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.