Saturday - March 19, 2005
Defending Nowhere
The repeater site is nowhere. I mean nowhere.
Well, the whole country I've seen so far is nowhere. Nothing but dirt, a few
sparse and dry plants, and occasional badly maintained roads. If you can call
them roads, that is. Most are barely passable by tanks and other extreme off
road vehicles. People live near the Euphrates, but go more than few hundred
meters from the river and you're nowhere. We're
nowhere.
Last night I went on a patrol
of this part of nowhere. Our standing orders are to kill anyone inside the wire
that isn't a Marine. I took the place of a regular member of the fire team.
Our mission is to patrol the site and prevent people from taking items that can
be used as bombs. There are a lot of such things nowhere. And people want them
badly enough to risk meeting us. They know we're here and what we
do.
That morning some of my Marines went on another
patrol. They were delivering water and rations to an outpost. Twenty minutes
after they left, we heard a distant boom. The corpsman was on the radio and
came running out, "Oh shit! They hit a mine!" Officers earn their money by not
showing excitement at times like this. I calmly and deliberately got my war
gear on and prepared to move out if needed, but it turns out our Marines were
safe, someone else ran into the mine and of them, no one was hurt.
That's about the best they can do. A
few mines here and there. That's it. It's pathetic. Most of their mines and
IED's are seen before going off, and those that go off only hurt or kill a very
few. It's a bad thing for the victims, but in the big picture it doesn't even
dent our capability to go where we want to go. Trucks get blown up, the other
trucks tow them out. Broken down vehicles are never abandoned for terrorists to
dance on them as Al Jazeera cameras film the scene. So, we move on no matter
what with all our gear. We don't stop our mission, every convoy is
completed.Young boys that are seen
selling sodas to Americans have been cut in half while alive. Others have their
limbs hacked off one at a time. Terror is their only power. Militarily there
is no contest, we dominate where we wish to dominate. We will only lose if the
American people lose their resolve and become
terrorized.One thing's for sure, the
Marines won't lose theirs.PS. Check
out the comic book author Joe Sacco's story that is where i am at now, and my
battalion replaced 1/23. You can view his story online here
(PDF format) -- and it's pretty cool.
Go Back to the Start, Do Not Collect $200 Send me your two cents
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