10/09/06

Death has again knocked on our door and taken another from us.

While out on patrol, by what I am told was double stacked anti-tank mines, detonated as their stryker rolled over them. A private driving the stryker was killed instantly, another soldier had his arm broken. The others inside the vehicle, and there were several, somehow escaped injury.

From what I was told, was left of the vehicle...it is a miracle any of them survived.

The blast left a 5' wide / 6' deep hole.

The sadness increased by what I was told next. It seems while this patrol was driving down this road, a small boy was trying to run across the road and tripped. They said he busted his mouth pretty bad and it was bleeding.

After they got to a point where they could turn around, they decided to. With the intentions of going back to where the boy was. To give him a few dollars and to tell the boy they were sorry, even though it really wasn't their fault.

Upon making the wide turn to go back, they drove right over the top of the bombs, and when whoever was there the whole time watching them, detonated it.

This is the second from the same platoon to die in almost as many months. He came into our rec. tent a lot, we knew him. He was just a young kid with his life ahead of him.

The news says lately it has been the deadliest in Iraq for awhile...but that's Ramadan for you, every year at this time.

I am not trying to say I have the answer, and I'm sure there are many that are privy to information that I am not. In which a correct, intelligent answer could be formulated.

But to someone looking at it from my vantage point, it just seems some of these guys are just being sent out to be target practice. It's not a secret that many think it has just turned into a training ground for insurgents here.

Maybe I am just venting cause we just lost another young life, maybe it is, but that is how I feel right now.

There was a letter a Marine here wrote to his family and friends that somehow got into the hands of a "TIME" magazine reporter last week. I don't know if it was actually printed in the magazine, because I found it on the CNN site.

Don't know if you saw it, but you haven't, you should hunt it down. Very interesting reading from boots on the ground.

He wrote of life here and his experiences of the last 7 months in the Al-Anbar province south of us. One thing I can tell you, is the "Stars and Stripes", our newspaper, has a column listing deaths here in Iraq.

There is, almost always it seems, a Marine in that province getting killed, listed in that column.

Baghdad is always in the news, maybe 'cause that is where most of the reporters are, but man for man, Al Anbar is the deadliest.

I digress...in his letter he writes of a Marine Recon unit coming upon an unidentified farmer in a remote area. After being asked by the Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area, the farmer looked at them, and replied, "Yes, you."

I can tell you this...the more I talk to Iraqis here, and Kurds here, I can only surmise that unless we are planning to stay here for decades, the cold hard fact is...and the only thing we are doing here now...is standing in the middle of three groups that have a terrible history of bad blood between them, going back generations.

The only thing stopping the inevitable is us, and if you watch the news you know at times it seems we are barely doing that. What makes it even worse, is to think about how vulnerable Iraq would be to their other outside enemies like Iran, who would certainly have something to say to the Iraqis once we were out of the picture. The whole thing is a mess.

Yesterday, I was awoken to yet another explosion. It's been bad lately with Ramadan. But now they are getting brave and launching mortars into the camp during the daylight. Which means the chances they will be headed to Allah and their virgins are greatly increased by such blatant exposure to us. Isn't Allah about out of virgins by now?!?

No one was hurt that time, but lately we hear explosions almost everyday. Yesterday, while walking to my hooch to go to sleep, I heard a couple explosions off in the distance, and after turning to look that way, I could see a "little bird" in the sunny, crisp, morning sky unleashing his weapons at someone or something, a few clicks away over Mosul.

The streets on the camp are all still closed down with jersey barriers and will probably stay like that.

In just this past week we have had one truck pull up to the gate and the occupants jumped out and ran. We never heard if that truck was a VBED or not.

Two days ago, the sentries inspecting a convoy trying to enter the wire, found a fuel truck with what looked like a flare with wires from it going into the tank. The gate was immediately locked down, and everyone in the area moved out. Fire and Medic crews were instructed on the radio to standby. The EOD guys were called out to diffuse the...umm....situation.

Thank God for them.

We heard nothing more about it other than, "The gate is now open" over the radio several hours later.

We have also heard of, via the only paper we get, "The Stars and Stripes", and I don't know how widely it has been disseminated in the stateside news, about a tape our insurgents pals released.

A tape that called for scientists to join the jihad and concoct dirty bombs that could be fired onto all the military camps here.

Mortars are one thing, most times they just hit the dirt and no one is harmed.

However, should the "evil doers" figure out how to do launch dirty bombs at us...well it's a whole new ball game. With the obvious donations from Syria and Iran the insurgents are currently receiving, material to make dirty bombs is not completely out of the question.

Surprisingly, even with all this going on, everyone is still in fairly good spirits, not one person is backing down from what they are assigned to do.

Somehow though it seems you just get used to...that's how it is.

A few days from now another memorial service will be held...it will be a very, very sad affair.

Those things you can't ever get used to...