Help From The Sky

Almost every single night of the week there is at least one IED that goes off at our southern boundary on coalition forces. Always between 8:30pm and 1:00am and they are always fairly big. Sometimes it’s homemade explosives maybe with some napalm or a few artillery rounds with some occasional chlorine or ammonia added for extra trouble. Napalm, for those of you wondering what the hell I am talking about is this flammable sticky substance that you can make with some fuel and household cleaners, kinda like the stuff we used in “Nam”. When the IED explodes it ignites the napalm into a huge fireball that will stick to the vehicle passing by. So the vehicle is not only slammed with red hot pieces of shrapnel it also gets a coat of flaming gel that burns it to the ground.

We have tried a million different ways to catch this IED team. But we always just miss them. They either set up further down the road from where we are, or if we set up there they move further up the other direction or as we arrive and get set they detonate the IED right then. We know that they have “spies” that work the area and tip them off on our movements and it just adds to our frustration.

But on Monday night we had some help from the boys of the United States Air Force. A team of F-16 fighters were coming through the area on a mission when they saw a group of three men emplacing an IED along the highway. They continued to watch them from afar while a team of OH-58 Kiowa Warrior Helicopters moved in on the area. When they arrived the IED team had emplaced their IED’s in both the north and south bound lanes and had moved into a hide position in the reeds along a nearby canal. The Kiowa’s spotted them and their “get-a-way” truck (A 1976 single cab Toyota truck that looked like it had been hit by a train) and proceeded to light up the night with a “Hellfire” missile followed by a few rockets and several hundred rounds of 50.cal machine gun fire during three very impressive “gun runs”. After that they reported “No further movement from that location.”

We had been set up in our hide position and had front row seats to the show. Once the choppers were complete it was our turn to move in and clear the area on the foot. We arrived to find a destroyed truck and a larger crater from the missile but no bodies or body parts. After searching the fields nearby for about an hour we were able to track down one of the terrorist attempting to crawl away; his foot had been misplaced during the altercation with the Kiowa’s. We patched his nub up and he said that his other two cohorts had been hit badly but he left them near the canal. A little later they were found down stream doing the face down float. Tuesday night was the first night in quite some time there weren’t any IED’s at our southern boundary. It was chaotic with all the different elements that were working in the area. But as always we go the job done and there are a few less bad guys out there today.


PS – 12 days until I am “suppose” to be home.