Another long one

We had a night mission through a hostile neighborhood to destroy an explosives cache. You never have a very good feeling when driving a route you have never been on before. Getting where you’re going can be a difficult when so many of the roads are in disrepair or lead to dead ends that aren’t marked on maps. While we were stopped on the road figuring out which way we needed to go, fireworks went off in the courtyard of a house across the street. After the fireworks ended all of the lights in the house and the houses nearby went out. All of us were pretty sure that something was up, and expected to get lit up by enemy fire at any moment. Thankfully nothing happened and we got out of the area quickly. When you’re in a war zone you see danger in almost anything. Every clump of dirt is a possible roadside bomb and every hint of strange behavior from the locals is a signal for insurgents to attack. You have to be a paranoid schizophrenic to get by.

After we had destroyed the weapons we headed for home. I was driving and it was difficult to see through the dust that our vehicles were kicking up, not to mention it was the middle of the night and there wasn’t much ambient light. The road was pretty worn. There was a canal on one side and bushes and rough terrain on the other. The vehicle ahead of mine belonged to the explosives team that we were escorting. Looking ahead of me I watched as suddenly their vehicle was thrown off of the left side of the road. The driver had misjudged the width of the road and their vehicle had rolled within a blink of an eye. We quickly sped up to where they had left the road and found that the vehicle had fallen nearly thirty feet down a giant ravine. Looking down at the wreckage I was sure that someone had been killed, others maybe seriously wounded. I stayed in the truck and pulled security around the area while others from my platoon raced down to help the wounded. Amazingly, the three people who had been inside had escaped serious injury. One of the people who had been inside was a young woman who had only just arrived in country the day before. This had been her first trip outside the wire, and she was pretty shaken up. As the vehicle had rolled down the ditch she had been struck in the head by equipment. She was not critically injured but was pretty badly bruised and in need of medical attention. While most of our platoon pulled security on the wrecked vehicle a few of us transported the woman back to the camp. When we were all assembled back at the wreckage we established security and waited for recovery assets to arrive and lift the truck out of the ravine and haul it back to the camp. It was not a fun experience to be stuck pulling security in an unfamiliar area. It would be several hours before the other units finally arrived to relieve us. It had been a long and exhausting night and we were all glad to finally head home even though the sun was soon to rise and another day about to begin.