Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Back to a new mission...but some things never change...

So I did make it back from R & R. Sadly, they did make me come back. Home was great. Good times with the wife while we were in CO, good times with the rest of the family in GA.

I got back to a new area, new mission. Still a quiet area, though. Just north of the Market we were in not long ago. Fair amount of Christians in our area and you can generally tell where they live. Their houses are cleaner, they dress a little different, yards are nicer. But they're also leaving the country do to threats. So far we've had two reporters in (LA Times and AP) to look into a story about that. I had the wonderful priviledge of escorting them both around.

What's happened since I've been back on these new and wonderful missions? Well...we've been taking a census of the area, sorta like we do in the US, but here we include a full search of the house, weapon's serial numbers and fingerprint/picture of all military age males. Census days are long, hot days. With temps in the 115 range, even short walks aren't any fun.

Days we don't do census, we do normal patrols. Normal is generally driving around the neighborhoods. Basically we're police officers. We stop and talk to people a little bit. Sometimes we'll put in overwatch positions.

One of the times, while we were putting in the overwatch position (at a highly undesireable, but ordered time of the day...), we took fire from across the road. Most people would be upset by this. Not necessarily the case for us. It gave us an opportunity to 1. Shoot. 2. Maneuver. Bascially what we're trained for.

The OP took fire and returned fire. I went up to observe, see what we could see. The bad guys had already fled. So I took the guys down, reorganized and decided to place them in there anyway. At the range we were being shot at, I felt good about trying to pull them back out into an exchange rather than worry about the fact the position had been compromised. And that's just what happened. As soon as the OP got back up and started setting up, they began to take fire again.

I started pushing trucks to cordon off the area the best we could w/out entering the neighborhood we were taking fire from (it's another Company's AO...). With coverage to the West, North and East, though...there wasn't too far for anyone to go. It wasn't long before a C Co patrol showed up. We directed them to where we were taking fire and they began a sweep of the neighborhood. Best we could do at that point was hold the cordon we had set and let those guys work.

But that seems to be the way things go in our area. To the south it's fairly violent. The most we do is chase ghosts. We hear large volumes of machinegun fire and drive towards it. By the time we get there, there's nothing left to shoot at. The bad guys have left and the IPs or NPs are just excited we actually showed up.

As far as comrades. Since I've been back from leave, A Co's lost one KIA (yet another from my old platoon) and had around 9 WIA (including the PL from my old platoon...who's returned to duty now). B Co's been hit with a chlorine IED that sent 10 of theirs to the CSH...2 stayed overnight. There's been a rather noticeable change in tactics if not insurgent cells in the area as there's less IED's in general, but more accurate RPG fire, more complex ambushes and more guys actually willing to stand and fight against our guys (which generally results in several dead bad guys...).

But we'll continue our police work type patrols. It may be boring overall, but at the same time it's hard to complain. I know A, B, and C Co's would be willing to change with us for a while.