Attention To Orders

“Attention to Orders:

The President of the United States hereby awards SGT. "Jacob" the Army’s Purple Heart Medal for injuries sustained during combat operations on 05 January 2007.

During a combat patrol SGT. "Jacob" was the gunner on the lead humvee when it was hit by a roadside bomb. The blast sent shrapnel and debris into SGT. Jaocb's face, knocking him unconscious. After being rendered unconscious for over 90 seconds, SGT. Jacob re-manned his weapon and began laying deliberate and suppressive fire to the enemy detouring any further enemy attacks.

SGT. Jacob’s actions adhere to the Army values and show great merit and honor not only to himself but to his unit and his country.”



This afternoon during an awards ceremony I was awarded the Purple Heart, if you couldn’t figure that out. That’s how the award was read aloud to the battalion as the Brigade Commander pinned the medal on my chest.

It is an awesome feeling. It is not an award anyone ever sets out to get, it just happens. It’s to often the awardees are awarded this after their death, or it is given to them in a hospital bed back in the states. I was lucky; I was able to stand on my own two feet in front of the battalion I fight with daily. All of this makes you proud to serve.

Being awarded the Purple Heart by the Colonel.

Shaking hands with the Sergeant Major.

Never have to pay for another parking meter or car tag again!

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing. My previous post was just that. I should have knocked on wood or something superstitious like that. For the lazy that don’t want to scroll down to remember what I had written about last time I will refresh your memories. Simply put, it was about how we often get the call to go “REDCON 1” which means grab all our gear, get on the vehicles and roll out to save the world or fight some fight somewhere.

Now that we are all on the level, here is the story.

First off I was sound asleep as usual. I was so asleep I didn’t hear the 3 mortar rounds impact about an hour before we got the call to go to “REDCON 1”. This time the eye in the sky had seen four masked men “hi-jack” and large cargo truck and kidnap the three people in the truck. Two of the men were thrown in the trunk of a black sedan and the other was put back in the truck. All the kidnappers were masked and armed with AK-47’s and one was wielding a large knife. Imagine that if you will; you are pulled out of your truck at gun point beaten severally and then shoved in the trunk of a black car in Iraq at 3PM. Not my idea of a good time.

This was all seen by an Air Force “Air Scan” team or "the eye in the sky", that I still have no idea where or who or what they are. They are just a voice on the radio telling us bad things are happening and that we must go. It’s kinda weird.

We roll out pretty quick and head north. To the rescue! As we make our way up there Air Scan watches the sedan and the large stolen truck leave the scene and head down some back roads. The sedan goes one way and the large truck going another. The kidnappers have no idea they are being watched this entire time. The same time the sedan gets to one house the truck arrives at another. Three gunmen from the sedan hop out and rush in the house. Moments later I imagine they see/hear us on the horizon blazing through the fields to their house and one guy runs out pops the trunk and out pop the two hostage and they take off in a mad dash for their lives. He has his rifle with him but never shoots them, don’t know why, but I am glad he didn’t.

Minutes after we arrive at the house where the sedan and the three gunmen ran inside, with their weapons. At this time we are given clearance to destroy the house with the tanks. This would have been an easy solution to the problem. One well placed shot would dismember the gunmen inside easily and blow out most of the walls of their little house. As I move my dismounted team closer to the house we notice that there are women and children looking out a window in a small hut behind the house. Therefore making the choice or leveling the house not such a good one. So just like an episode of COPS there we are at a stand off with the gunmen. As far as we know there are three of them, they are armed and possibly willing to fight. Up against us, The Good Guys, with two Kiowa helicopters, two M1A2 Abrams tanks, two M1114 Up-Armored Humvees and me and my squad of 4 dismounts. (A “dismount” is a soldier on the ground, on foot, with a rifle and the soldiers to his left and right.)

Obviously the odds were against them and they knew it too. We got the interrupter on the loud speaker and after a few convincing words about how they will turned into a red mist once the tank rounds rip apart the house and that there is no where for them to run because the helicopter will hunt them down and destroy them and a few other choice words about there mothers, the doors opens and out comes each kidnapper, one by one. Each one having to lift their shirts and turn around to make sure they aren’t strapped with explosives. This is where I left the scene. I left two members of my team there with the Iraqi Army soldiers that were moving in to clear the house and a few more of our guys that moved up in the trucks now that it was clear.

With all that secured at the house “Josh” another member of the team, and I head off in search of the two released hostages. Not to detain them or for anything bad, but to make sure that they were not wounded or injured and to get their sworn statements saying; “Yes these men put a gun in face, beat me senseless and shoved me in the trunk of a car.” We push out looking trough the fields for the men. We make it about a half mile out and come of a small berm and in the distance we can see the two men laying on hill waving a white flag they had made from one of their T-shirts.

When we come up to them there on the hill and they are ecstatic, rambling all kinds of Arabic and making gestures of thanks, doing this kissing their hand motion that’s a way of saying “thank you so much”. They are dripping in sweat and look really beaten. We know we need to get them and ourselves to a secured area and when we motion that we all need to all walk back to the trucks they both point to their feet and shake thiers heads.

In their barefooted mad dash for their lives they managed to tear the skin of their toes and heels. The rocks and dirt that had been baking in the 120 degree sunlight all day ripped and burned causing blisters on the skin that was left. The younger man was able to limp along with the help of a shoulder from Josh; who is a small guy, not short, just the type that might blow over on a windy day, which made it funny to watch. The other man was not able to walk or even stand for that matter and his return was now left up to me. Taking all this in; I was left with no other real option.

I hand Josh my rifle, and me, and with all my gear on, in the 120 joyful degrees of an Iraqi afternoon, I lift the man over my shoulders in what’s called a “fireman’s carry” and start walking back a little over a half mile to relative safety. Once you get someone up on you shoulders like that and get moving forward you don’t want to stop, you just want to get them there and get them off you. Especially if they smell like he did, but he is an Iraqi and he had been stuffed in a trunk and then did a mile long dash for his life, I would smell pretty ripe too.

From there we move to the next house and call the last kidnapper out and he gives up just like the others. In the back we find the kidnapped man tied up and barricaded in a chicken coup, he was beaten a little but was in better condition and was even working his way untied and planning a dash of his own

The kidnapped men are bandaged up by “Doc” the kidnappers are detained and as we are blindfolding them and putting them in the trucks we let them watch as we burned their black sedan to the ground and riddle it with bullet holes in their front yards that they won’t be seeing for many, many years.

Justice served.

Let's Roll

Just like every other little boy growing up I thought it would be really cool to be a fireman. To slide down the pole pull on my gear and race off to save the world or whatever kitten might be stuck in a tree.

While doing our usual rotations out at the patrol base the action has it’s high and low points. That can actually be said about this whole tour. It is never ending series of moments of the most agonizing boredom followed by absolute unfiltered chaos. You will be sound asleep in a bunk at the patrol base when someone swings open the doors and says the almost famous line of “Lets Roll! We are going REDCON1!”

[Military Jargon Training: REDCON is the Army way of deciding what kind of waiting posture you will be waiting at. There are different degrees of REDCON. You have one, then one point five, then two and so on. I don’t know what the all are. I just know 1 and 1.5. “One point five” not “one and a half” is for everyone to be standing by their vehicles (which are off) with their gear on or right there ready. REDCON 1 is just a step up from that, everything on, everyone in the vehicle, vehicle running, waiting to move. Class complete. You get an A.]

When this happens it is followed by everyone in the CHU’s scrambling to get their gear, lace up their boots, wipe the sleep from their eyes and head out the door and on to the vehicles.

We have to go REDCON 1 for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes a helicopter will see something they want us to check out, sometime a helicopter will “light someone up” and all we are doing is picking up body parts or in the worse case scenario’s a patrol passing through will take a catastrophic hit from an IED and we will head out to provide support. It’s always something different; it’s always exciting, half the time you don’t even know why you are running around getting ready until you are headed out the gate. I wouldn’t say it’s something that I look forward too, but it is not something I cringe at the thought of either. Its part of my job and it’s as close as being a fireman and racing off the save a kitten in a tree as I will get.

Comfortably Numb

After 10 months over here things that would normally make you either cry in fear or stand there is awe don’t really do it for you anymore. The “Shock and Awe” wears off and then it’s just another day at the office. This whole “numbness” that falls on everyone has always made me laugh over here. I imagine it happens in everyone at their job or in everyday life; things just don’t shock or amaze you in some way anymore.

In my last rotation out at the Patrol Base (the past few days) there were a few different moments that just made me stop and laugh after it was over with. The first one wasn’t really any big deal, it was about 4am and we were making security improvements to the Patrol Base. On average it’s about 120 degrees during the day here so 4am is an optimal time for manual labor. So there we all are (my platoon) out on the walls stringing out new rolls of razor wire across the walls and berms. As we are all going about are little task we here several large “Booms” off in the distance and hear this odd roar sound as well. We all look up in the sky and see what we believe to be an Air Force AC-130 lighting up the night and laying waste to something. No idea what they were attacking, just one of many things I never thought I would see in my life. Fortifying a Patrol Base in Iraq while and the Air Force lay waste to somebody or thing or a lot of somebodys and things just about a mile from us. But it did happen; and we just shrugged our shoulders said that was cool and went back to work.

The next was while I was on guard at the Patrol Base. It was pretty quite around 7pm; just the rumble of the generator running in the background when the tower guards and I all heard the all to familiar sound of a mortar round being launched. And of course, it was being sent our way. After the launch you have about 2 to 4 seconds of this awkward and very uncomfortable feeling of “Where the hell is this thing going to land….” Then WHAM! It slams into the ground just a few hundred feet outside the wall and you can hear the shrapnel make this weird kazoo like sound as it rips through the air. That’s not where it gets really intense. The patrol base is, just like every other one, very small. So it’s a hard target to hit, therefore making the terrorist launching the rounds to have to fire multiple rounds and “walk them in” on us. We hear another launch…3, 2, 1… WHAM! Closer this time, just a hundred meters outside the wall. In my head I am thinking, “SOB’s are going to walk them right in on us.” Then… silence. Just two rounds today that’s all this time. Which is good, they were on target pretty well. There isn’t any real immediate counter fire we can do. Mortars are launched to far away for us to see them. They fire them from behind hills or in the orchards then they tear out of there before we can make it even half way to them.

The one big equalizer in this battle are helicopters (OH-58D & AH-64) and today we just so happened to have some OH-58D Kiowa’s just 60 seconds out and I was able to guide them in the direction to where we believed the rounds we launching from and just like we thought, a blue bongo with two individuals in the back were flying down the road with a disassembled mortar tube in the bed of the truck.

Thanks to the Kiowa’s; they won’t be launching any more rounds our way.

But once again I was left thinking; “There is a football sized bomb being launched through the air at me… and I wonder if my pizza is done cooking…?”




Oh, can’t forget. I caught a Hedgehog also and it was the coolest thing ever.

"Never Forget"

Funerals are never fun. They make you reflect on your own life just a little bit. Make you look at just where you are in the world and where you want to be. For most people however there attendance of a funeral is rare. When deployed over here however it is an all too often occurrence. For me, in the 9 months I have been here, I have attended 17. Yes, 1- 7.

The battalion that I am attached to over here in Iraq lost another soldier just he other day. It hurts when we lose a guy. There aren’t a whole lot of us here on the FOB so whether you knew him well or not, you will definitely recognize his face. The guys I am with got here two months before my unit did putting them deep in the fourth quarter with just a little less than two months to go. Two months to go and he got hit. It’s awful.

We had his “Hero Ceremony” for him today. We all formed up in two rows with room in the middle for the stretcher team to carry the body bag draped in an American flag to the awaiting Blackhawk’s to carry him away. We all saluted as the body passed by and quietly said our goodbyes, dropped our salutes and filed to the right continuing on with the fight. The gears of war just keep grinding away, never stopping for much of anything.

I didn’t know the kid, I had seen his face but that was about it. Still doesn’t change the fact that he was the seventeenth soldier lost from the FOB. I have lost six from my company alone. A company that only consisted of 84 soldiers to begin with and 12 of them never leave the FOB. Hopefully this will be the last time I ever write a blog like this.

Hot Getting Hotter

So the “Dog Days of Summer” are upon us I assume. Everyday over here is the same thing; clear skies, highs in the 120’s and a sand blasting from the south called a “breeze”.

There is refuge however. At least there use to be, up until yesterday. Back in the day (which was like 3 days ago.) when we were back on the FOB the AC’s ran full blast and every electronic device was on and I could often be found in my sleeping bag because it was so cold in my CHU.

Then something terrible happened. Yesterday one of the main generators on the FOB went down and I am afraid it is KIA. So now the FOB is running on one generator and it’s maxed out and oh what a mess that might be if she crashes.

So in conclusion this all means that the AC have to be set no lower than 26 degrees Celsius and the washer and dryers can not be used and all lights must be off during the day. War is hell my friends and Hell is hot.