Okay, okay, I’m delinquent again. I actually took the day off on our DONSA, and did pretty much nothing productive. I managed to spill CLP while cleaning my CHU, so that’ll take a while to air out. Oops. I still haven’t managed to get the stacks of papers under control, but at least it’s organized chaos in here now. Yesterday it looked like a concussion grenade went off under about 3 reams worth of assorted papers.
So anyway, enough about my pathetic CHU, we went out on a mission! An honest to God linked up with a Coalition Forces unit and were one of the pawns on the chessboard mission! A bit melodramatic, I know, but nonetheless it’s good we got rolling out the gate for something other than just checkpoint inspections. I’m not going to say where we went, or what our task and purpose was, or any of that operational stuff. I won’t because A: I at least try to practice good OPSEC, and B: We may be going back near there because of the high Abu Jackass per capita rate in that area. So without further ado, here’s our storyline for the week:
We left to infil during hours of darkness, and had to pick up the scout platoon on our way out the O’Ryan gate. I apologize for the blurry picture, but anything further than pic 2 had lots of dust flare from where we had just driven the trucks in the area.
Here are a couple of our guys ready to go. One of our local national (LN) interpreters asked that I not post his face in photos for his family’s safety. I am of course more than happy to oblige.
Our position was adjacent to a canal, at a crossing point. Of course the ‘crossing point’ was a 2×4 and plywood ‘bridge’ that I wouldn’t trust to hold a squad of US soldiers at once. It protested my ‘me plus bodyarmor’ weight of less than 250#. But it worked.
Can’t complain too much, as though our area was swampy, where truck 3 was headed the road itself was over-hydrated (read: soft). With the 25-ton bunker on wheels, the result was pretty predictable. It’s good that we had only the week before gotten all of our tow-strap procedures and attachment arrangements squared away.
This adventure didn’t dampen the truck 3 crew spirits:
Next, we have some of the Jundis (enlisted soldiers) on the way out, clearing across a field:
This of course brought some of the locals out to see what was going on:
Edit: I was remiss in noting that the truck 3 element pics were not taken with my camera, but were in fact provided by our own CPT Ryan.
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