and it has a port on the river Main, making it an important transport center. The city is known for being the birthplace of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and Franciscus Sylvius. Since the 16th century it was a center of precious metal working with many goldsmiths.

Oh and they forgot to mention Witches.

I was at the EM club at Pioneer Kaserne, no hum no drum just getting my drink on. A wild looking brunette kind of just appeared in the seat across from me at my small table (later I remembered that I hadn't seen a second chair there to begin with.) and started to angrily try to pick me up. I say angrily because there was such an edge on her voice, her movements/body language that it set off alarms in my head. I'm not a bad looking guy but I have not and do not have women try and pick me up (Untill I got married and wore a ring.) Well my spidey sense or combat antenna just screamed to get the F out of there so I said I was going to take a piss and abruptly got up and headed to the bathroom.

It could have been nothing, a girl wanting to make her boy friend jealous, it could have been a prelude to a setup mugging.

I ducked out the back door and had a cig and then went back in to the same table now with only one chair!?! Even my glass was still there, I sat down and lit another cig and was about to order another drink when the glass sitting on the table in front of me with no discernible help moved a good 8 inches from right to left.

The table was level and did not wobble, there was no one close by jumping up and down there was no loud bass playing. The hair on the back of my head came to attention and I sat there, I don't know how long; then I got up and got the hell out of there.

It was about a mile and a half back to the Transit barracks I was billeted in so I looked for a cab but it was late, none to be had. I decided to walk and tho having walked it before I got lost and wondered around a bit. I noticed that I was heading for the river and the woods and stopped my self with a jar. I told my self that no way I'm getting away from the street lights so I back tracked and finally got on the right path. I had lost track of time which later it occurred to me that I never even thought of looking at my watch. Anyway no biggy I was on the right side street about 75 yards from gate to my billets.

NOTE: The Baader Meinhof gang was still activate at that time. And a nicer group of psychopath's you would never find.

When I heard that sound, the sound. The scrape, click, scrape/shunk. That's right boys and girls. It was zero dark 30 in was cold wet and there was not a sound then scrape, click, scrape/shunk. An M16 locked and loaded.

I dove to the ground and waited for the shooting to start. I am not ashamed to tell you If I hadn't already emptied my bladder I would have done so then. I waited and waited and after a bit realized I was covered with ice cold mud, I had dove in to the dirt/mud next to the sidewalk and prefab concrete walls with concertina wire on top.

I got up and looked around there was not a soul, there were no cars nobody and nothing.

I got back to my barracks and the CQ, a Pvt2 looked me up and down but just went back to buffing his boots. I cleaned up and finally went to bed and slept like the dead. I was weirded out for a day or two. I went to a local Guest House and got in to a conversation with this older lady bar tender. She flat out asked me if there was something wrong, did something happen. She had those bright icy blue eyes that seemed to look right through you.

I don't know why but I laid it out to her what had happened. She then tells me about Hanau, about the brothers Grimm and that Hanau had been a hot bed of paranormal activity, witches, witch trials in the 1500 and 1600's. She also told me that if I was religious, that I should go talk to a priest or get a charm against witch craft. Gold, Silver, Iron, Oak, and Ash. She said that like it was an every day thing. She assured me I had met a witch and had I gone with her I could have ended up dead or worse.

She didn't elaborate what (or worse) was and I was to tell the truth reluctant to ask.

I laughed it off but as soon as I could I followed her directions and went to the hole wall shop she directed me to and got the charm. Yeah when I was in Germany I did drink a lot but never to the point of being falling down drunk, well not every week, every other month. But that night I hadn't and wasn't. I had a little bit of a buzz and could maintain.

When I remember it every now and then I go looking in my drawer and make sure that stupid charm is there because late at night and that's when that memory seems to pop up the most of the time, it can still make my hair stand up and give me a chill or two.

Happy Halloween.

This story takes place in an unnamed deployed location. However, to provide context, the following info is important.

I started off my stint working on the F-15E Strike Eagle after 3 years of working on the MQ-9 Reaper. For those of you that don't know, unmanned aircraft lack a lot of the systems that manned aircraft have (for obvious reasons), and since I arrived at my new base as a brand-new SSgt, I basically got tossed into the deep end of the figurative pool and was told to figure out how to swim. I eventually got pretty good at diagnosing and fixing issues on the F-15E, even to the point that when it came to the bleed air/air conditioning systems, I could call out the problem with about a 90% accuracy rate before any test equipment was employed.

That said, we had a guy who had spent his entire career up to that point working on the F-15E, and he, simply put, knew that aircraft inside and out. When someone came up with the idea of bro/Star Wars nicknames, I was named Brobi-wan Kenobi for my ability to solve problems, and he was named Broda, for his seemingly infinite knowledge and wisdom. There was also an engine dude that got named Han SoBro, based entirely on the fact that he would stay sober at unit events, and make beer runs for the rest of us maintainers. Ah, I digress. On to the actual story!

It was a fairly normal day. We'd send jets up, they'd come back, we'd fix them, and send them back out. Now, if a jet has an issue prior to taxiing out, it's called a red-ball in Air Force lingo. We'll, I was helping my troops finish up a generator install job when the specialist truck came squealing up, with Broda shouting "Air conditioning red-ball!" I made sure my troops were good, then ran and hopped in the truck. Broda damn near drifted the truck around the corner to get me to where I needed to be (we were launching actual combat missions, so time was in short supply), and I jumped out, connected my headset to the jet, and started talking to the pilot.

Now, there are three main parts of red-ball maintenance: Diagnosing the issue, determining if it's feasible to fix on the spot, and if it can't be fixed, determining if the aircraft is safe to fly with the issue the pilot called us for.

In this case, the pilot had only his right engine running, but he had no airflow into the cockpit. I went ahead and popped the ground cooling access panel, and then manually compressed the check valve to feel if air was flowing to the avionics, and I was greeted with a surge of ice-cold air. So, with my knowledge of how the system works, I figured that the cabin inlet valve was stuck closed, and that's not a part that we can change during a red-ball. I told the pilot to hang on for a second, and ran over to speak with Broda. I told him that it was probably a stuck cabin inlet valve, and he nodded, picked up his radio to call it in, then stopped, closed his eyes for a moment, then turned to me and said "Hey, have the pilot cycle his emergency vent handle to vent and then back to normal. If that doesn't do anything, I'll call it in."

I ran back to the jet, asked the pilot to cycle said handle, and like magic, frosty cold air started pouring into the cockpit. I remember the pilot shouting "Hot damn! It's been like a fucking oven in here. Thanks chief!" I threw up the 'rock on' hand signal, he returned it, and then I jumped back into the truck. Once I was in, I asked Broda why he even considered the emergency vent handle as a possible cause of the issue. He just chuckled and said "I saw it happen about 6 years ago. Exact same issue."

Broda was later picked up to be an instructor for new E/E troops, and while I'm not sure where he went after that, I'm sure he's humbling "experts" with his incredible tech skills.

Mortars are suppressive indirect fire weapons. They can be employed to neutralize, suppress, or destroy area or point targets, screen large areas with smoke, and provide illumination or coordinated high explosive/illumination. The mortar platoon’s mission is to provide close and immediate indirect fire support to all maneuver units on the battlefield. – U.S Army Field Manual 3-22.90

May 2006 – Oct 2006

Thunder

“Dog Company does not have any mortars,” Dick Holmes said when SSG Donnelly told him who I was. SSG Donnelly gave him the same shrug every soldier gives to every other soldier to wordlessly shrug off some contradictory nonsense in the Army.

Dick Holmes was a Ranger tabbed Staff Sergeant who referred to himself in the third person— as “Dick Holmes.” He used to refer to the Joe’s as “young warrior” when he spoke to them. He was a serious warrior who did not take himself too seriously. I loved Dick Holmes; he was a character.

SSG Donnelly vouched for my ability to ruck and follow simple commands and then he bid me farewell. Dick Holmes tossed me like a hot potato over to a Corporal Cazinha. Corporal Cazinha explained to me that they had released their Joe’s early for the day because we were going to the field for a week. He told me when to come back to work and then dismissed me for the day.

Five minutes after dropping me off, I passed SSG Donnelly’s squad and shrugged. “I’m going home.” I called out as I walked by. “Look at that, shamming already. I told you it would be okay.” SSG Donnelly yelled back.

Being in the battalion mortars is a more sedentary life than being in a line company. The 120mm mortar system weighs 110 lbs. total and is a battalion level asset. The rounds weigh 32 lbs. You are not moving those on foot. You are riding in vehicles, or your guns are set up on a FOB. They stay with the Battalion Headquarters element. Maneuver companies will usually have a 60 mm mortar section, but our battalion was not configuring itself that way for this deployment. Being on a 120mm mortar crew is less walking and more lifting. You must put on “man weight” to start chucking those things around— and you will.

You spend too much time down range humping rounds and eating the Army’s green eggs and ham, you will gain some weight. What form it came in depended on the discipline of the individual. I gained thirty pounds while in the Army—some of it was muscle.

We had several guys from that platoon make it through Ranger school and one successful special forces selection in my three years with them. We had no shortage of studs, but we also had some dad bods. The spectrum was wider, for lack of a better term.

The Battalion mortars also tended to be in the field a lot more than I had been with Dog Company. The battalion mortars were doing fire missions for all the rifle companies, one after the other. Officers, forwards observers, or whomever would practice calling in fire missions, often in conjunction with the maneuver companies conducting live fire training. It gave both sides valuable training, and it added ambiance for the Joes.

On our end, the PL Lieutenant Camp (Thunder 6) or someone from the FDC would yell “FIRE MISSION” and we would all drop whatever we were doing to instead drop rounds down range. We would live in tents on Fort Carson for days or weeks, doing fire missions day and night. After the line companies finished, we would often do an abbreviated version of whatever training the bravos were doing.

The first day I showed up to HHC for PT, we were all standing around near the arms room waiting for formation to begin. I was standing on the periphery of a group of Joe’s, most of us meeting for the first time.

“Hey new guy, have you ever seen anything like this before?”

An unknown Joe turns to face me and hangs dong; he points to some imperfection on his junk and asks me for my professional medical opinion. Before I can even process this, a voice calls out from the back, “Go get rodded off the range, Waer.”

Getting “rodded off the range” like many things in the Army, has a dual meaning. In literal terms, when leaving the firing range you are to present your weapon to the range safety NCO with the bolt locked open, and the Range safety NCO will stick a rod down the barrel to make sure there is no round in the chamber.

The second definition is Army slang, it refers to the act of a medic jamming a q-tip up your dick hole to check for STD’s— hooah. This was my introduction to Specialist Waer, and our beloved Mortar platoon— callsign “Thunder.”

Headquarters and Headquarters Company (HHC) had the Scout platoon, the Battalion Aid Station, the Mortars, and other Battalion level assets. As the two Infantry platoons in the Company, there was a brotherly rivalry between the Scouts and Mortars. The Scout’s Platoon Sergeant, SSG Hager, fanned the flames often in a good-natured way. SSG Hager was always happy to be there and trying to get the Joes fired up.

The Company Commander, Captain Hanlon, or Hotel 6; was one of the Officers that came from the 75th Ranger Regiment. You would not know how sick his resume was from his unassuming demeanor. He was very much a quiet professional. Our First Sergeant’s chest rivaled Bird Dog, he had damn near every school, badge, or tab you could get in the Army. He had an incredible variety of tools in his toolkit.

Training with the Battalion Mortars was a slog. I got there in the beginning of the summer months when the training tempo was really picking up and it felt like I spent the rest of my time on Fort Carson in the field.

I read a lot of books leaning up against stacks of 120MM mortar crates in between fire missions that summer. Now that I was in it, I was less interested in reading about current events. I started mixing in fiction with history. Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22, all things Palahniuk. I graduated from World War 2 history to Revolutionary War history.

This was in the days of flip phones, and we were living in tents with no electricity. My entertainment options for my down time were limited to reading and/or playing cards. We spent hours standing around in a circle, smoking cigarettes and retelling each other the same old stories of past field problems and the small miseries that go with them— we called this, “smoking and joking.”

The mortar firing points were far away from small arms ranges, and we had little adult supervision out here. The highest-ranking man was Thunder 6. He looked older than most Lieutenants and he struck me as a football coach type, and that assumption was spot on. I learned later that that is what he did prior to 9/11.

We spent most of our time on the mortar range on Fort Carson separated from the Battalion and Company. We were the red headed stepchildren of the battalion and there were few guard rails in place to keep it from going all Lord of the Flies on the Mortar Square. That must be why they picked LT Camp; he was a big guy and looked capable of enforcing good order and discipline.

The 11 Bravo’s called us POG’s. The feeling was that we were living high on the hog out there. I had way more fun training with Dog Company, honestly. Although, I did seem to fit in more here with the mortars.

The thing about firing the mortar system, if you have fired it once, you have fired it a thousand times. Setting up the 120 mm mortar system, especially when dismounting from vehicles, was about as fun as bounding on cement. It was the summer of a thousand tripods to the shin.

My first field problem on the Mortar Range on Fort Carson, Dick Holmes taught me how to hand fire the 60mm mortar. We just plopped it down and started lobbing rounds— it was more casual than AIT. It was one of the few times I could see where our rounds were landing, which, admittedly, added to the coolness factor quite a bit. Dick Holmes took a knee next to me, giving me corrections to guide me on target. There were old rusty armored vehicles for us to aim at in the impact area. Now this feels like a light infantry weapon.

One night we made patterns in the nights sky with illumination rounds that looked like little star constellations— the Forward Observers were peacocking. Even a determined curmudgeon like me had to appreciate it.

The nights sky on an Army base, out in the field, is awesome regardless of mortar fire. With no light pollution, I really saw the nights sky for the first time. You hear about the concept of noise pollution as a suburbanite, but until you see the contrast, you cannot appreciate what you are missing. The nights sky was familiar no matter what strange place I found myself.

We fired a lot of rounds that summer. We were fast. We became quite good at what we did and after a brief readjustment period, I started to get into the groove of the Mortar lifestyle.

In the Army, the term “mortars” refers to both the weapon system, and the Joes who employ it. The mortars, as a group of soldiers, was an endless cast of colorful characters. One example was a guy named Esau. He enlisted from Micronesia. When I met him, I learned a couple of things; first was that Micronesia is part of Guam. Also, that Guam is a territory of the U.S, and therefore their citizens can enlist in the US military. Why would he want to? We could not ask him.

He showed up to the unit not speaking English. He somehow made it through basic training without speaking the same language as the Drill Sergeants and then our platoon's leadership had to send him to a community college in town for ESL classes. The Joes also helped; one of his first English phrases was “go eat a dick taco.”

It takes balls to join the Army in a time of war, but to join an Army that does not even speak the same language as you is something else. He did not even do it to for the opportunity to emigrate here, he moved back to Micronesia after getting out of the Army— he did it for love of the game.

There was a Sergeant who promoted to Staff Sergeant while we were at the mortar range and our Platoon Sergeant asked him to say a few words to inspire the Joes after they pinned him. He stood there, cleared his throat, and said “well boys, if you stick around long enough, they have to give it to you.” That was the entire speech— he nailed it.

I did not move into the HHC barracks with the rest of the Mortars. Shortly before I went to HHC, Buford and I moved out of the single room, and I now lived in my own room with an E-4 for a roommate who was shacked up with a girl in town. I had the place to myself, so like a good Joe, I kept my mouth shut. When the Army closes a door, it leaves open a window for mischief.

I was in this beautiful gray area where no one from HHC would think to look for me in Dog company's barracks when they did room inspections, and when Dog company did room inspections, I was at work. It was just a random, unspecified soldiers room for them to bypass. Every single NCO who passed that room said, “not my circus, not my monkey.”

I was living off the grid, thumbing my nose at oversight and accountability. I was a Private pulling a Specialist level swindle. I assume, if the company had discovered it, Hotel 6 would have pinned the sham shield on me in a meritorious promotion.

Ilana and I were making frequent trips to visit each other when I wasn’t in the field. One of us flying to the other for long weekends regularly. We talked every day that I wasn’t in the field. It was the kind of powerful infatuation that only teenage hormones can explain, and with war in my immediate future, we made the decision to get married in May 2006, rather impulsively.

If I was going to get the full Army experience, I only had three years to do it, no time to dilly dally. This was around the same time that I had switched companies. My chain of command knew I was married but overlooked the fact that I was a geographical bachelor during room inspections. That is how I fell through the cracks in the barracks.

I was more of a shrewd operator than I let on sometimes. It was not even a lie of omission, no one ever asked. When they told us to go to our rooms for room inspections, I was in my room as ordered, waiting for a knock that would never come. Hooah.

One momentous weekend, I walked into a small store near our barracks with one of my battle buddies. He was in line in front of me, buying beer for both of us, when the older woman behind the registers asks to see his I.D. As he reaches for it, she waves him off with a chuckle.

“Oh, I am kidding, honey. If you are old enough to go to war, you are old enough to drink beer.”

My ears were burning. I was still only 20 years old, not that anyone seemed particularly concerned with underage drinking— unless your First Sergeant is called into work on the weekend.

Still though, not having to rely on a battle buddy for my beer supply was huge in those days. This lady was a patriot, and she was true to her word. I became a fiercely loyal customer, and she never once carded me. She was a likely contributor to what Manchu 6 would later describe in an interview as “a shocking amount of indiscipline” he was dealing with leading up to our deployment. I cannot speak for all the Manchu’s, but it was party time in Dog Company’s barracks.

The ironic part was that she told me her husband was a retired First Sergeant. This was the Army equivalent of your strict parents becoming the overly permissive grandparents spoiling the kids.

As we got closer to deployment, the training became more practical. We did a combat lifesavers course where we learned how to give immediate care to the wounded in the absence of a medic. Things like applying tourniquets, how to stick an IV and hang an IV bag, treating shock, opening an airway with a nasal pharyngeal, how to do a needle decompression on a collapsed lung, how to identify and patch a sucking chest wound with a specific patch made for that purpose. We had the equipment necessary for all of these on-the-fly procedures in a medkit on our equipment. These were all geared towards treating the kinds of wounds we were most likely to see on the battlefield— I really hoped I would never have to apply these lessons.

We practiced fireman carrying each other and strapping each other in these half sled, half stretcher hybrids called a skedco and dragging each other around. Those were some rough and tumble rides. They always make the smaller guys carry the bigger guys because there are no weight classes in combat. I needed to be able to carry anyone in the platoon and I was one of those smaller guys. We all learned how to call in a 9-line medevac and the NCO’s gave us cheat sheets to keep on our person for reference. Learning all of this makes it seem so much more real.

We did a training exercise where we worked ourselves to exhaustion and then live fired our weapons while our heart rates were maxed out and we were sucking air. It is extremely hard to shoot straight under those conditions, even for professional soldiers. We learned that we would get adrenaline shakes in combat and this practice should hopefully make it easier to overcome later.

——————- After this it goes into my experience at NTC, which is already posted as a stand alone story.

The mission of the Infantry rifle platoon is to close with the enemy using fire and movement to destroy or capture enemy forces, or to repel enemy attacks by fire, close combat, and counterattack to control land areas, including populations and resources - ATP 3-21.8

Manchu

Jan 2006- May 2006

I reported to the welcome center on Fort Carson at the correct time and in the “correct” uniform on Friday, December 23rd, 2005. I then spent over week at the welcome center with my thumb in my ass because the post was a ghost town. This was before open internet wi-fi was common or smart phones. I should have gone to the gym or found some training materials to read, but I took up smoking again instead.

I reunited with a couple guys from my basic training platoon at the welcome center. David Cain from Texas and Sean Haskins was from Boston. Haskins was a nice reminder of home; red hair, pasty complexion, his demeanor, and accent were pure Boston.

I woke up on Christmas Eve 2005 and I walked out to the smoking area and saw Colorado in the light of day for the first time. A lanky Joe whose name tape said Amos was staring at a Mountain peak with antennas sticking out of the top, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“Look, at, that, shit.” He said every word slowly, deliberately, like he was trying to explain a tough concept to an exceptionally dim bulb. It was love at first sight, we did not know it yet, but Amos and I were destined to be Marlboro men, huddled in the smoking area, ripping heaters together until the bitter end.

On my final day of in-processing, I was in line waiting to receive my orders and the guy next to me in line struck up a conversation. His name was Travis Buford and he was from Eastern Texas and he is one of the few soldiers I will meet that is smaller than I am.

As luck would have it, we were both assigned to 1-9 infantry. Buford showed me where to get the 2nd Infantry Division patch sewn on my BDU’s and he offered me a ride to battalion because he was a rare new Joe that had a car already. He was the kind of guy who became friends with everyone he met, and I have a little brother energy. He must have noticed that and decided he would hold my hand. I was lucky to end up behind him in line.

The unit we found upon our arrival was the 1st Battalion, 503rd Air Assault Regiment; they were reflagging to a light infantry battalion. This was the last day under their old colors. A 503rd veteran, Specialist Logan Monts, looked us dead in the eye and told us that we should feel honored to spend even a single day in their beloved First Rock— and he was serious.

At Battalion Headquarters we met our new Battalion’s Sergeant Major; he told us his nickname was Bird Dog. He gave us a welcome to the Army speech, but I cannot recall what he said to us. All I remembered after first meeting him was how much bling he had on. I was trying not stare at his chest, but he had all kinds of shiny shit on there.

A soldier's uniform tells everyone exactly who they are. It tells us your name, your rank, your skills, and experience. Command Sergeant Major Bergman had a star on his jump wings, which meant he had jumped out of a plane into combat. He had a star on his combat infantryman badge, which meant he had seen combat in two wars. He had about every skill badge you could imagine, and he had a Ranger tab, and he wore the Ranger scroll for his combat patch, which meant he had served in combat with the 75th Ranger Regiment.

In infantry culture, experience and facing adversity are currency that award you street cred with your fellow soldiers. What have you done lately? Are you airborne? Air Assault? Pathfinder? Do you have any tabs? How long is that tab.

If you are an Infantry Officer, you do have a Ranger tab or you are persona non grata.

Having been to combat, as proven by wearing a combat patch on your right shoulder, under the flag, or even better—having a Combat Infantryman Badge— earns you the most street cred. This is also true for Medics with the Combat Medical Badge, and other jobs with newer Combat Action Badge.

Doing your job in combat is the test that every Soldier knows they may face when they take the oath of enlistment. A combat badge shows to your peers that you have. I admired everyone I saw walking around with a CIB. Everything in Infantry culture is a dick measuring contest and having a star on your CIB like Bird Dog had means that you are swinging a meaty hammer.

At Battalion Headquarters, Buford and I were both told to report to Dog Company for in-processing. Battalion should not have assigned me to Dog Company because that was the only company in the Battalion that did not have a mortar section. I did not know or care about any of that at the time and I happily went on my way, grateful to stay with my new friend.

I do not remember most of the names from my time with Dog, but I do remember my first squad leader. Staff Sergeant (SSG) Donnelly. In our first meeting, he dropped the military formality and just talked to me like a normal human being. He was the first NCO to really do so. This was great because I was feeling that first day of school anxiety and he was saying all the things I needed to hear. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but I remember it relieved my anxiety and made me confident in his leadership.

The gist was that he told me that he loved the Army, and that he hopes I will too. He would try to help get me slots in any schools I want, and to help me advance my career the best he could. This was the first time the Army had been framed to me as career. I had never thought of it as more than a temporary service you rendered. I had decided on my first day that the Army was not for me, so I did not think of the Army as my “career”.

SSG Donnelly gave me a great pep talk about the “real Army” and I was starting to realize that the real Army is nothing like Basic Training. I was starting to get excited about the whole thing again— but then I got another taste of that Army bureaucracy that makes you yearn for the bedsheet exit.

SSG Donnelly directed me to the company admin clerk, to stand there at parade rest while he rhetorically read questions from a form and rhetorically answered them for me. "Last Name, Fletcher. Rank, Private” he said gleaning the information that was available on my uniform.

“MOS; 11 Bravo” he said, again rhetorically.

"Corporal, I'm an 11 Charlie." I corrected.

"No, Infantry are 11 Bravo" he said, mansplaining my MOS to me.

"Roger, but I'm an indirect fire infantryman, which is 11 Charlie."

The Corporal stared at me, slack jawed, exasperated, as if I anything that had happened up to that point in the Army was my choice.

"You can't be an 11C, we don't have a mortar section in this company" he snapped. He could already see his evening plans going down the toilet.

In desperation the Corporal called out to a passing, more senior NCO, for guidance.

"What did you do in AIT?" the sergeant asked me.

"Uh... mortar stuff."

"Such as?" the Sergeant inquired. A crowd was forming behind him.

"I don't know, we learned how to use the mortars and then did a test on them. Then we fired some rounds and then we spent like a week digging an elaborate trench system with gun pits to conceal our 120mm mortars, and then filled it back in the second that we finished it.”

"Sounds believable" a voice conceded from the hallway.

Someone decided to summon my squad leader and dump it on his lap. I repeated my story again to him. Buford had been standing outside the room waiting to in-process after me.

“You’re a mortarman, Fletcher?” Buford asked me.

“I didn’t pick it!” I said defensively.

"You’re a mortar?" Sergeant Donnelly asked. “We don’t have a mortar platoon in this company.”

I repeated my story again and I told him that I was fine with staying here and filling whatever Infantry role they needed me to. My new platoon sergeant, SFC Boots was also there now. They tried to explain to me that it would hurt my career because I wouldn’t be learning my MOS’s job before becoming an NCO and I would be way behind my peers.

Technically, an 11C also knows the 11B role to a lesser degree, but not the other way around. In practice though, we ended up with 11B’s in the mortar platoon in Ramadi. Any meat bag can be an ammo bearer. Any meat bag can lay suppressive fire. This side towards enemy.

I told them that I was not going to re-enlist, so it would not matter in the long run. He told me that everyone says that, but most change their minds before their time is done. Someone suggested I reclass to 11B and I would have done it then and there if they would have let me, but this was way above all of their pay grades. SFC Boots told someone to grab called the Company First Sergeant for guidance.

"Great, I want a mortar squad in the company," the First Sergeant said after hearing a brief synopsis and then he walked away anticlimactically. All the assembled NCOs looked around at each other, shrugged and then left.

I would stay with SSG Donnelly until the company got a mortar squad or until further guidance was issued. I thought I was volunteering to be an 11 Bravo from the start, so this all worked out as far as I was concerned.

The unit's barracks had different two room lay outs. One was a two-room unit with a common kitchen/bathroom for two Joes. The other is more like a studio apartment is meant for an unmarried NCO. It is meant for one man, and lacking room, they crammed Buford and I into one of these NCO quarters together.

Buford on the weekends looked like he was playing an extra in a Western. Jeans, button up shirts, long sleeves rolled up, shirt tucked in, of course. He wore cowboy boots and a big old cowboy hat, pretentiously large belt buckle. He was Texas personified in my mind. He was a big personality in a small body, and he was popular with the ladies. He would go out on the town when he was off duty. I was underage and spoken for, so I drank in the barracks with the Joes.

Buford and I did not have a lot in common outside of being soldiers, but that never mattered in the Army. No one asked you who you voted for or cared if you played world of Warcraft at night. If you suffered well as a team, if you could be trusted to do your job, then you are battle buddies. Being a soldier is our commonality, and it trumped everything else. I admired everyone I met— just for being there.

I spent the first five months with the unit training with Dog Company in an infantry rifle squad. This was my first taste of garrison life. The unit had just recently returned from a brutal deployment and was just now spinning up for the next deployment, although where to, was still up in the air.

I was fortunate to get to train with the battalion from the very beginning of their train up, from individual marksmanship, all the way through brigade level exercises. That is the absolute best-case scenario for a Joe at this period of the war— some guys went from basic training straight to Iraq.

When we had the change of command ceremony the next day, we also got a new Battalion Commander. Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Ferry, or “Manchu 6”, was a former enlisted man with a Special Forces scroll, a Ranger tab, and his combat patch showed that he had also served in combat with the 75th Ranger Regiment— and he had combat infantryman badge with a star on it. He had led soldiers at every level from rifle squad all the way up to commanding a light infantry battalion.

In Army terms, he was high speed. Squared away, even.

A couple of the Company Commanders and staff officers had also seen combat with the Ranger Regiment. This unit was lousy with Rangers. It was like a cosmic joke, the way the Army hands off the twenty-seven lbs M240B machine gun to the smallest Joe in the platoon, they put an underachiever like me into the most high-speed unit they could find in the regular Army. My entire chain of command from company to brigade descended from Ranger Regiment.

It did not occur to me as a young private that this density of Ranger scrolls in one battalion was unusual. I just assumed that badasses were everywhere you went in the Army, but I learned later Manchu 6 had brought most these guys along with him when he took command.

In addition to having those studs walking around everywhere, the soldiers of the battalion had just returned from some of the heaviest fighting in the war. These guys had about as much combat experience as anyone at this point.

This was an impressive, and intense, group of guys. Occasionally, someone would fly off the handle and then a tripod would go flying into a wall. That should be a giant red flag for everyone in the room, but coming out of the environment of Basic Training, I was mostly unfazed by these sudden outbursts of extreme anger— that is just the Army I thought.

On one of my first days with Dog company, each platoon had to do an equipment layout. A Specialist explained to me, that we were missing a few items for our layout, and that I would need to help them “combat acquire” the items from the other platoons in our company. I was a new face, and I would be less obvious skulking around because of that fact. So, I tried to “combat acquire” these basic “non-sensitive” items—things without a serial number.

As I was skulking around, I noticed that other new guys from other platoons were also skulking around acting shady and it dawned on me that all the platoons were constantly stealing from and losing equipment to each other. None of them ever able to gain or lose ground in the eternal struggle to have a 100% complete inventory in a company that only has 95% of its equipment. It was a true catch-22 moment straight from Hellers novel.

The wise Joe learns early in the Army not to trust anyone or anything. Everyone wants to screw with the new guys. Send you off to look for non-existent items like a grid square or send you to the First Sergeant to ask for a “pricky eight”. (Prick E-8) They tell you fly commercial in your dress uniform.

If you are not training or at war, it is anyone’s guess what your day will look like as an infantry soldier. It was mostly repetitive and mundane tasks. Cleaning weapons, refresher classes, physical training, equipment layouts, ruck marches, safety briefings, filling sandbags, having vaccines injected into arm, some light yard work, mop a floor or two. Whatever needs doing. You stand around smoking and bitching about it the rest of the time.

Every day would start with a 45-minute wait for PT formation. We would then do PT, which was usually running and the usual suspects of body weight exercises. Often on Friday we would do a ruck march for PT. PT was the start of every duty day in garrison, unless the company was going to do a urinalysis, or if the First Sergeant yelled “zonk”. When they yell zonk, everyone runs like hell back whichever way they came and we have the morning off from PT. Zonk was rare and special, it was reminiscent of the feeling you would get on a snow day as a child.

For a brief period, my squad became an honor guard detail to perform military funerals. We spent a couple of weeks practicing. It is more difficult than you would think; it takes a lot of practice to get everyone to fire the rifle volley in sync. Folding the flag properly is a nightmare. I was the only one that shot left-handed, so Sergeant Donnelly told me to use my right hand just for the sake of uniformity. It did not take long for my inevitable demotion to bugler.

I could not handle doing port arms with my right hand on short notice, so learning how to Bugle felt like a tall order. — “No problem, killer.”

Big Army has an answer to all my problems, big and small. It turns out, the Army has a bugle shaped speaker for Joe to wedge into a bugle to play a recording of taps while he stands there looking pretty. We call this “faking the funk.”

We attended one funeral as the honor guard and there was a full bird Colonel in attendance. I was in my dress uniform, in a ceremonial situation, with field grade eyes on me. This is as uncomfortable as it gets. I hated wearing my dress uniform. Everything on there must be precise and perfect and it puts a million things on you for someone to nitpick. It is a nightmare for someone with ADHD.

I had already acquitted myself so poorly in rehearsal that expectations were nice and low. If the speaker does not fall out of the Bugle when I raise it to my dumb face, then I am a “go at this station” as far as the honor guard detail was concerned. When my part came, I did my level best to look natural. Nothing went, obviously wrong, as far as I could tell, and I lived to fight another day.

After the funeral concluded, the honor guard stood by the casket as attendees passed by to greet and thank us for coming. The Colonel did not get up from his seat, he waited until everyone else had left to approach, and it felt like his eyes were on me the entire time he was waiting. By the time the Colonel gets to me, I am certain that the jig is up. He stares me down for a moment before clasping my hand in both of his and shaking it enthusiastically.

“That was the best rendition of taps I have ever heard, son. You are a master of your instrument.”

“Thank you, sir!” I beamed with pride. I was a bigger phony than the bugle!

An NCO showing a Private how to fake knowing a task well enough that a field grade officer cannot tell the difference is the quintessential Army experience.

The first field problem we went on was miserable. It was still winter, and Fort Carson is in the Rockies. Fire watch was next to a literal fire. It was too cold to be out of your sleeping bag at night otherwise. New guys tended to have a guard shift every single night, and it was always right in the middle of the night— 0200 or 0300 Buford would be kicking my foot to wake me up for guard, or I, his.

Older Joes call the newer Joes “cherries;” as in, your hymen has not broken yet. There were no fixed rules for when you stopped being a cherry. It was either when someone new showed up or the collective hive mind decided you were not anymore. Cherries carry all the heavy stuff; namely the 240’s and the SAW. The 240B was my honor and privilege this first time in the field. I was scrawny at 5’8, 145 lbs when I enlisted, I was one of the few guys who gained weight in basic training. I was around 160 lbs at this point.

If you are small, NCO’s will load you down with the heaviest stuff, I presume to toughen you up. There are no weight classes when you need to fireman carry your wounded buddy. You need to prove you can ruck.

Before we left for this field problem, some random Specialist, who was on his way out of the Army, told me that if anyone offered to swap weapons with me on the ruck march, to tell them “Fuck off, this is my weapon.” He said to be protective of it.

This is one of these moments in the Army where you must weigh whether this is actual advice or someone subtly screwing with you. Joes gaslighting each other is a time-honored tradition in the Army.

Whether or not he was screwing with me, it was good advice. The 240B weighs twenty-seven pounds, it is the heaviest weapon a light infantry rifle platoon carries on foot. The M4 weighs seven pounds by comparison. On a long march, usually the Joes will take turns carrying the heavier automatic weapons. On this road march, I did what he told me and refused to give it up when offered. It was a long road-march. It was twelve to fifteen-ish miles. I refused several times over the course of the march to switch until I was struggling to keep up and my platoon Sergeant, SFC Boots, firmly ordered me to switch with Buford towards the end.

Afterward, I realized why that soldier told me to do that. I was a little timid and I needed to prove I could hang. I earned respect from my peers by doing that, which gave me more confidence, which led to me making less mistakes overall.

When I was home on leave before reporting to Fort Carson, I got a cringy Army tattoo on my forearm, and I had been thoroughly mocked about it weeks earlier. At the end of the road march where I carried the 240B; Sergeant Donnelly was changing out of his wet shirt and turns around to face me and points to his chest where he had airborne wings tattooed.

“Hey Fletcher, do you like my tattoo?” he yelled. “I was a dumb private, too”

By the next time we went on the next field problem, there was a fresh batch of cherries to share in the burdens of being new and they were even lower on the totem pole than us. I had an M4 on the next field problem. Seniority is important in the Army.

Dog Company had a lot of combat veterans with a lot of experience to share. They told us about Ramadi and regaled us with their war stories. They gave us practical advice, like stuffing empty magazines in your cargo pockets while shooting on the move. Little soldiering tips that we would have to learn through painful trial and error otherwise. What comfort and hygiene items to bring to the field. Stuff of that nature. They taught us survival tips, such as, it is not gay to cuddle with your battle buddy for warmth in the field.

They say there are no atheists in a fox hole. Well, a lesser-known anecdote is that there are no homophobes under the woobie.

I trained individual marksmanship with Dog Company. We did a fire-team movement to contact exercise. We spent several days training, bounding, and covering as two-man teams and then stacking on a shoot house and clearing it as a fireteam. They moved guys around the platoon a lot, but during this field problem, Buford and I were on the same fire team. I had an M4, and he had the SAW. At the end we ran it one last time with live ammo. I was getting a lot of practice shooting now, and I desperately needed it.

On my first day of Basic Training, while the Drill Sergeants were smoking the shit out of us, one of them taunted us by saying “it looks way easier on Call of Duty, huh?” That is a valid point, every single part of soldiering is uncomfortable. The gear we wear, when you first put it on and are standing around in a neutral position, completely at rest, just waiting to get going, is already extremely uncomfortable. It does not get any better with time.

It is winter in the Rockies; it is freezing and my lips and face become chapped from the never-ending wind. We have not showered in days or sometimes weeks. You feel gross and itchy. It is too cold to even take a whore's bath like a gentleman. You did not really consider the fact that just existing in the Army was painful.

Then it is finally time to do the live fire exercise. We have spent days practicing this, first a dry run and then while firing blanks. We have drilled and drilled and drilled and now this is the fun part, finally. We get to shoot some guns— yeehaw. Except, getting up and down off the ground with all your gear on is a lot easier in Call of Duty.

I’m up, he sees me, I’m down. I land on a rock.

I’m up, he sees me, I’m down. My knee pads are around my shins.

I’m up, he sees me, I’m down. My glasses are fogging up, and my Kevlar is drooping, I cannot see a damn thing.

I’m up, he sees me, I’m down. I catch my chin with the butt of my weapon.

By the time we get to the shoot house, I am black and blue and steaming from the ears. I do not even enjoy making my M4 go pew-pew, because I am so pissed off about how poorly the Army’s equipment works. Then we stand around drenched in sweat and wait for hypothermia to take us or for everyone else to complete the training— fucking hooah.

Afterward, the platoon gathers around, and the Platoon Leader and Platoon Sergeant will conduct an After-Action Review. (AAR)

This is where you talk about what went right and what went wrong. We do this after training and after a real-world mission. This job is life and death, so there is no sugar coating anything, if you tripped over your own bootlaces, you might as well be the one to bring it up— someone else will. This process teaches accountability, how to reflect on and improve upon your own weaknesses, and it keeps you humble— I starred in a couple of these myself.

We were about to really start getting into the nitty gritty of Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) when Sergeant Donnelly informed me that Battalion was transferring me to Headquarters and Headquarters Company (HHC) to be in the Battalion Mortar platoon. So much time had passed that I was hoping no one even remembered I was an 11C.

The battalion made the decision to combine the 60mm mortar sections from the line companies into the Battalion Mortar platoon in HHC. When they did, the Mortar’s Platoon Leader, Lieutenant Camp, must have finally realized that he had a ghost soldier on his roster and dispatched bounty hunters to track me down.

Sergeant Donnelly damn near had to lead me at rifle point over to HHC and turn me over to the first Mortar NCO he could find.

Standard Army story preface. No Sh.. No lie I was there .......

I just read post about a guy buying a car off a used car lot the had a problem so he took it back and the mechanic found hundreds of little bags behind the dash full of pills. It was a seized and auctioned car.

It reminded me of this.

Background.

June 11, 1971–President Nixon directed military drug urinalysis program to identify service members returning from Vietnam for rehabilitation. 1972 – Department of Defense amnesty program results in over 16,000 military members admitting a drug abuse problem.

I had friend I had made in basic drop me a note through the post locator office. He got to Germany about 2 months after I did. I was about an hours train ride away from him so I headed over to see him. I signed in and was let up to his barracks and his room. He had to put on some civvies and was also trying to clean up the wall locker he had. He told me he had to wait two days after getting to the unit to get a locker and literally just after the guy who had it before left. Bob (Not his name) was grabbing lose paper and was trying to pull a piece of what looked like wax paper sticking out from under one of the drawers to toss in to a Gov issue plastic trash bag for the little round trash cans we had. He got a new platoon Sgt who was a ball breaker and was doing spot inspections.

He got it out and looked at with a frown on his face. He turned to look at me and say. "Dots?", meaning that candy. No I said as I looked closer. It was a half of a page of micro dot acid. I was a noob but had been exposed to that by a property inventory I got stuck with. Bob had gone through 2 company level inspections and that acid was in his locker.

We ditched that stuff and went through his locker from top to bottom. This was 1977 I hadn't been in Germany for very long and was still much a barracks rat not going any where other the the PX and rec center. Bob asked how I knew what the microdot acid looked like and I told him about a guy who got busted and was going to Mannheim and I got stuck doing his property inventory. I had waved the acid around and stuck it under the HQ platoon NCOIC nose who got a little up set with me sticking in his face.

Bob proceeded to tell me as I remunerated on what we found that if you wanted hash you went out the front gate of the Kaserne and turned right (see the guy) hanging at the Taxi stand, if you wanted grass you went to the local park and for the hard stuff the bus station. Oddly no mention as I recall of going out the gate and going left?!?

In the mid to late 1970's the druggy unofficial uniform was hair parted in the middle, sun glasses and smoking Kool cigarettes. If you smoked Sherman's you were on Heroin. EDIT: Forgot -- drink Grape soda.

If you were from California you were guilty until proven innocent. Both were referred to the "RANDOM" piss test schedule.

I know of an entire battalion that was called to a formation and the marched. The Enlisted, NCO's and Officers all, down to the local gym and all Piss tested.

I can pretty much guarantee that it never made the news then in Germany nor back in the states. Anyway I on my return to my barracks did a full cleaning of my wall locker and other then some questionable looking dust bunny's I was clear.

So how many things did you see or hear of happening that never made it to the news?

Also now as it was then anything that get that was in the control of someone else should be thoroughly cleaned and checked.

Oh just to let you know this was long before I made my Spec4 Mafia bones and was still a Pvt2....8-)

For some background: at the time, locals were allowed onto the base to peddle their wares as a way to boost the local economy. Said wares were usually crap, but some cool stuff could be found every so often.

Me and my buddy Mike decided to browse the bazaar that used to be held on Khandahar on Saturdays, and after sifting through a bunch of fake stuff, Mike hit figurative gold. He found an acoustic guitar that was in decent shape, and somehow ended up with a small sack full of costume jewelry rings.

As for me, I found a vendor that was selling genuine silk scarves (They felt real, but it's possible that I got scammed. Let me enjoy the fantasy.) I ended up buying 4 scarves, and yes, I haggled the shopkeep down. He was asking $50 per scarf, but I ended up snagging them at $40 each. They were all sent to women that were important to me at that time.

The weirdest part about the bazaar was seeing the little boys running around, aggressively trying to sell trinkets to US troops. I didn't think much of them, right up until one locked eyes with me and started sprinting at me. We had been told about child suicide bombers countless times, so I was wary of him and pulled my M-16 (I'm old), slammed a mag in, racked the bolt, and started to line up a shot, thinking that he was a suicide bomber, and that maybe I might just be fast enough to make the shot before the bomb went off.

Turns out, there was no bomb, and I didn't pull the trigger. The young boy had his right arm covered in bracelets, from wrist to shoulder. He stopped about 20 feet feet from me, held his arm high, and shouted "These bracelets fuck!"

Mike and I each bought a bracelet after we apologized for pointing our weapons at the kid (Mike had my back). Said bracelet and one silk scarf was sent to a gal that was kind enough to send snacks to me and my buddies.

Once again, I'm not sure how to end this story. I guess it boils down to not jumping to conclusions, and if you're deployed, send some cool shit to the people who care about you.

By the time I got back to TQ, three or four weeks had passed. The boys came to pick me up, which was a nice gesture, I appreciated avoiding a helicopter ride.

I had new clients waiting for my sexy mercenary skills when I got back. Our task force had a Psyops team. They needed a Joe to be the gunner on their vehicle for a few weeks while they their guy was on leave. I was fresh from party time and as hooah as could be, so I was a perfect candidate.

The Psyops guys were cool dudes. The driver was a jacked E-4, and he was trying to recruit students for a martial arts class he wanted to teach at the Corregidor gym. He wanted me to go, but I never took him up on it. I did not go to the gym on Corregidor. I went to the one next to the battalion aid station/motor pool so I could watch my Primary Care Physician deadlift a humvee.

During my time with them, they were mostly going out the civil affairs team; they had speakers on their humvee to blast messages out in Arabic for the people—or taunts at the enemy, whatever the situation called for. It was one way of spreading messages to people when there were no other means of mass communication.

My first Psyops mission was a meeting with locals at a school in Viet Ram. We drove out there in a convoy with the Civil Affairs team. This was my first time going on a mission without anyone that I knew. That was unnerving enough, but these were also non-infantry types, and I had absolutely no idea how they would react if we got into a firefight. The clench factor was high on this first one.

We got to the school and to my relief there were Manchu’s there. I do not know which company had a Combat Outpost out there at the time, but they were providing security, so I relaxed a bit. The Civil Affairs guys did not seem worried as they took of their body armor and left it and their weapons in the humvee when they went into the school.

“What the fuck are they doing?” I asked the driver.

“The Civil Affairs guys take off their gear, so they will not intimidate the civilians. They want us to drop our gear, but we keep our weapons on us to protect them.”

They would have to pry my M4 from my cold dead hands before I put it down out here in Viet Ram— or anywhere outside the wire. I hated every part of what we were doing, but good soldiers follow orders, so I stayed reticent and approached Iraqi civilians with my precious vital organs exposed.

Every single person that came to meet with us wanted reimbursement for something. They never blamed us for the damage directly, they always said it was insurgents. “An insurgent shot my goat.” “An insurgent mortar damaged my house.” “An insurgent blew up the water tower.”

There were no insurgent attacks happening anywhere in our AO currently, except in this one neighborhood, and exclusively targeting private property. Fog of war and all that I suppose. I was not sure if this was a backlog or if it was all recent events.

Until this point, I had only been this close to civilians in Mula’ab when AQI still controlled it. Even the ones who were not hostile were mostly too afraid to approach us. This was the first time kids approached me without throwing a rock.

Jundis were lounging in lawn chairs with their weapons slung, drinking tea. It was a relaxed atmosphere. The locals did not seem to be worried anything would happen, which is always reassuring. This was still too informal for me. I wanted to put my body armor back on and climb behind the the 50.

Eventually, every grifter in Sufiya had received their pound of flesh, and we headed back to base knowing that we had won “hearts and minds.” I was jaded and not seeing the big picture at all.

The next psyop mission was a cordon and knock in Viet Ram. It was miserable— this was early summer, and this mission occurred mid-day. It was an all-day mission roasting in the gunner's turret while the Jundi’s and Public Affair types went house to house kissing babies and shaking hands with the locals.

This was the worst mission I did in Iraq. I had no idea how long this mission was going to be when we left; I did not properly hydrate prior, I did not bring enough water, and the water I did have was just a tad shy of boiling. I could not even enjoy my Marlboros because my mouth was so dry. I had a random NCO or two approach and offer me water, but it wasn’t any better than what was in my camelbak. I wanted to die.

I was there pull security but there were soldiers and Iraqi police everywhere now. There were Jundi’s and Joes dismounted on both sides of the convoy, and this was a very friendly area. We were not the kind of soft target the insurgents typically go for. The fact that I was not needed at all made the ordeal that much worse. It was a long, hot, miserable day, and a successful mission.

They loved us in Sufiya now. I understood now why tower four on COP never took fire; tower four faced towards our friends here. That is why we never saw anything but sheep herders and kids' soccer games from that position.

We did meetings with locals in various other locations over the course of the few weeks I was with them. One was at OP Mula’ab— the one with the maintenance pit I had fallen into back in December. This was my first time back, so I walked over and peeked at the hole in the daylight hours for the first time and was surprised by how steep it was. OSHA would vomit if they saw that.

The locals fed us kebabs with some mysterious meat in it. I ate it, against my better judgement. It was delicious and it triggered immediate and painful diarrhea. I asked about a latrine, and I was directed to a room in the back with a hole in the floor. It was a spacious room, concrete walls, and concrete floor with a little hole. There was nothing else in the room, completely empty. Just a hole in a floor.

I found myself at this same damned gas station, squat shitting mystery meat into a hole on the floor and wondering if I had pissed off a gypsy at some point; or this gas station was built on some sacred burial ground perhaps— some type of dark magic was afoot. I did not have any toilet paper, so I had to use one of my boot socks to wipe my ass and then put my bare foot back into my disgusting boot and do the walk of shame. I am Joes last shred of dignity.

Some days, I was on Camp Ramadi getting delicious, iced coffee from Coffee Bean with the Air Force hotties, and then some days I spent out here, like this— as they say, experiences may differ in the GWOT.

During Desert Shield, before we began bombing the shit out of Iraq and Iraqi positions in Kuwait and we changed to Desert Storm, I was back in base camp one day. We were there to refuel and resupply our food and water, pick up mail, etc. Walking through base camp, I always made sure to check the donated book bins and "Any Soldier" letter bins. Both were a great way to fight boredom. I was hoping to get a shower this time, as I hadn't had one in three weeks, but they were all occupied and also low on water. Fuck me to tears. (I would end up getting FIVE showers over almost six months until we got back to Saudi after the fighting.)

Anyway, I was walking back to our Vulcan, feeling dejected, dirty, and salty as hell, with a case of MREs in my arms when I walked by several of the NCOs from the Stinger platoon. Even though I was crewed up with the Vulcan guys and drove one, I was a Stinger gunner. So I nominally "belonged" a bit to Fourth Platoon, even if they weren't in my CoC - Chain of Command. So when the Platoon Daddy, SSG Padilla, hollered at me, I wasn't surprised.

"SPC Cobb! Get over here with your high speed ass!" I turned his direction and saw who it was, so I walked over, came to a stop, dropped the MREs and went to Parade Rest. "Relax. At ease, Cobb." "High Speed" can mean a soldier who is self-serving and just looking to game the system and get ahead. But in this context (as you will read) it can also mean a soldier who is really gung-ho and out to do a great job. Someone who is eager to experience it all.

Hearing him call me that meant something. Up until this point, I hadn't had a chance to get to know Padilla much. I was not even two months back from my tour in Korea, and he had transferred in to A 5/62 ADA while I was there. But this conversation cemented in my head that he was definitely in the Platoon Daddy category of guys, even if he was just a salesman pushing a re-up at this particular second. I could tell he genuinely gave a shit about ME as an individual and what I wanted, versus what the Army wanted.

"Listen, SGT Mac has been telling me good things about you. Your Vulcan is squared away, you have your shit together, he has said some good things about you."

News to me. Mac is out there in a forward firing position with us all day. Mac can't use the radio without one of us hearing. Mac only has a chance to talk to other NCOs when the entire squad has driven into the base camp, which has happened only a few times. And yet, SGT Mac found time to talk me up a bit. It felt good. I had been a shitbird while in Texas for so long before going to Korea and now Iraq, I was proud to be recognized a bit. I was doing a good job dammit.

"You thinking about re-enlisting?"

"Hoo-rah, Sarge. Dad has been in 20 years now, I want to be in at least that long. But I want promises, in writing. I got fucked over in AIT." I then quickly relayed the story of how I selected Germany, Korea, and Fort Carson, Colorado as my top three and got to stay in Texas after Basic and AIT. I also relayed the story of how I was supposed to be promoted to E2 upon entry and wasn't.

"OK. The Army gives incentives. What do you want?"

"I want to reclassify after this into Infantry, to start." He recoiled, as if I had slapped him.

"Why the hell would you want that?" He was incredulous.

"Because I want to go to Airborne school, then try RIP next. If I have what it takes, great. If not, I'd be cool being Airborne Infantry for the next 16 years." RIP was the Ranger Indoctrination Program. It was kind of a mini-Ranger boot camp. If you made it through that, you could probably hack the actual Ranger school. Today, they call it RASP. Ranger Assessment and Selection Program. Same concept. I badly wanted to be "Tabbed and Scrolled." That is, I wanted the uniform tab to show I was a Ranger school graduate, and I wanted to actually serve in one of the Ranger units and have their scroll looking unit patch on my uniform. That meant I would be an active Ranger vs. being Ranger qualified.

Those guys were always in the shit. They were supporting SOF and other operations around the world. Even when they weren't doing something like that, they were usually doing some cool training. At least, I though it was cool. I wanted to be one of them. I mean, Rangers carry fucking Tomahawks. Maybe, just maybe, one day I might have what it took to try out for Special Forces or something. I got all this across to SSG Padilla.

The thing is, this was before well before we started bombing, and even more before I crossed into Iraq and saw the horrors of war up front. If I'm being honest: Yes, I could have made it through Infantry school. Yes, I probably could have made it through Airborne. Anything else was up in the air. I was physically in shape and I had endured a lot to this point. I was sure I could hack it. I was "Young, Dumb and full of Cum" as they used to say. Too stupid to know better. Seeing thousands of dead and almost dying myself sure changed my mind out going Infantry, but that was months down the road.

"OK, Cobb. You agree to re-up after we get home, and I'll make the re-class and Airborne happen. RIP is of course up to you to make, but I can get you the other two. If that's what you want." For being a fan of not having to walk everywhere, I was being kind of stupid. The allure of wearing that beret, tab and scroll was too much to resist though. I wanted to be a fucking hero.

It's funny. A stupid accident four months later in port ended my career. After that, the Army didn't need me, but I wouldn't know that for certain for almost a year when it became evident my foot wouldn't heal. I'd never run again, and if you have read my other works you know that I was given an Honorable Discharge under medical conditions. I never got to become an Infantryman like some of my ancestors. I never got to go to Airborne school. I certainly never got the Tab, the Scroll, or the Beret.

But being recognized for my hard work by another NCO not in my chain of command was something else though. That ten minute conversation with him meant more to me than some of the awards I've earned. Sure, he was making a re-enlistment pitch, which was part of his job, but he was also being genuine with me - he thought I was "squared away" and a good soldier. He saw in me the soldier I knew I could be. That conversation was a real morale booster for me as I fought my fear in Iraq and did my job in spite of it. He was one of the reasons I kept my cool, remembered my training, and came home alive.

Thanks, Sarge. Real mother fuckers like you are why Platoon Daddies are a thing. Fuck a Platoon Sergeant. I'll take a cat like you any day to lead me into battle.

#OneLove 22ADay Slava Ukraini! Heróyam sláva!

The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion ... and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself - ultimate cost for perfect value.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

Operation Murfreesboro

The sounds of fighting drew closer to Eagles Nest as the Task Force turned its attention back towards Mula’ab in February. The line companies began passing by us on foot patrols and venturing out into the wilds beyond the jersey barriers.

I was feeling comfortable out on that street by now. We would go hours, days, rotations with nothing happening, and the sounds of violence became harmless background noise.

Being the gunner comes with a sense of vulnerability, but also a reassuring feeling of control, as you have the best visibility and are the first one who can react to enemy contact. It is also a responsibility, if something goes wrong, you will carry it with you.

To break the monotony, we would change positions periodically, swapping between driver, gunner, and dismount. The dismount would exit the truck and handle anything that needed doing on foot or be the squad leaders battle buddy if he needed to step away from the vehicle.

The Task Force received two Marine rifle companies to help build on our success. Echo and Fox companies from 2/4 Marines flew in from the Marine Expeditionary Force to reinforce us when the surge started.

Fox 2/4 helped attack the second shark fin, known as Julayba. The battalion massed combat power there to clear it out in January. AQI had been using the shark fins as bases of operations and rat lines to run supplies and reinforcements into the city.

Now that the TF had cleared both Shark Fins, the AQI fighters left in the city were cut off and surrounded. The TF was ready to clear Mula’ab. Operation Murfreesboro would kick off a series of operations meant to secure the city. After Mula’ab was clear,1-6 Marines would begin clearing the area near the government center and then finally, 2nd Battalion 5th Marines was set to reinforce the Armor battalion in Iskaan and provide the infantry needed to clear that last area.

On February 23rd, Operation Murfreesboro was set to begin in earnest; named for a battle the regiment had fought during the civil war, Murfreesboro was the TF’s third or fourth major operation since November and the largest. Taking back Mula’ab was always our primary objective.

Engineers placed high barriers to cut off vehicle traffic in and out, preventing AQI from moving weapons and supplies. Once the Engineers finished emplacing the barriers, Able and Dog Company along with Bravo 1-26 IN and their Bradleys would clear Mula’ab house by house— along with their Jundis and some tank support.

I did not know any of this at the time. I only paid attention to the task at hand, and the task at hand was to hold a road. I took it one mission at a time.

February 22nd was a quiet day at Eagles Nest. My shifts on guard and patrol had started in the morning and had gone without incident. You would never know that Manchu 6 was about to bring the hammer down the very next day. By nightfall, I was back in the CP, fine dining with Otis Spunkmeyer.

Buford came walking in, stopped at the shelving unit, and looked up at box of muffins out of his reach. “Why do they always do this to me?” He was smiles and good humor, as always.

One of the Dog company guys grabbed him a muffin and he sat down to eat. Nobody talked; everyone ran on fumes at Eagles Nest. As we were eating, Sergeant Cazinha entered and instructed me not to leave the CP because Bravo section was coming to relieve us momentarily.

After I finished eating, I headed towards my bunk to get my gear ready to leave. If you could hear the explosion from our position, I did not notice it.

A short distance away, Manchu 6’s convoy was returning from Camp Ramadi on a route that ran south of Mula’ab and hit a large IED that killed the Scout platoon sergeant and wounded several others.

SSG Joshua Hager was 29 years old when he died. SSG Hager was a prominent face in the company, as a platoon sergeant he was highly visible and well known. I did not know him very well, but he always had a great attitude and always happy to be there. The enduring memory of him that has stuck with me over the years was the time he was my grader during our last PT test before the deployment. He was not just grading me; he was coaching me, giving me tips and encouragement in between calling out reps.

He was at the one-mile mark on the run part of the test and when I called out to him for my time, he shouted “way too fucking long, hurry up.” I hauled ass.

It was the best PT score I had on Fort Carson. I was not even one of his soldiers, but he was still leading me to be better for the few moments I was his problem. He was a good NCO; you did not have to know him that well to figure that out.

SFC Heekin called out for the QRF as he walked out the CP. I turned around instinctively, but then I remembered what Sergeant Cazinha said about staying put and I did follow them.

Buford followed SFC Heekin out the door, and their medic followed. At this point, we did not know even what had happened. Buford was driving an Amtrak, SFC Heekin was in the commanders' seat and their platoon medic, Doc Walter was in the back. Manchu 6 was trying to call them off for fear of secondary IED’s, but they could not get comms with the QRF element. The Amtrak hit a secondary IED, which exploded under the rear of the vehicle, killing Doc Walters instantly. Buford and SFC Heekin were grievously wounded.

PFC Rowan Walter was 25 years old. I had recently met him for the first time. You always want to know who the medic is, and he came to introduce himself to us on our first rotation at Eagles Nest with their platoon.

I learned later that he had climbed on top of a burning tank, under fire, to help save the wounded tank crew trapped inside on Christmas Eve— he was bad ass medic.

The rest of that night was chaos and rumor, Bravo section never made it out to relieve us. With the catastrophe unfolding nearby, everything else in sector came to a standstill.

I heard that Buford and SFC Heekin had made it to the aid station. I sighed a breath of relief and tried to put it out of my mind. Nobody slept, nobody talked, it was a never-ending night. Amos and I smoked about a pack of cigarettes together.

The next morning, when Bravo section came to relieve us at Eagles Nest, I heard Sergeant Roe mention to SSG Carter that an NCO and two soldiers had died last night. I corrected him that only the medic died.

“No, the other guy died from shock later.” Sergeant Roe said.

Sergeant Roe and I did not know each other very well at this point and I assume he was unaware that Buford and I were friends. That bluntness was a tough way to receive the news, although obviously unintentional.

I had taken it for granted that if he made it to higher medical care that he would be okay, I was naïve or in denial.

After a fleeting moment of anger, I did not feel anything. Calm is not the word. I did not cry; I did not show any emotion. A bit of denial, the information kept changing, it could change again I reasoned— maybe he was wrong. It was a different Joe.

I saw Buford a few times in Iraq. We were with a different platoon from Dog Company each rotation to Eagles Nest, our paths did not cross often, and always very briefly. He was not a regular fixture in my day. I did not witness his death or see his body. No last words were shared between us— he was just gone.

He was just shy of his 24th birthday. Both the first and last time I saw Travis Buford he was helping someone. The first time was me at the Welcome center on Fort Carson and the last time was the Battalion Commander in combat.

He would give you the shirt off his back, that is just the kind of guy he was. He was a great man, soldier, and friend.

Later that evening, Ortega came by the COP to check on me. Him and Cazinha found me in the smoking area staring off into the void, they were studying my face when I noticed them.

I felt like a monkey at the zoo with them staring at me. Fonseca popped into my head and I knew that they knew exactly what it felt like. Were they expecting me to react how they reacted? I don’t even know how they reacted. I was worried I was under reacting— I told them I was fine while botching eye contact.

For as much of a sensitive bitch I can be at times, I was able to compartmentalize this much better than even I would have expected me to before it happened.

While we were standing there in silence, a gunship flew over the COP and started firing into Mula’ab. I was suddenly aware that the nights sky was lit up with tracers and flashes from explosions. Multiple skirmishes were happening in the city. I seized this opportunity to change the subject.

“What the fuck is going on out there?” I asked.

“Operation Murfreesboro.” Sergeant Ortega said.

“Okay.” I said it with a tone to convey my ignorance.

“The battalion is clearing Mula’ab.” Sergeant Ortega explained.

“Nice. I hope they kill those fucks that keep attacking us.”

The operation was irrelevant to me because we would be spending our next four days on Combat Outpost doing guard duty and fire missions, if needed.

As I was walking to guard tower one the next morning, I passed by the Amtrak. Luckily, all I saw was cosmetic damage to the vehicle. I took an alternate path on my way back.

Operation Murfreesboro was rough. You did not have to be out there to know that. The frequency of medevac flights told us the story. Those of us on the COP and Corregidor hunkered down, watched our sectors, and listened to the boys lay waste to AQI with a sense of satisfaction and envy.

I joined the Army in 1975. It was actually something I had wanted to do for years, but only got around to it when I was 24 years old. Basic Combat Training was at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I was pumped. I knew I was going to love it, and I did. But a few of the guys seemed a bit overstressed about it, especially one guy whose bunk was directly opposite mine.

There we were, in our brand-new uniforms standing in our barracks room for the very first time, having just arrived and been assigned like lost ducks to our individual bunks. All of a sudden, our Drill Sergeant (DS) bellows out "At Ease!" Of course we hadn't a clue what to do with this command (it's basically "Shut up, assume the position of parade rest,") so we just continued to stand there awkwardly. In comes the Senior Drill Sergeant (SDS) of the training company. Our DS takes him down the platoon bay, and the Senior Drill looks at us newbies, and does a meet-and-greet, like "How're you doing, trainee? Where you from? What MOS will you be training for?" and things like this. Everyone responds more-or-less appropriately until he reaches the guy across from me. He asks "Where you from, boy?" No response. The kid looks like he's scared to death.

After a few moments of silence, the SDS tries out "What state are you from?" Nothing. After a few seconds more, he widens out the search with "What country are you from?" Nothing again. "What planet are you from?" He finally asks. At this point, the question about his state seemed to have finally reached his brain, so he responds "Ohio!"

The SDS nods in satisfaction, "The Planet Ohio!" He then proceeds to walk out the front door of the barracks and we hear him loudly saying to our DS "This is quite an occasion, Drill Sergeant! I've finally met a man from the Planet Ohio!"

Our DS comes back in and starts reaming the man from Ohio: "You haven't even been here ten minutes and you've already pissed off the Senior Drill Sergeant! Get down and give me twenty!"

I don't think anyone laughed at the time -- and certainly not the poor trainee -- but darn it, that was funny.

A long, long time ago

Well three years at least

I was in Basic Training on the Air Forces version of fire watch called EC(entry control). It wasn’t very difficult, you just stood there and verified identities of MTIs and did a barracks walkthrough every 15ish minutes

One of the few times you had to be really on top of things was during any of the drills, but even then we had this big binder that had step by step directions on what to do. It was during one of these times that our story takes place

It was some random afternoon, I think around 1930 or about 30 minutes left of my shift, when our MTI decided to make us do a fire drill

Well, I went room to room making sure everybody got the message and “checking for survivors”, before meeting back up with the other EC, a pretty quiet kid. He had grabbed the binder, and I assumed(quite naively) that he had also grabbed the other essential thing: the roster

After a couple minute walk outside and the forming up of the flight, I asked him for the roster so I could take roll

“Hey, where’s the roster?”

His eyes got a bit wide and he turned to look at me

“I didn’t bring the roster”

Shiiiiiiitttttt

“Okay. Give me the binder”

Thankfully this portion of our conversation was largely unheard, as people were still forming up and our MTI was still walking over

Now, another unfortunate point, people were gone on KP duty, helping out in the kitchen, so we couldn’t quite just call roll and hope no one messes up their number, because we would have to account for them as the EC people and let the flight know to skip their number; However, we didn’t really have another option

He gave me the binder, and I was holding it up and doing my damndest to pretend like the roster was just on top of the binder. We started doing our roll call, and even without the roster present, it sounded remarkably like our normal roll call.

Which is to say, not great. I love those guys but you’d think we got the Air Forces first ASVAB waivers with the way they would count

After about a minute and half the flight down, our MTI just decided to stop and let us go back upstairs. It was probably just dumb luck, as we were most of the way through basic and she expected us to be able to do roll call without further practice

We got back upstairs and soon after my shift ended. She never called us on not having the roster and nobody besides my EC partner knew

Unfortunately pretty soon after we got called for another fire drill because she was unhappy with how thoroughly I searched for survivors and had two of the other trainees hide, but at least this time the other shift grabbed the roster

Hey hi Howdy - Long time since a long post. I hope you enjoy, this one is a bit different.

For those who don't know, I'm the Bone Marrow Guy. I'm an E-4 Signaleer from Fort Bliss who, as a hobby, started hosting bone marrow registry drives around Fort Bliss. The first in ten years. I registered so many people, I started this account and started posting, helping others do the same at their base. Eventually I changed my goal, from do my part and have no goal, to make this something that doesn't just stop with me. All those people who reached out to host drives I gathered together and we set out to make a more lasting program at our bases. Quirky lil hobby, very demure.

Welp since January, it's now my full time job. 1AD, CSM Light, and MG Isenhower somehow let an E-4 who isn't even medical, isn't even good at being a soldier, have a job that doesn't exist and will never exist again. My job has no reporting structure, no set deadlines. My job has one set goal: grassroot an Army-wide Bone Marrow Program across every installation and unit. And do it with nothing more than what you and your volunteer team can get and negotiate on its own, freedom to travel, and a TDY budget to use when necessary.

On the surface, It sounds like a fucking gameshow when I think about it. Doomed from the start. Like they just decided it was worth the entertainment to see how far I get for the meme.

We have all the knowledge, I had gotten registry drives down to a science. But it's not what you know, it's who you know. And I honestly didnt know a goddamn person when I started. All I had was a reddit account, a couple soldiers in a groupchat, and a near suicidal obsession with getting this goal done.

Networking is a word that for the last year and a half has been burned into the center of my brain. It's not who you know, it's who you know...and who they know...and who they know...and who they know. I've literally had to make red string walls with names and units to try and map out the series of people I have to meet in order to get to the chair of the offices I had to sit in. It takes a long time.

That's where AUSA comes in. The Army National Conference. The single most target rich environment for foreign adversaries humanly possible that happens exactly once a year. Every single command team in the Army all gathered in one place, in one building, for three days. They say that AUSA, you can do more networking in 3 days than you ever could in two years.

It's genuinely terrifying to be there for the same reason twice. You are surrounded by hundreds of Generals and CSMs, and you are surrounded by hundreds of Generals and CSMs. You're both watching yourself under a microscope because one slip and you literally get a panicked call from your first line leadership in 5 minutes, and watching imagined scenarios in your head because one lunatic and your family is getting a panicked call from your first line leadership.

Last year we managed to get a team of 5 fully paid for to attend through a loophole in a new program they had started up. We skipped almost every event they had scheduled for us and networked. It was our big BIIGG break. We hunted down every single CSM and GO we could find and pitched to them. A swarm of E-4s in goofy polos running around talking about bones. AUSA 2023 and the connections and impact we made there literally laid out every bit of work and progress we made this year. We knew people. We had notoriety. We had strings. That scared some people.

This year I looked at that programs rules and quite literally everything we had done to get there last year was specifically mentioned as not allowed. I pulled some strings and they agreed to bring me again this year, immediately and specifically saying only me. So I brought my teammate from Novosel. Just two people against the single largest event.

I spent every minute of this year ensuring we were about as well known by the leaders of the Army as possible. I was loud, chaotic, annoying, ever present, attending conferences I was invited to, sneaking into those that I wasn't. I would ask three different people to talk to one single unit commander about the program and hope they did it on the same day. I get the list of every VIP who visits Fort Bliss, and I specifically set out to hunt every one of them down and talk to them. A big smiling, respectful, passionate E-4 who consistently be exactly where you would coincidentally run into him.

I have a lot of Articles yes, I have this reddit account yes, but my real social media presence is within other people's outlook and over the tables of private meetings, trying to ensure Operation Ring The Bell is a topic of gossip frequently discussed between leaders in conversations I only ever find out about weeks afterwards on the rare chance I ever do. 1AD has accepted that I will get them in trouble a couple times and encourage taking risks.

Our team did the same on the smaller scale. They have a lot more risk than I do, and can't make huge huge power moves. But we had people all over the country just making little reminders reach desks, hosting drives, getting PAO coverage.

It was a lot of gambling I'm going to be honest. Again, I basically have no fucking clue what I am doing. I took the risk that those conversations even happened and if they would actually hurt us more than help us. My only hints were random phone calls from higher and higher command's staff asking for some information and immediately hanging up, emails from Aides asking for my contact information and what unit I am in. Hearing "there's some interesting email traffic about you I was cc'ed in" from leaders every now and then. I had developed almost a 6th sense for what I call reading tea leaves and piecing together these little clues to try and figure out what the climate was in the higher Army, and what I should do next. Sometimes it's make powermoves and cause more chaos, sometimes it's literally to just disappear for a bit. All I could really do was just guess, and hope I'm not making it up in my head.

Well AUSA 2024 was where we finally got to see what the hell was going on up there. Did it all pay off, what is the climate and opinion we fostered. Did we even manage to make a blip??

The answer came pretty easily. The answer is yes. Good fucking God yes. I was stunned for three days, almost every single CONUS leader knew about us. Certainly every single Public Affairs person. The Chief of Staff recognized me, the SMA was just waiting for me to hunt him down again. The Surgeon General (who is amazing and my favourite person ever btw) ran up to me excited to see me again. Nobody I hadn't personally knew me by face but they knew me by shirt and by name. It was fucking terrifying. We talked to absolutely everyone.

Last year the tone was all introductions, them being impressed or amazing by what we had done. We were a novelty, we were cute, the only E-4s in the entire conference, with an interesting story to go with it. Bring dragged by a 1-Star to a 2-Star to retell the story like we were a good news story on human Linkdin. Say the thing Bart - "We E-4s are gonna change the whole army"

Encouragement lip service from leaders thinking "wow that's a great thing y'all are trying, but it probably won't go anywhere." I knew it. I didn't care. I played the shiny new car, powered through, and followed up on the genuinely interested and supportive leaders we spoke to, and you can look over the year's successes to see who some of them were.

The tone was different this year. We still had that novelty for those who just learned about us, or were told about us by others we had talked to this week. But for the majority of those who already had heard about us it was different. It was serious. We were a serious thing. There is politics surrounding us now. People who were in those backroom convos were being careful. I struggled to navigate this climate at times.

Some PAOs carefully watching their every word, staffers seeming on edge when we talk to them. COMPO leaders who had those calls or emails sent - quickly stopping me, asking one or two clarifying questions then walking away without another word. Or some we hadn't met yet curtly and respectfully acknowledging us, stopping us before we could give em the pitch and saying "we are working it, you'll be reached out to." This wasn't constant but enough to put the hair up on your neck that you are wading waters you don't understand, and you're being watched.

But most importantly, those under the big brass. Smiles, greetings, and pleasantries then looking over their shoulders and it quickly changing to serious quiet discussions about what our direct actual goals are, what we have to do next, and what they are going to do to help. Discussions about the ramifications of what I am doing. Interrogations about our methods, our support systems, and our next steps transitioning to hard conversations and advice for how to get there, who is in the way, and offers to remove roadblocks where they can. Then demands of what they need from me.

Instead of a Senior Leader only wanting to hear this cool story for their entertainment, it was real professional negotiations between two people about how to get there. Mentors wanting to help. People willing to take risks for us.

We left AUSA 2024 with more than I ever could have asked for. We left with new friends, passionate leaders wanting to follow up and hear more, new partners and teammates I never thought possible, real advice on how to navigate things, one or two burned bridges. a vastly wider and network of connections and support for our mission. But ultimately, we left with a new understanding of the road ahead.

Last year the goal was to make leaders aware, and make connections. This year is cementing the road to the finish line.

We might just reach it.

I've talked a bit about my time in Afghanistan, but this story kind of slipped through the figurative cracks. So, let's dive in!

During my first deployment to Afghanistan, I was fixing one of our Reaper aircraft, and my shift lead came up and told me "Hey, we have some people coming by to get briefed about our birds. You'll be giving the briefing. They need to know what to recover and what to destroy if one goes down." I thought it was a bit strange, but whatever, I'm pretty alright at public speaking, and I knew quite a bit about the aircraft, so a quick briefing would be easy.

A few hours later, some very scary looking guys show up on our flightline, stating that they're here for a briefing on the Reaper. I took a deep breath, and told myself that it was showtime. As it turns out, these guys were Pararescue men (aka PJs, which are some of the most elite troops in the US military). I brief them on every part that they would need to recover from a downed Reaper, and then went on to describe every safety hazard associated with a downed Reaper, all while answering every question they could throw at me. All in all, the briefing went well. Then, the biggest and meanest looking member of the team of PJs approached me and said "Hey, that was a great brief. We learned a lot. Thanks man." He held his hand out for a handshake, and when I gripped his hand, I felt something hard press into my palm. I looked down, and saw a PJ poker chip in my hand. I thanked him, and without further comment, he and his men left.

Fast-forward a few weeks, and my shift lead (who is a 6'2" Hawaiian, just for reference) tells us that his older brother is on base, and since there was a lull in work, we all went out to meet him, because said shift lead was a superb leader, and we wanted to meet his older brother.

We met him on a summer afternoon, and the best way I can describe him is to tell you to imagine the character Maui, only he's lean, has a high and tight haircut, and is outfitted with the best gear the USAF can provide. Big brother looked mean as hell, but as soon as we started talking with him, he ended up being super nice, even to the point of offering us energy bars. One thing I distinctly remember was how during our introductory handshake, it felt like he could crush my hand. That said, it was a cool interaction, and caused me to have even more respect for the PJs.

Fast-forward more than a decade later, my wife decides to buy a display case for the military coins I've collected over the years. That poker chip is front and center in my coin case. And since we're talking about preserving cool military stuff, my wife's dad gave me his dad's burial flag (AF vet) because he figured I would take good care of it. We had a case made for it, and I proceeded to hang it above my coin case. He was a good man, served honorably, and I loved trading stories with him.

I'm not really sure how to end this story. I guess I'll end it by saying that sometimes the scariest looking military guys are the nicest ones you could ever hope to meet.

I was 20, in the Marines and in Yuma for a few weeks. My buddy and I took a cab to a Chinese restaurant. While we were eating we noticed two of the waitresses doing a lot of talking to each other while looking at our table. They were both blonde with sexy slim figures. After we were done the busboy says as he is taking our plates that the waitresses think we are cute, we of course are flattered but didn’t really think much of it. As we are walking out one of the waitresses gives my buddy a napkin. Well now this is an interesting turn of events. We walk around the corner out of sight and he reads it. Now he is 6’4” to my 5’ 10”, so I can’t read over his shoulder. He does a quick happy dance and gives it to me. It says “we think your both cute, if your interested and want to get a drink we get off work at 10, meet us at (bar)”. Funny after 30 years I remember exactly what it said. I do a quick little happy dance. Now we have to figure out where this bar is, it was well before there were even flip phones, so no googling the address. We figure it out and start walking, we had about 3 hours to kill anyway. We walk the 8 or 9 blocks, discussing possible options on how this can go. Are they serial killers? Are we walking into a bar full of guys that have fucked them? We finally get there and order a couple of beers. Mind you I am 20, so I should not be getting served beer, but no one seemed to care. We start looking around, there are about 5 other people there, a couple of guys shooting pool. We wonder how many of there guys have banged these girls. We are half way thru our beers when the chicks walk in, and we are both wondering if that’s them now that they are not in work uniform and there is more lighting. They come over and sit with us at the bar, yep it’s them. We start chats and discover they are about our same ages, and one liked me and the other my buddy. They could have been sisters so we were happy with whatever they wanted, we were great full for the attention😁.

The gal (we will call her J) that liked me wanted to go to another bar, her friend (call her M) wanted to go to their place. J won and they were shocked when we told them we didn’t have a car, we walked to the bar. So we all pile into their little truck, with M driving, my buddy in the middle and J sitting on my lap, I was cool with the seating😉.

J tells M to put on her tape (pre CD era) and play black velvet by Alannah Myles. M protests saying she hates how J acts when it’s on, but she puts it on.

As soon as it starts J grabs me and starts attacking my face with her mouth! Kissing me hard and deep. I’m freaking out in a good way on the inside and open an eye to make sure my buddy is seeing this, and I notice she is rubbing his groin! Holy shit I think, this is fucking crazy awesome. It’s a tragically short drive to the other bar. J says she just want to score something real quick then we can head to their place. I grab my buddies ID since I am not 21, and there is a bouncer at the door. He gives it a half a glance and she and I are in. The first thing I see is a big ole dildo on a plaque front and center behind the bar. Liking this place already!😀

We are at the bar and she says her regular dealer isn’t there. I’m looking around at a dive bar full of Marines and bikers. I’ve got a beer and am standing there with my back to the door, when she suddenly gets very stiff and her whole demeanor changes as she looks over my shoulder at the door. I’m think what the fuck, who just walked in… she answered my unspoken question with “my ex just walked in”…. Well fuck!! I glance over my shoulder and see 4 Marines walking in. Well fuck again!! Now I am thinking tactics. How am I going to fight 4 guys. As I am running scenarios through my head they sit down in a booth. She feels the need to go talk to him. My visions of a 4 some have evaporated. They start to argue🤦🏼‍♂️ I was done, I walk we over to the and told her I am leaving, as I walk towards the door I was fully expecting a beer bottle to hit me in the head. None did.

As I approach the truck I knock on the sides to let M and my buddy know I am walking up, I see them separate and she pulls on her shirt. He asks where J is and say her boyfriend showed up, M says shit. About that time J shows up saying sorry we should go. Before we can get into the truck, boyfriend (not sure if he was ex or not at this point) skids to a stop in his truck and they all pile out…well fucking fuckidy fuck! Boyfriend starts professing his deep love for her and how he wants what’s best for her, and she is not stopping him. M is looking pissed and worried. I look at my buddy and we both agree to just leave. I look at him and tell him he can have her, it’s not worth this much drama, and good luck and we walk over to a cab and head back to base.

But I still love that song black velvet, she was a great kisser, even if she was crazy as fuck.

Standard Army story preface. No Sh.. No lie I was there .......

Tho come to think of it “Malicious Compliance” will always be engaged on a day off.

It was the late 1970's in the F.R.G. Federal Republic of Germany. A TDY assignment to a security post. Not saying where or for what. Hence the four days on three days off. For four days you worked 8 hours on and 8 hours off some did it the other way 3 on 4 off. Our OIC was an ass so what you gonna do. Well anyway to continue. We were also in the middle of an I.G. inspection. You count everything twice clean it three times and paint stuff, a lot and hide stuff you couldn't account for or were not supposed to have.

Then when all else fails you have to go through your paper work with a fine toothed comb to dot every I and cross every T.

Well we hit the jack pot, mid I.G. the fairy godmother department went on leave and the green Grinch called an Alert.

Well that was a rousing cluster F ....but we survived. I did the alert with no sleep and then my fore days on and off and was in the first of my days off after binge drinking the night away at a local guesthouse trinkhall. It was a Birthday party, promotion party, don't really remember what it was for.

Any way it was at 0530 in the morning after an hour earlier having given up and having put my finger down my throat to empty my stomach so the room would stop spinning (even with a foot on the floor). I was shaken awake by the First SGT. The Capt needed some paper work from the supply office the SSGT of supply who had more experience with I.G. inspections and our ass of a CO had ex-filtrated the AO and was gone. I was a clerk typist who flouted floated between the orderly room and supply to do just that, type.

Normally a good job, I kept everyone in Black US GOV pens and refills, 200 series locks and toilet paper you name it, need a TL knife, surplus wall lockers PDO them, go back the the PDO yard buy them as sheet metal PDO wall lockers again and order new ones all inventory's right and correct ...

So I had the key to the supply room front door but did not have the back office nor the file cabinet keys - remember that.

Anyway back to the story, after waking me up the First SGT ran off to kiss ass with the CO and the I.G. My Platoon SGT came in and did his best to keep me from killing someone with a rusty spoon and once again reiterated the order to obtain that missing paper work. I was hurting bad and needed the hair of the dog but all I had was spice rum (Yuck!) and the vending machine was out of beer and the only soda left was grape.

Don't know to this day where the HE double hockey sticks I got that rum from.

Still makes me shutter, I put on my PT stuff and with a can of 50% Spiced Rum (Yuck!) and 50% grape soda I tracked my Platoon Sgt down and the CO and once again attempted to tell them I had the front door key but did not, never had the back office key nor the file cabinet keys.

At which point the CO screamed "I don't care I want those files asap!"

My Platoon Sgt later found me in the supply office. The outer door open, the inter-door knocked off it's hinges and two file cabinets on their side pried open. He stopped me as I was hammering on the third.

It took a bit for him to talk me down and he noticed the can of grape soda I was drinking. He quickly discerned the content (took a whiff and gagged ) and got somebody I can't recall who to escort me back to my buck. I slept for the rest of my days off.

The after action report was as follows. Art 15 was discussed, submitting GLP lost and or damage Gov property was discussed. Supply SGT was reamed a new one.

Out come I got a three day pass, the company ate the damage. More keys were made and locked in the Arms room where they should have been in the first place.

Oh and the Reports, they were already on the CO's desk right in his in-box put there by the Supply SGT. With a note stating the XO had the extra keys for office and cabinets if needed. The OX was the OIC for the security detail so he wasn't on site.

Reaming revoked.

I could share more and I do believe that the statue of limitations have run out on most if not all of the things that happened … but those are for another time.

This was while I was undergoing basic officer qualifications up here in Canada a few years ago.

After a miserable snowy, rainy, swampy winter week with all the trench foot that follows in what's known jokingly as our "Nham" (as in the Farnham training grounds for Canadian non-com recruits and officer candidates), my platoon arrives back at garrison. We spot some relatively fresh recruits, put on our unfocused shell shocked gazes, and implore them to make better life choices while getting close enough to shake them so they can smell us. One fireteam of three carried a limp member between them, muttering prayers. We drag ourselves up 9 flights of stairs to blessedly shower and, even more blessedly, sleep.

My body, however, decides otherwise.

I wake up in the middle of the night with a radiating abdominal throb. I half expected this as I had trouble crapping in the field, what with the austere conditions and MRE/IMPs constipating the hell out us. I try to get something out, but I could barely push. Defeated, I return to my room and thankfully fall asleep.

My platoon wakes up for breakfast, and I feel better. We eat, shower for the umpteenth time, and relax knowing we essentially made it to graduation. The day passes nicely, as even our staff is more jovial and the jackings and overall cock have diminished greatly. Come supper, I can barely get up from a chair without using my arms. My FTP is concerned, but the MIR is closed. Somehow, I sleep through the night.

I wake up on Sunday morning with the sharpest abdominal pain ever, and it's tender to the touch. Something is wrong. I go and visit the nursing cadets and they all agree to one probable issue: appendicitis.

From their perspective, as the pain has advanced extremely quickly, the appendix might be in danger of bursting. There's no real point in going to the MIR since sick parade hours on the weekend are borked, so the nurses and my section mates haul me to the green/duty desk. I can barely walk without breathing like Matt Damon in The Martian when he performs surgery on himself.

The nursing sisters are amazing in arguing my case over the crotchety Commissionaires' can-barely-give-two-shits-about-anything attitudes, and I'm tossed in a van and driven to the nearby civvie hospital. I have a MCpl watching me at all times and after 3 hours of sitting in a wheelchair waiting to be seen, 2 in a bed waiting for an ultrasound, then 2 more for a CT scan (all to confirm I have acute appendicitis), I'm wheeled into the OR right at midnight and my appendix is pulled out. The anesthesia was a trip upon waking up.

The civvie nurse was a bit of an ass, as he downplayed the possibility of appendicitis as "jumping to conclusions." I get that it's not 100% confirmed yet but don't be like that, man. I'm glad he ate his stupid words though.

I spend Monday morning in the hospital, trying to #1 and #2 to prove my systems work so I can get discharged. First few tries are failures due to the anesthesia side-effects and the dreaded catheter goes in so my bladder won't explode too. It all finally evacuates and I'm free by mid-afternoon. A carousel of MCpls had come and gone by now, and one air force MCpl was welcome company due him just being a decent human being and very chatty. I load up in a van and get driven back to garrison.

I hit up the MIR and get a chit for a wheelchair, elevator use, antibiotics, and stool softeners for a week. I was allowed civvie clothes for the two and a half days before graduation.

Grad day comes and I must still abide by most of the medical chit. I'm dressed in my No. 1s but without a belt. I'm still confined to a wheelchair and walking (much less marching) long distances was forbidden, so I'm barred from parade. I would have been flag party commander too, goddammit, but I sit through my bloody graduation on the sidelines. I win an award for platoon MVP which my MS section commander goes to get it in my stead, and the photo is great because it has my name inset and we are not physically or ethnically similar in any way.

To be honest, it was the best week out of the 14 despite me being down and out. I get wheeled around by my bomb-ass FTP bro (which means he got to take it extra easy too), there were so many jokes at my expense, and I liked seeing my staff relax and have fun with my situation too. My platoon warrant, an air force tech with an astounding surfer's attitude (bear marching and crotch scratching and all), gave me my first legitimate salute. We then exchanged our first professional formalities with a firm handshake:

"I wish you the smoothest of shits in your future, sir."

"Thank you, warrant, and I'll think of you when I do."

I observed several recent post regarding the mobile BKs in r/military and posted this there. Thought I really should have posted it here.

Taszar, Hungary, circa 1997.

I am currently a Major, working as the Communications Officer for Task Force Pershing in Slovonki Brod, Croatia. Since we are under arms, weapons and live ammo, we are allowed no alcohol. There is only one place in theater to legally get a drink and that is in the beer tent at the LSA (Life Support Area, Taszar, Hungary, a tent city for troops transitioning into and out of theater).

About four months into the mission, the gods relented and several of us take a long drive to Taszar, turn our weapons in and proceed to the LSA. Beer is the mission and that was accomplished, but this is about Burger King.

There is a fest tent (huge tent) set up for recreation and in the back is one of the famous mobile Burger Kings. I head over for a Whopper and fries. I note when ordering that it is being run by locally hired Hungarians. My Whopper arrives (with fries) and I am delighted to note that the burger looks more like the advertised picture than any Whopper I ordered in the states. It seems our Hungarian friends took their training seriously and took some pride in it's presentation.

Your probably aware that BK will cook a batch of fries and and after a certain time has passed, whatever has not been served has to be tossed out. Apparently this did not sit well with our Hungarian friends who languished behind the Iron Curtain for decades. I had ordered a small fry to accompany my Whopper, and was suspicious as to why my bag weighed so much when I picked up my order.

I got back to a table to eat, opened the bag and found about 3-5 pounds of fries. I tore the bag open for a group feed and went back to the trailer and politely asked for more ketchup.

BTW, the dark beer in the fest tent was awesome, until the next day when you realized it's alcohol content.

A convoy security operation is a specialized kind of area security operation conducted to protect convoys. Units conduct convoy security operations anytime there are insufficient friendly forces to continuously secure routes and other LOCs in an AO, and there is a significant danger of enemy or adversary ground action directed against the convoy. - ATP 3-39.30

EOD Escort

As the battalion cleared Mula’ab, our mission changed again. Our new job would be to convoy with EOD out to the location of explosives and protect them from enemy attack while they worked.

Convoys in Iraq had to be three vehicles minimum, and the EOD unit was a three-man team. They needed an Infantry escort, and we were surplus infantrymen—it was kismet.

The task forces EOD team were Marines, and they were my first. I was not sure what to expect. I had the impression that the Marines took themselves too seriously; but we warmed up to these fellas quickly.

The EOD guys liked us when they figured out that we were the red headed stepchildren of the battalion. Being in a small three-man team that acted independently from their own command, they could relate to us as being outsiders.

I once heard them refer to us as the “Man Goo” battalion, and I knew they were alright. If they had kept it professional, I would have thought they did not like us.

Instead of sending a section to Eagles Nest; half would now be on standby to go on missions with EOD. In the beginning, we were working double overtime. We would receive a call to go deal with an IED or grab a cache and find more on the way there.

The EOD guys had an MRAP. The “Mine Resistant Ambush Protected” or MRAP was an absolute beast of a vehicle with what I dreamed to be a comfortable and roomy back compartment.

It was the GWOT version of a mini van, extra room to shuttle the kids around town. The back was square and looked roomy enough to stretch out in.

This MRAP was the only one I ever saw— they were common to later GWOT veterans— but it was a novelty at the time. It would not have lived up to the hype in my head, it never does. But when we were traveling with them, I gazed upon it with envy.

Once called upon for an EOD mission, we would head to Corregidor to link up with the EOD guys and the NCOs would get a briefing. They would then formulate and communicate to us their plan. The planned route to the objective, rally points, radio checks, etc. A lot of built in redundancy to make sure everything does not go horribly wrong, which it often does regardless.

One of our early missions was an IED located West of Eagles Nest at an intersection with a road called Easy Street. I was in the gunner's turret of Cazinha’s truck, Garcia was driving. When we approached, some Jundis stopped us and pointed out where the IED was. When we got to the target location, there was usually security already in place, and it was relatively safe.

Cazinha had Garcia skirt around the IED so we could move further down the road to pull security to the front and give EOD room to work. We gave it a wide berth as we passed. Williams, Ruiz, and Sergeant Carter were in a vehicle directly behind the IED, the MRAP behind them, and Sergeant Clark bringing up the rear.

This was the area to the west of Eagles Nest that was just beyond what we could see from the west tower. I had imagined all manner of evil brewing over here for months, so I was intrigued to finally see it. It looked exactly as destroyed as I would have expected it to be.

I am not sure if we were in the Iskaan district, or on the border, but it was close to the only area of Ramadi still active with insurgents, hence the IED.

Boom. Ears ringing, and I am pelted with dust and debris. There is zero warning, I am mid-sentence and then I am rocked by an explosion out of nowhere. It takes me a few seconds to regain my bearings.

Something bangs off the hood of our vehicle and lands in the road. The robot’s arm lays in the street a few feet to our twelve.

“Are they okay back there?” Cazinha asks.

I swivel my turret to the left and glance back, but there is too much dust obscuring my view. “I can’t see shit.” I said. By then, there’s radio chatter and Cazinha is not paying attention to me anyway. I swivel back to the front to scan my sector. “Yo, did you see that shit, bro?” Garcia asks while tapping my leg.

“Hey, EOD says that was command detonated, there is someone watching us.” Cazinha said.

I scanned the buildings. There was way too windows for them to be watching us from, it was an exercise in futility. There is no way to know who wants to kill us until they try again, and I would prefer if they did not.

“Fletcher, did you see that shit?” Garcia is still tugging at my leg.

“See what?” I asked.

It was a tense situation, but they were not interested in a real fight. Killing the robot was the best outcome they were going to get from this IED, might as well cut their losses and get out of dodge. That feeling of being watched is hard to shake off.

EOD did not approach these IED’s on foot often and we learned why quickly.

https://youtu.be/oP3JR8ZVAFs?si=g2X9PSUYnO5jAuvz

I’m in the truck in front of the IED.

Every adult male in Turkey has to do military service. Of course, there are exceptions to this. Those with mental or physical disabilities and those who prove that they are gay (long topic) are exempted from military service.

Until last month, I did my military service, as a sergeant. Since I was in the recruit company, new recruits came every month, so I met hundreds of different people. One of them, let's call him Can, I will never forget.

Since I was in charge of health affairs in my company, those who had health problems and needed regular medication would come to me and I would make their records. Can was also in the group that month. Can was 80 percent disabled, his brain development had stopped at the age of 9 when he was in a car crash. This also effected his harmones and he was basically a 9 year old.Although he had diffuculities he was always trying his best. He coudn’t do the training but he was always with his company. He didn't miss his musters and shaved his beard every morning. We never figured out how he was recruited, but we admired his courage at a time when people were trying so hard to avoid military service.

But he was not without his strange habits. One day we took the morning roll call and we were waiting for our company commander, the first lieutenant. Can's phone rang, we all had those old Nokia 3310s since smart phones were banned. A deathly silence filled the atmosphere, he picked up the phone, he was talking and laughing, he handed the phone to me and said, "Sir, my girlfriend is calling, she misses me a lot. I picked up the phone and saw that there was no one on the line, he was talking to himself. When I told our tough non-commissioned officer about it, he couldn't be angry either, I politely told him not to joke again.

In the evenings, he would buy us chocolates from the vending machine and hand them to us, saying "Commander, Commander, Commander, please eat please, you’re tired". He wouldn't let us refuse, and with his sweet smile, we had to eat. He was so affectionate with his friends, he had become the most popular soldier in the company.

On the other hand, no matter how much we loved him, he had to go back home, so we prepared the necessary papers. We left the brigade to go to the medical board. I usually took the bus so that the children wouldn't spend money, but he showed his wallet and said, "Commander, let's take a taxi." There were really hundreds of liras in the wallet, and when I asked him where he got so much money, he laughed and said, "Come on, come on. We set off.

On the way he told me how he was recruited for military service. One day he and his cousin were pulled over by the police. The policeman jokingly told Can that he was old enough and should go to the army. Taking this seriously, our Can registered for military service and somehow convinced the doctors who said we shouldn't send you, and he came.

When the doctors in medical board saw Can, they couldn't believe their eyes, they said who took this child and immediately said that he was unfit for military service.

He had returned home the next day. A few days passed, and a child who stayed in his room explained to me why there was so much money in Can's. Our Can would enter the rooms in the evenings, laughing and asking for money. His friends, who loved him very much, would give him money. Thanks to this, he saved money. He served in the military for a week and returned home with money in his pocket. I hope you are well, dear brother; we will never forget you and that beautiful smile of yours.

So, many years ago, I was assigned to a desk job. I was offered a deployment to Turkey as Command Support Staff (CSS). I was sold on it when I thought that it would be a cushy admin job, where I'd be expected to make sure that everyone ran their programs correctly.

Foreshadowing is a hell of a thing, right?

The unit we joined was a total shit-show. Pretty much every program was in shambles, so me and my counterpart took it upon ourselves to apply permanent fixes instead of the band-aids our predecessors used.

I made it way easier for inbound troops to inprocess by consolidating a bunch of steps in the process into one quick visit to my office. One downside was that everyone had to come see me, but every rose has its thorns.

One day, a Chief Master Sergeant walks in, and tells me that he needs to be inprocessed. I filed all of the necessary paperwork, and then said Chief notices that I happen to share a last name with one of his best Ammo troops. He then asked if I and this gentleman knew each other. Me, being the smart-ass that I am, played dumb, and proceeded to describe the individual to a "T". Dumbfounded, the Chief asked how I was so accurate, and we had following discussion:

Me: "I can describe him perfectly because I saw a picture of him last week."

Chief: "I don't understand what you mean. He's back at our base in the US."

Me: "He can be a bit of an ass, but he means well and wants to get the job done. I'm his younger brother."

Chief: "Holy shit, this is incredible! Stay put for a half-hour."

TIME PASSES

The Chief walks in with 4 young airmen, and asks them "Do you remember SSgt Rico? That's his younger brother! This man will get you boys everything you could ever need. Sparky, I expect you to look after these boys as if they were one of your own."

I got them all squared away, and a day later, the Chief came back into my office, and declared that he has never seen paperwork get done so fast, and shook my hand, telling me that SSgt Rico spoke very highly of me.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this took place while I recovering from an appendectomy.

EDIT TO ADD:

A commenter got me talking about my time in Turkey, and I realized that I could probably write a novela about my time there. Some highlights:

On one occasion, I fixed the windshield sprayers on my commander's staff car, and then found a set of cotton OCPs (the cotton version is reserved for firefighers) on my chair. This same commander was also a partial victim of one of my pranks, which I'll link in another edit.

We also had a cat that would come and chill in our office with us. What was funny is that we were in an upstairs office inside of a repurposed hardened aircraft shelter, and said kitty would just politely wait by the door until someone let her in. We eventually did have to oust her, due to an order from the Wing Commander that made it clear that no animals were to be kept as mascots. So of course, the crew chiefs took her in, and would just happen to drop open cans of food for her. I may or may not have dropped a couple as well.

Lastly, I made my commander say "Oh shit" during his going-away by actually showing up, because he'd learned that I have little patience for pomp and ceremony. Later that day, he came by to personally give me and the rest of my team ceremonial blood chits, which is normally reserved for officers and SNCOs. He also pulled a gangster move and pushed to have us all given commendation medals due to how we worked our asses off.

2ND EDIT: As promised, here's the link to the prank story: https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/s/HfzoI191kc

Tales from the Bonhomme Richard Pt. 5 “The fall”

We were those guys, you know the workhorses. We had already gone in multiple times and continued to go in out of sense of pride and service to our country. That’s why we joined, or at least that was my reason.

I joined after 9/11, gave college a shot, music education, it was my jam. I was good at playing drums but realized music teachers don’t get paid very well and percussion also means playing piano, marimba, vibraphone. All instruments I had little experience with and demanded a lot of practice time.

Here I am 15 years later having accomplished so much and fighting one of the biggest fires in Naval history. So me and my goon squad continued to go in and avoided hanging out by the theater. We didn’t belong in that depression den with all the lackies. People would start their shift and sit in a dark theater for 10 hours, on their phones, hoping they didn’t get voluntold to go do something like hand out water or clean fire fighting gear etc.

I was four days with little sleep and I was starting to see the effects. Hallucination, hyper vigilance, my head was constantly spinning, i thought it was all part of the experience. My shipmate and I were on another investigator trip throughout the ship. We were one of the few people that had been in the ship and knew the layout. There were no tac marks on the bulkhead. Tac marks identify where in the ship you are and what type of space it is like if it is an engineering space, medical, or berthing etc. The walls were charred, there was missing ladders and bulkheads had huge holes in them from explosions. So it was hard to determine where you were. We had to report our findings back to our scene leader as to what the condition the spaces were in; flooding, fire, hotspots, smoke damage, etc. My buddy and I did a 10 hour shift doing this. Recharging our bottles every 30 minutes ish and going back in. Only to stop if we wanted a quick snack or water then back in. We would usually talk basketball, we played on a team out in town together. We would go space by space looking around writing the tac number down, the condition, and determine if it was safe. We would mark our path with glow sticks so if a fire team needed to go in, they had a safe and clear path with no hazards. A lot more tame than when I entered with previous fireteams.

There was one ladder I will never forget. My teammate started to ascend, I would stand at the top and shine my light down for additional light while he maintained two points of contact on the rails. The ladders were slick, the floors were covered in soot, fire fighting water and whatever else that happened to be collected from the walls/decks. There were hazards everywhere . As my shipmate was ascending one of the pins on the ladder snapped, and we started to fall. I reached out and grabbed this bar that hung from the ceiling. I always used to swing on these as a junior Sailor. I don’t know what they are for to this day but I instinctively grabbed it to catch my fall. As I swung and watched my shipmate fall to the ground with the ladder, the portion of ceiling collapsed with the bar and I followed my shipmate down to the deck. The last thing I remember was how pissed I was because I was wet and covered in soot.

It was time to knock it off. For now…..

Ortega and Cazinha were itching to get outside the wire and were looking for missions with anyone who needed bodies. If we had to be sexy mercenaries to get into the war, then so be it. I did not come all the way here to not even see the city.

Our first mercenary mission would be going into Mula’ab with a team of Snipers from a Mechanized Infantry company that was attached to our task force, Bravo Company, 1-26 Infantry.

Mula’ab in Arabic means stadium and this part of the city had the cities soccer stadium. You could see it from COP Eagles Nest, which was a few kilometers away from Camp Corregidor. Insurgents had used the announcer's booth as a fighting position, and it had been destroyed with an air strike at some point.

Mula’ab was the concrete jungle, it was row after row of straight roads intersecting straight roads, it was as urban as terrain could get and AQI owned it. Retaking this charming neighborhood was our task force's primary objective. The 506th had put in a Combat Outpost shortly before we arrived, and now we would make the final push to clear the area.

Eagles Nest was under siege, and that tiny strip of road connect Eagles Nest to Corregidor required an around the clock vehicle patrol to keep insurgents from burying large IED’s. They still harassed the patrol with small arms, IED’s and rockets, but it kept the supply line open.

The point of this mission was to set up an overwatch position on a rooftop so these snipers could try to catch insurgents planting IED’s. It was a nighttime mission, which is the safest time for us to work. We own the night, in addition to having night vision goggles and infrared lasers on our weapons for fighting in the dark; we were enforcing a curfew, so civilians would not go out at night. It made it much easier for coalition forces to find and kill insurgents if they moved around at night.

We took humvees out of Corregidor and down a dirt round around a canal. Where the dirt road met the paved city street, there were an outpost manned by Iraqi Army soldiers at a defunct gas station called OP Mula’ab. We called the Iraqi soldiers Jundi, which was Arabic for soldier. We left the vehicles at OP Mula’ab and headed to the target building on foot.

This was my first time leaving the wire and it was also the first time I was seeing the city proper. It was a god damned nightmare.

Potholes, trash, debris, dead animals and burned-out shells of vehicles. Every building scarred and pockmarked from years of fighting. Everything had booby trap potential. It looked like Stalingrad in night vision green.

It was a short walk to the house. It took no more than ten minutes to walk there. For some reason I ended up on point with my SAW as we headed to the front door. I stopped dead in my tracks when I noticed the door was wide open.

When we trained to enter buildings, breaching the door in some way was the first step of the process. The door being open deviated from that and seemed ominous to me, as if they were expecting us. It especially seemed odd considering it was winter and it was cold outside.

I was scrutinizing the door, unsure about moving forward, when I felt Sergeant Ortega lean in close next to me.

“What’s the fucking hold up?” He whispers in my ear. “The doors open, Sergeant.” “So?”

With that, I walked through the door, and nothing exploded. There was a wall a few feet in front of the door with a chair against it facing the entrance. The only direction to turn was left and when I did, several women and children in the back of the room stood up and shuffled into adjacent room to my right. The snipers rushed past me and up the stairs to the next floor. Ortega a couple guys followed the woman and his kids while I checked another room on the bottom floor.

After the house was clear, Sergeant Ortega started directing the Joes where to go. Ortega led me back to the chair facing the front courtyard and told me to shoot anyone who entered the courtyard.

It occurred to me that this family knew the program and this has happened to them before, more than once. That is why they left the door open on a winter evening; they did not want some idiot to break down their door.

These overwatch missions may seem exciting when portrayed in movies like American Sniper, but the ones I went on were boring and cold. When I took a turn on the roof watching a sector with the snipers, I could see the Mula’ab patrol driving in circles and sitting around idling, and that was all we saw.

I guess it could be worse I thought, at least I am not out here driving around in circles all night like these poor bastards.

After a couple of hours, Sergeant Ortega gives us the order to exfiltrate back to Corregidor. As we form up in the courtyard I somehow end up in the front again, I am now walking point on the return trip. I never wanted to be on point, I am oblivious and prone to tripping over my own shoelaces. Surely someone else was more qualified; I did not say any of this, I just started walking like a good Joe.

I am seeing everything. Every piece of trash or out of place rock looks treacherous. I am scanning for wires or anything else that might tip me off to an IED. I thought my own shadow was going to explode. I held my breath with every step I took over debris.

We make it back to the IA outpost and I sigh a breath of relief. The tension is released and replaced with a sense of satisfaction at having survived my first combat mission. I could already taste the midnight chow back on Corregidor.

I am lowering my right foot and suddenly the Earth disappears beneath me. The sheer weight of my gear causes me to spin violently and twist my ankle as I begin to fall. My dumb helmeted head and shoulder bounces off the side something and I fall. Thud.

This is one of those moments in the Army where you ask yourself ‘what the hell were you thinking?’

I cannot breathe and I have no idea what happened. My NVG’s went flying off my Kevlar and I cannot see. My eyes adjust and I see the helmeted, night-vision goggled faces of Ortega, Cain, Alaniz and Ruiz. They ask if I am okay, but I cannot speak.

As I am trying to I make a high-pitched whimper, but more pitiful. I know, because the boys were already mimicking it to me before they had me out of the hole. I was in excruciating pain. I have never wished I could hit a rewind button in my life.

It turned out that this gas station had also been a mechanic shop; and in the middle of the parking lot there was a pit deep enough for a man to stand in and work underneath a car parked over it. The Jundis at this outpost were using this as a slit trench. I seriously injured myself falling into in their trash and piss. My pride most of all— night vision goggles are so overrated.

The snipers tried to warn me, allegedly. I was too busy thinking deep-fried from frozen pizza and hot wings to register their voices.

This is not how I envisioned it when I said I wanted to drop from the sky into a combat.

The squad was having a rip-roaring good time. It is funny when your friends get lightly hurt. If it does not require more than ibuprofen to treat, then it’s just a delightful story. Ladders are a reliable source of comic relief in combat.

After a successful mission, midnight chow is the banquet of Kings. Sergeant Ortega’s squad got midnight chow after missions during his first deployment and now he was passing on that tradition to us. I did not let my ankle stop us from this sacred ritual— we went to the chow hall before the aid station. Sergeant Ortega helped me limp my way in.

I did not really appreciate it on this first one, but midnight chow would be key in the lean winter months to come.

We went to the Battalion aid station but considering their average patient was a gunshot wound and limb amputation, the Medics weren’t shedding any tears for my ankle.

This was my first face to face meeting with my primary care physician. He was also a former enlisted man that had a Ranger Scroll.

He was maybe the most physically intimidating man in the unit, he made the Hollywood Drill Sergeants look like featherweights— his chest muscles were bigger than my glutes.

The PA told me to drink water and stay off it for a few days. He then warned me that if I came back to him again about this ankle, he would hit it with a baseball bat. The medics tossed a bottle of ibuprofen to me and reminded me to not let the door hit me on the way out.