A Battlefield Tourist

The Longest Kilometer

Sep 22 at 9:09am by David Tate

I spent much of Friday afternoon sleeping in the shipping container that has become my new home.  Fortunately there’s AC in it, but it has no light and is still woefully hot during the day.  Later in the evening we’d be getting ready for a night operation that was at first planned as an air assault, but became a planned infiltration, for reasons only known beyond my pay grade. 

The final brief about the mission went down around 1615 and involved all the officers and NCO’s around a sandbox site map that laid out all the particulars.  I can’t really go into the details of the mission for reasons I’ll soon divulge, but the plan was to pick up some “HVT’s” (High Value Targets) that you need to believe me when I say, are some bad dudes.

We headed out to PB Hawkes around 1800 where we would stage our stuff, rest, eat and wait for H-Hour, which would come around 0400.  Most of the guys laid their gear out on the ground, bundled up and went to sleep.  Me, being all so prepared, had no long sleeves which would soon become a huge nemisis for a number of reasons. 

The first problem I had, which began earlier in the day, was a full on assault by the local bug population.  “You guys shouldn’t have anymore bug issues tonight…”, I said to one soldier.  “They’re all full of of me.”  And I wasn’t joking.  I’ve been to a lot of places and have done a lot of outdoors stuff, but never in my life have I been so ravaged by bugs.  The crazy thing is, I don’t see any bugs.  Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen one mosquito and one of these little sand flea things they have here.  However, the huge welts all over my body prove that I have been feasted on regularly, and the itch is just unbearable.

Trying to get away from the little bastards I hunkered down in the HMMWV for some shelter away from them and the heat (the AC in the Hummer was nice), but then you start running into the problem of being comfortable:  One leg here, your butt cheek there, etc…  HMMWV’s are not built for sleeping comfort… just for the record.

As the night wore on, things got worse.  The AC started to get too cold, so I abandoned the vehicle only to find that the air temperature outside had plummeted.  I was miserable.  So I gathered up my stuff and put it down in the gravel in front of the HMMWV and laid down.  I pulled my arms into my shirt and gathered warmth from the running engine.  Who would imagine that the carbon monoxide and other engine fumes would’ve been the most welcome part of my night?

I must’ve got some sleep because the nine hours of downtime went by in good fashion, even in my misery. The next thing I knew, we were gearing up and heading out.  I had some reservations about this mission.  The guys we were after were, as I said, real bad guys.  We were taking no chances and punched out with a full platoon plus (50 of us altogether).  We would have air support at our discretion, which is always good, but as mentioned before, this place is full of IEDs, so the going was slow…. very slow.

We made our way through farmland, orchards, and very muddy canals… not a Sunday walk by any strech of imagination.  Stopping every few meters as the guys in the front cautiously moved along.  The entire way was punctuated by barking dogs that became so annoying, I wanted to scream.  I was told earlier that they used to carry suppressors on their weapons for just such occasions, but that an order came down authorizing just Special Ops Command the privledge of carrying the silencers.  Made no sense to me since these dogs definitely posed a threat to our mission.  Then again, if the men with me had suppressors, they’d probably have shot 20 dogs on this night.  Barking followed us everywhere.

Unfortunately for us, and fortunately for the HVTs, time was not on our side.  The cover of darkness was moving much faster than we were and before we knew it, about a kilometer and two hours into the mission, the boss gave the order to abort.  The HVT’s were to valuable to spook and they decided to let them be until another day.

Back at PB Murray, I was drained, tired and muddy as hell from this 2km roundtrip jaunt through the Iraqi countryside.  Some of the guys took full-fledged dips in the canals (not on purpose of course), so I was in better shape than some of the others.  Regardless, I needed to cleanup and get some sleep.  As I walked away from the parking area heading to my metal box, I heard someone call my name from behind.  I turned around, and there was Roggio, who I hadn’t seen in over a week.