MOSUL 20JAN09

1230: First contact with enemy forces.

I was inside an Iraqi National Police company headquarters speaking with their commander when the room was rocked with a resounding explosion. It came from right outside the building. My first thoughts were of the disposition of my humvees pulling security outside; where they had all been stationed, where I had placed my dismounts, where the alleys were and the neighboring buildings. Then, as I bolted out the door to assume direct control of my element, all I could think about was what I would see when I opened the door. The explosion was very loud and very close. All I could imagine was one of my trucks on fire with Blue Platoon corpses scattered across the street. Then, as I threw the door open, the firing started. The street was hot. We had a firefight on our hands.

Never did I imagine that my first thought in a firefight would be of immense relief, but when I finally got eyes on my element all I could feel was the pressure draining as I witnessed all of my vehicles, perfectly fine and operational, and all of my men—excited and returning fire, but all very much alive and well. Thank God for that. A quick scan of the bodies in the alley to our southwest confirmed that none of my men were down. No time for giving thanks, though; we were still engaged in a firefight with at least one insurgent and I wanted that bastard dead. My blood was up. He needed to die.

He had thrown a grenade at a National Police truck neighboring my position from a large rooftop to my immediate southwest. One National Police soldier was lying on the ground with a partially amputated leg, surprisingly quiet given his condition. Or maybe it was just too loud to hear the screaming. Two local nationals had been wounded: one older man had taken shrapnel to his leg, and one child had lost an ear to shrapnel and had taken some metal in the abdomen. I grabbed a dismount fire team, commanded by SGT Skizz (thank God I got our best for our first contact), and pushed all of us forward into the alley. My first thought was to get SSG Lark’s truck to push in first and cover our movement, but once he informed me that the attack was grenades thrown from rooftops that plan was scrapped. He’d just be an easy target. So we pushed up, six of us with minimal cover, and started clearing the building to get access to the rooftop. My first room clearing in combat. Fortunately we were met only by five very surprised office workers, all of whom quickly complied with our instructions to get down on the floor and stay there. No weapons, no ammo, and regrettably, no access to the roof from their office. So we got them all on their knees and handed them off to the National Police following us. Then we shot down to the next door, breached, and found ourselves staring right at the stairwell up. How fortuitous was that? Made my life easy, certainly. So up we went. By the time we got to the top, of course, our insurgent friend was gone. He had doubtless fled by one of the dozens of stairwells leading to every corner of what we quickly ascertained was a ridiculously large complex of individual apartments all housed under one roof. And he was gone. SGT Skizz was pretty sure he winged him, but I regret to announce that I found no blood, weapons, ammunition, or trace of the enemy when I searched the roof. And we were unable to identify him out of the dozen or so local national we rounded up inside the complex. So he got away clean. Final tally was one National Police seriously wounded, one child moderately wounded, and one civilian male lightly wounded. And our attacker was gone. Air assets pushed up too late to be of any assistance, which is a great pity because I have been so pleased with their assistance and performance to date. I wish they could have been on station or at least around when we took contact. I wish we could at least have flown a drone over ourselves during the patrol. If we had kept our eyes in the sky we could have tracked him down. There is nothing more frustrating and demoralizing than getting your blood up, having the men under your charge attacked, watching innocent bystanders bleed in an alley, and be unable to close with and destroy the enemy. But try us again, asshole. We’ll get you next time.

The only Coalition casualty, I announce with the utmost regret, was my pants. I ripped the crotch completely open when I dove for cover. This is a long-standing problem with ACU pants. I didn’t notice until the issue was brought to my attention a good half-hour later. The boxers I was wearing at the time did not have a button on the flap, so—yes, you guessed it—I spent the entire engagement exposing myself to the people of Mosul. I tactically questioned (can’t say interrogate, as we aren’t qualified to doctrinally interrogate anyone) families inside that complex in an attempt to find our attacker, and didn’t even realize that I was showing a bit more of the “vestiges of humanity” than was normally allowed. For heaven’s sake, there were children in those groups I questioned. I can’t believe nobody mentioned it. But what would you say? Your home was just the site of a grenade attack and a firefight and your living room was just breached and cleared by a fire team of American soldiers all hungry for blood. You probably aren’t going to list public indecency very high on your priority of concerns. Still. Could my life get any more ridiculous? Probably not. My commander was the one who finally pointed out that I was pointing out. How embarrassing.

Reactions after the fact were unanimous; the platoon has experienced catharsis. PFC Bourbon (a young and surprisingly gentle Kentucky soldier who serves as my RTO [carries my radio] and got married a month before we deployed to a woman he had met the month before) was downright excitable. He showed some particularly fierce killer instincts for a man who is generally so mild. PFC Devil happened to be my driver today, as we decided to give my usual team some time off to recover, and he was overjoyed that he was there when it happened. I know I shouldn’t show any favoritism to any of my soldiers, but I’ll come out and say it here. PFC Devil is my favorite soldier. He’s a tall, lanky older twenties soldier who spent time in prison for assault and spent most of his youth addicted to some of our society’s nastier drugs. His brother is still in prison leading a band of the Aryan Nation. Despite all of this, he is one of the most calm, composed, resourceful, and competent soldiers it has ever been my pleasure to work with. He would have a great career ahead of him in the Army were it not for his felony record. As it stands, though, he will most likely never rise above Staff Sergeant. He can’t get the security clearance to be a Platoon Sergeant. But from here on out, whenever I hear someone complain that the quality of soldiers dropped when the Army decided to fill the gaps by accepting convicted felons, I’ll use PFC Devil as a counterexample. I’m grateful he was there today, too. Our real hero of the day, though, was Doc. I recognized this guy as an invaluable asset when I first arrived to the platoon. Of all the medics in the company, and probably the battalion, we got the best. Doc is absolutely stellar. He’s a quiet, friendly, and very intelligent soldier who has yet to demonstrate fear, frustration, or exhaustion in my presence. And we’ve been in some pretty strange spots. Through it all, though, he’s been constant. He can perform combat medicine without even thinking about it. He slapped tourniquets on that NP’s legs before we had even pushed our fire team forward of his position. Just dove right out and started assisting the casualties. We couldn’t complete our job out there today because the enemy escaped, but Doc definitely completed his. I came back from the rooftops to find him calm, composed, and coated in blood. Jovial, even. Looked right at my pants, looked at his shirt, and announced with a wry smile that we were both out new uniforms. Speculated that, had we been the same size, we could have combined my top with his pants and at least salvaged one. Maybe he’s just naturally like this. I would conjecture that part of this is because Doc is the only man in our platoon who has ever been shot… but he was shot in a bar fight when he was a civilian. This baffles me. I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to fight Doc. He’s just too good natured. I have an even harder time imagining someone wanting to shoot him.

The rest of my day, after having my heart launched into my esophagus, was an endless series of mind-numbing debriefs. This misery was compounded by the fact that my body was just about ready to crash once my blood rush ended. Fight or flight takes it out of you. Nevertheless, there I was: eyes barely open, fingers clutched in a death-grip around my coffee, reciting my debrief narrative by some method of rerouting my subconscious/unconscious directly to my mouth. It was downright impossible to bring myself to recall all the little details the Iraqi commander and I had discussed before the explosion. I couldn’t bring myself to care. There was my life before the explosion and my life after the explosion, and right now I really didn’t feel like thinking about my life before. This was big. This was life-changing. This was first contact under hostile fire. This was the first time I took a fire team into a building, tearing our way up the stairs as I waited for the other shoe to drop—would the house explode, was there an ambush waiting on the roof, would a car bomb detonate around my security, is one of these local nationals wearing a suicide vest, is the enemy waiting around this corner, is another grenade ticking off seconds even now?

We took another mortar on the FOB today. I was walking outside when I heard it impact. I was surprised at how little I cared. There was life before first contact and life after first contact. I can understand how some people could become addicted to the adrenaline rush of combat, but quite frankly, I’m just tired. Tired and relieved. I wished for something just like this to keep my men from getting complacent, and I got it. But all I can think about is that similar acts took place against Coalition Forces all over the city today. Maybe it was in honor of our new President. Maybe their elections are just looming close. Maybe they’ve decided that the observation period is over. Whatever the cause, I get the feeling that we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the next few weeks.

ADDENDUM FROM 21JAN09

Couldn’t even finish this entry last night. We got the call to respond to a Task Force (Special Forces) QRF mission, so we put on the gear, turned on the trucks, and moved out. On the way out, just before midnight—meaning that both major incidents did manage to fall on the same day—my lead vehicle was shot at by Coalition Forces. Some lunatic gunner on a convoy security MRAP looked over, saw our trucks trying to pass, and somehow convinced himself that the insurgents had stolen five HMMWVs, packed them with explosives, and were trying to integrate themselves into his convoy. No, you idiot. You were going two miles an hour and we had to respond to a QRF call from a unit in sector. We were trying to pass you. Anyway, long story short, he tossed a warning shot at us. A very close warning shot. SSG Chase was in the lead vehicle—and immediately he was out of it, correcting malfunctions on this idiot in a way we can all wish we’ll never see firsthand. I had to stop him from physically assaulting the man, get him back in the truck, and push us out on our mission.

What does this mean? Well, at a basic level it means that I’ve had two firsts today: enemy small arms fire and friendly small arms fire. Exciting day to be in Blue Platoon. At a punitive level, it means some unit out there committed a Blue-on-Blue (friendly on friendly) hostile act. And that means that after I spent all night out with Task Force, doing nothing, I spent the early hours of morning doing paperwork on the “incident.” Then, just as I finished with that, Blue Platoon was called out to another QRF call. When we returned from that we were instructed to stay in our vehicles at RedCon 1.5 (5 minutes out the gate from time of order) until further notice as an operation was currently underway. Remember how I said I was tired last night and hadn’t slept in a long while? Well, the situation has not improved. I’m running entirely on coffee fumes by now. That’s all right; tomorrow is our first maintenance day. Our vehicles are getting absolutely torn apart by the constant pace of our operations (naturally we’re more concerned about vehicular than personnel breakdown) and we need to get them into the mechanics. I’m going to go ahead and designate a block of that time as Human Maintenance. I’m going to shower. I’m going to eat. And then I’m going to sleep.

I can’t stand it when anyone here complains of exhaustion, since we’re all undergoing some form of sleep deprivation and nobody wants to be subjected to constant whining, but today I’ll make an exception. I’ve started walking funny and stumbling everywhere. I blink and blank out for whole minutes. It’s been at least three days since I caught more than two hours of sleep a night. The worst part is that it isn’t for any good reason: I’m awake because the infernal inhuman machine at headquarters wants me to give them more paper so they can justify their existence. I’m doing nonsense work. Mandatory nonsense work. I have a list of dozens of things I need to be doing, but command forces me to waste my time on trivial paperwork instead. They interrupt my patrols with orders to investigate shadows. They send me out at night so I can observe Task Force and make sure they don’t abuse anyone or damage any property during their operations (surreal moment last night as I’m calmly discussing the finer details of property accountability with an operative in the middle of a room of screaming and wailing women at 0200). They send me out to escort VIPs suffering from delusions of tactical competence. And then they complain that I spend too little time patrolling my neighborhoods… and where was that paperwork we needed last night, LT?

Go. To. Hell. Stop bothering me. I have things I need to do, you lunatics, and I’m on the verge of physically dragging some of you out into my sector so you’ll have a chance of seeing how incredibly ludicrous you all are being with your own eyes. Seriously. I’m tired, I’m angry, and you’re bickering at me that I didn’t give you a grid for my last front-line trace. It’s the Main Traffic Circle, you ass! It’s big, it’s on your map, and you DO NOT NEED ME TO TELL YOU EXACTLY WHERE I AM ON IT AT THIS GIVEN INSTANT. Because I’m STILL MOVING. By the time I finish giving you the grid it’ll be a distant memory. And next time someone gets into a fight out there? Don’t flood the net with three thousand requests for additional information. That Platoon Leader is trying to maneuver his element and develop the situation. He needs that frequency clear to arrange for air assets or CASEVAC. Do not bog it down because you just feel curious and have somehow convinced yourself that your need to know trumps their need to survive.

I’m sorry. I think I get a little grumpy when I’m tired. SSG Chase and Crunchbery have already discovered this; joking does not go over well with me at these points. I’m getting a bit abrasive around the edges. So I’ll stop bewailing my little problems and get around to sleeping. I’ll write as soon as I can—but go ahead and be jealous. It was a hell of a day to be in Blue Platoon.