Hillah, Iraq.
Following the success of Operation Lightning, in which Baghdad was searched for bad guys, the Poles were inspired to launch a similar campaign. Only they picked a remote part of the desert three hours away. With no real population density, only collections of mud huts. And no real targets, just the objective of searching every house and car in the hundreds of square kilometers. And we needed to make sure that we didn’t disrupt the locals’ lives. The Polish leadership stressed the last part.
Clearly this didn’t call for the entire crime fighting capacity that The Justice League could bring to bear, so we opted for half the El Sals, supported by two ODA and one Anglico vehicles. I won the toss, and got to stay in Camp Charlie instead of three days out in the desert.
As they were packing up, one of the Marines observed that if that vehicle got shot at, I would be the only one in our team not eligible for the Combat Action Ribbon. I nearly made him do pushups.
The good guys rolled at sunset, and I set about the serious business of working on my CAS presentation in between levels of Halo 2.
Fifteen minutes after the Justice League rolled, the Regional American Embassy got word that they were to be attacked by mortars and rocket propelled grenades sometime in the next forty eight hours, and they wanted our advice on how best to prepare their defense. We have all gotten pretty good at getting our gear on quickly, and we were rolling in fifteen minutes. The trip to the embassy is fast, and twenty minutes later I was standing on the roof of the embassy with a bunch of SF guys and the embassy security detail.
I can’t ride in a car these days without keeping my eyes peeled for booger eaters trying to shoot at me (and thus get me in trouble with my Beautiful Bride), and now I can’t stand any place outside of Camp Charlie without automatically trying to figure out where the bad guys would come from and how I would drop bombs on them. I am by no measure even remotely competent in land warfare, which in my current situation is a benefit because neither are the booger eaters. The SF guys were talking about how the bad guys could infiltrate the local palm grove for weeks secreting weapons for a future attack. I figured that if I was some knucklehead with a mortar, I would stop my car on that nearby road over there and shoot so that I could scram easily. If I had an RPG, I would shoot from across the river because it is a straight shot with trees to hide in. Surprisingly, my opinion got a lot of consideration with the SF guys and embassy security. We hung around for an hour or so to see if the bad guys would oblige us with an attack. I spent most of my time wishing that the coffee bar downstairs was open.
Since the booger eaters didn’t want to fight, we decided to go set up a hasty checkpoint on the nearby road. It was well after curfew, so anybody out was probably a bad guy. Besides, we were all dressed up, and it seemed a shame not to do something more than stand on the roof of the embassy while I wished I had a cup of coffee. We drove off, set up, and settled in for the wait. Dogs barked. I began to thoroughly regret the lack of time for a proper cup of coffee. To fight off sleep, I began to time the duration of dogs barking. Some of the dogs got bold, and came to within 30 meters of the vehicles, which is remarkable considering we were parked in the middle of the freeway. I have gotten pretty good at picking a canine voice out of a din, so I selected a likely candidate, and watched my clock.
43 minutes.
That dog barked pretty much continously for 43 minutes. At one point, the staff sergeant said that he really, really wanted a silencer. When I was mobilized for the war, I wanted to bring my Red Ryder BB gun (alas, lacking a compass in the stock and the thing that tells time) to Iraq, but my Beautiful Bride wisely and correctly talked me out of it, because I would certainly be slinging some spring loaded copper around here.We did stop one vehicle, but he was Iraqi police wondering what we were doing out here. We spent the time practicing with our night vision devices and our targeting lasers, and drinking Red Bull. Mac and I decided that we would dedicate ourselves to the Buff and Tan plan starting on the 15th. Sitting in the humvee wishing I had a cup of coffee was not much of an improvement over standing on a roof wishing I had a cup of coffee.Finally, we declared victory and went home.