One Wild Night

It was wild. That’s really the only way to describe what all went down the past 48 hours out at the Patrol Base, simply wild. Our platoon is really working on picking up our “Op Tempo”. This means we are hitting the streets harder, hunting down the bad guys and pretty just going all out with a show of force. We have named this “Operation Tool Time” In honor of our worthless platoon sergeant “Tim Taylor”. He is a very scared man, and is always trying to talk our LT and the rest of the platoon out of missions. This in turns allows the terrorist more freedom to conduct their operations, then bringing it all full circle and making to more dangerous for all US Forces in the area. Needless to say he is by no means a brilliant man, and I obviously have great distaste for him. But he is gone on leave now so its time to go full speed.

So “Operation Tool Time” is in full swing and we are going at it pretty hard while out in sector for those ~48 hours. The first major incident plays out like an episode of COPS and a scene from the movie “Platoon” I believe. And it goes like this.

Our platoon was rolling north along a narrow dirt road atop a berm that holds in a canal on one side and swath of pathetic excuses for farms on the other side, it goes by the name “Canal Road”. Creative, I know. The tank is leading or patrol to a place where we were planning on over watching the road way for IED emplacers that night. The tank notices a person running full speed away from us. This is very suspicious for many reasons. First it’s nearly 11pm and no one is supposed to be out and about at this time. Second, he is in an area that many IED’s are detonated from and lastly he is running and these people know if you don’t have a reason to run from the Americans, then don’t, cause we will more than likely kill you.

So we decide to action on him. All the trucks pull off the berm and start off-roading through some very rutted fields. The trucks are bouncing all over the place, it feels like a riding a bull. The tank can see him duck into the fields and start trying to crawl away in its thermal sights. As the trucks trail blaze through the fields our LT’s truck hops a ditch and sinks off into a rice paddie. His truck remains stuck there for the next 30 minutes while we continue to operate around him. Now we are down to my truck and my roommate’s truck. Our trucks manage to make it to a small village where the tank last spotted him.

Doc, Jose and I bail out when we get to the village. We kick in a couple doors and push through the first few houses. At this point our hearts are racing; we are all pumped to catch this guy. I mean he has to be a bad guy cause they way he tried to evade us. We move across a little back yard at full speed and I kick the door in to a small mud hut and Doc goes in first and finds him trying to hide in the back corner behind a ten-speed bike from 1960 or something. We have our interpreter “David” tell him to get up, but he doesn’t. This is where we had to remove him from the hut. Once outside we put him against the wall and start trying to search him. David is telling him to hold still and stop moving and to get his hands out of pockets, after his third warning we are left with no choice but to subdue him. Still after slamming him around and taking him to the ground he is still trying to fight us off. We finally subdue him and get him searched and cuffed and proceed to further search the house and talk to the family in the area.

This is when you start to feel bad. This guy is 19 years old and has surprising substantial strength. We have caught guys red handed with RPG’s and everything else and they never resist, but this kid was hell bent on not giving up. We pull some of the family outside to see if they know this guy and right away the mother starts to cry out that it’s her son and he is well, handicap. Yep that’s right, he is a little slow, a few cans shy of a six pack. He doesn’t have full blown “Downs syndrome” or anything the physically identifies him as not running on all cylinders. My personal diagnosis is that he might have been Autistic or something like that and really had no idea what he was doing and just how close he was to getting gunned down. He was just scared I guess. He ran, hid and then made the unwise decision to try and resist from US Forces. We had no idea he wasn’t all there at the time we pursued and captured him. But looking back you kinda feel bad. But you got to do what you got to do. So the first major event of the night was that we spent about 45 minutes chasing down, capturing and wrestling and handicapped guy. All too just let him go to his family, and remind them to keep him inside after dark. Totally wining hearts and minds aren’t we?