Send in the Strykers!

Well, I hope you all had a good weekend. I read Sgt Grumpy's blog today, so I feel better knowing his pain and suffering are just as sucky as mine was. Grumpy, there's no gravity in IRAQ, it just SUCKS. If you can read Doonsberry from Sun the 13Jan, you'll understand better.

Mission Mosoul Part 9: I had some complaints that I hadn’t continued with my story, so here we go. I am pretty sure later this week I won’t even be able to get on the Internet due to some Army stuff…but back to our last mission.
I returned to the “other” camp at Mosoul…to be honest, I can’t even remember most of the names of the camps I went to…but I should have written a tour guide book for travelers. When I got back, my team mates and I were shown where an Iraqi rocked or mortar round had landed in a sleeping trailer near our inner compound. Luckily the Joe was out taking a shower at the time and only suffered the loss of all his gear, and not his life. The round destroyed everything in his room… aluminum and plastic trailers have no Kevlar to stop anything.
Wow, that was scary. I’m sure I would have wet my pants if I had been nearby, but I’ll tell you a secret, God does watch over me. My team never wanted to be far from me again after that.

We walked to the mess hall and had lunch and coffee while I told them of our next job. It was going to be just us on this "job". So we re-packed our gear and took another First Class Passenger flight to a place called Telafar on another US Army Black Hawk.

Once there, we unloaded our gear and were greeted by a young first LT. He had a cargo humvee that he said was ours. He got us rooms and then I reported to the head shop. I met with their S(XXX) and looked to see what they had. I told him we would get started right after our meeting. The LT came back and showed where our “customers” were waiting to chat with us….. we had a lot of customers.

I studied the files and told my team to set up our work areas….they didn’t need micro managing…they knew what to do. Within a few hours we had our operations area set up and ready for customers.
Then I sorted out which customers got to see us first…. What a mess. It took me a little longer than I thought it would take, but we had our business going. The files of the folks we were there to help were not in good order.

I can’t say much more, read between the lines, but we did have a lot of customers to get stuff from…and we started to put together more “product” so the Stryker guys could get more customers. It was a good business….

We talked to a lot of customers....then about our 4th or 5th day there, we got to experience what being in Iraq is all about....random mortar rounds. We had just completed our work for the day when we drove back to our trailers to get ready for dinner. Then BOOM! I mean really loud BOOM...loud enough to make you want to cry for mommy kind of BOOM. Then gravel and debris started to rain down on our trailers.

I ran out the door and yelled for my guys to get in the bunker...but no more rounds came in. Just a random one. How close you ask? Too friggen close when gravel and crap lands on you. But nobody was hit.

to be cont.