Too close

Let me preface this post by saying that everyone in the platoon is safe and whole. All appendages remain firmly in their correct places. I advise family members of this unit to skip this post entirely and instead go look at some of the pictures of cute children featured below.

A few days ago one of our trucks took a direct hit from a road side bomb. My platoon was on a night patrol in a nearby town, while the Iraqi Forces secured the election polling sites, when one of our rigs drove over the wrong stretch of road at the wrong time. The humvee hit the bomb but by mere chance I was not inside of it at the time. I was elsewhere with other members of the platoon and when the word reached us that my truck had been hit I was a few kilometers away. There was some miscommunication at first over the radio that the vehicle was destroyed and that there were “multiple casualties.” For twenty minutes I laid in a trench believing that some of my closest friends were dying. I kept muttering to myself “take care of each other boys,” hoping they were treating each other’s wounds and hold on until we could get them evacuated. After that 20 minutes, I received word none was injured. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more relieved in my life.

As the mission began, just outside the gate, my crew and I performed a good luck ritual which we have used religiously for several months now. We sing an old Irish drinking song (you know the one, “Hi da diddly di da dum…”) into our headsets before each mission. We tell ourselves that we do it for good luck but more than anything else we do it to break the tension with a good laugh.

I remember having a bad feeling about this particular patrol as we left but assumed that if anyone got into some trouble it would be the guys walking through the village and not the ones who stayed with the trucks. When I jumped out of our vehicle my squad leader looked at me and said “have fun and be careful”. Fifteen minutes later the truck was hit. In hindsight I should have been the one giving him the warning.

If I had remained in the vehicle I would have been seated very close to the impact. From my squad leader’s description, my seat took the majority of the blast. While he’s pretty sure I would have avoided the shrapnel, in his eloquent words I definitely would have gotten a “diesel enema” as the bomb tore through the fuel tank.

Luckily everyone walked away unscathed. The situation could have been much worse. Instead of joking about the incident the next morning (as we did) we would have held a memorial service for our friends.

Later that night when we returned from the mission and left the chaos behind I was talking to Phil, the gunner for our truck who was in it when it was hit. I complained that our good luck song didn’t work. He looked at me very seriously and said, “No Joey, the song could not have worked any better. We’re all home safe.”

Now, days after the incident, our attitudes have changed. We are more cautious and focused than we were before. The whole people-trying-to-kill-you thing can be a bit unsettling. While it was far from the first time that we have had to deal with the notion, it was definitely the closest we have come to losing people to serious injury. We don’t need or want anymore war stories. But whether you go looking for it or not, sometimes the action finds you. We want only to finish our mission here and make sure every one of us gets home to their loved ones.