Sleeping on Broken Glass

Its been a busy week.  The raids and engagements never seem to cease.  Here I thought things were supposed to slow down as your redeployment date neared!  I have come to the conclusion, though, that one of our IA commanders hunts insurgents like people in the US hunt deer.  He is notorious for the way he deals with insurgents and terrorists, and his uncanny ability to find safehouses, caches etc.  Its almost as if he knows ahead of time where to look (and he might).

We were out with him today on a “recon” for a future IA outpost.  The area is really remote and dotted with tiny little villages, and the bad guys have probably been using it to train and launch attacks from.  We were traveling down some pretty bad roads, if they were roads at all.  Most of the time, it seemed that they were just places were the wadi system broke up enough to get through.  At one point we went straight up the side of a wadi.  I mean straight up.  The humvee made the trip like a trooper though, and I am always amazed at how far the Iraqis can push Ford F350s and Chevy pickups.

Anyway, we were traveling though this no man’s land, and suddenly the IA vehicles would come to a halt.  They would all dismount and start looking around.  The IA Commander would go to a place, look at something and then walk to another place.  It was like watching one of those old Cowboy movies where the Indian would listen to the ground and go “They go that way. 15 men on horseback.”  Suddenly, the IA would mount up and take off across the desert.  They wouldn’t tell us where we were going, but when we caught up (as pickups and F350s are much faster than overweight up-armored humvees) they would have some random truck pulled over and be searching it.  They would finish, mount up, the Commander would look in some direction and they would haul ass that way.  We would get there and same thing would happen again.  This happened all day.  We would be driving to some hilltop, and they would take off in an odd direction only to find they had, yet again, found some bedouin, shepard, or random truck way out in the middle of nowhere.  The most notable instant for me was when we were sitting on top of a hill.  The IA Commander raised his “sniper rifle” to his shoulder and began scanning off in the distance.  Suddenly his truck went barreling down the side of the hill, almost bowling our humvees over,  and sped off into the distance, catching air several times on the wadis and hillocks.  When he returned, he was escorting another vehicle.  It reminded me of when a hunter shoots his prey, then chases it down to finish off the kill.

So what does this have to do with broken glass?  Nothing.   However, with all the patrols and such we have been doing, we have had to catch little naps and take rests in some pretty rough spots.  The other night, we did a “counter-IED” patrol down one of our local ASRs.  We spent four hours driving down the ASR, stopping every now and then to search vehicles, look at something, or wait for route clearance to dispose of a possible IED.  At the end of our patrol, we pulled into a temporary patrol base. There were some operations going on in the area, and this patrol base had been set up in an IA compound.  It had been a long 48 hours without much rest, so the Platoon Sergeant took the opportunity to give us some downtime.  We still had another full day of patrols before we would return to the FOB.  Our platoon was directed to the balcony of an old Iraqi tenement that was being used as the CP.  When we arrived, everyone downloaded their gear and proceeded to crash on the floor.  I actually got a few hours of pretty decent sleep, although the seams in the floor were uncomfortable.  At daybreak everyone began to wake up.  We weren’t in any particular hurry and took our time stretching our sore muscles, drinking some water, and enjoying the cool breeze.  That’s when people started to notice that the balcony was littered with chunks of broken glass.  There were probably windows at the top of the high wall behind us at some point in the past.  No one was cut or anything, but no one had seen the stuff in the dark either.  We were all so exhausted that we all just crashed on top of it without a second thought.

A final note to tonights ramblings: Ramadan is here.  This is the Islamic Holy month and it will continue through mid-October.  Muslims fast during this month, and pray several times a day.  Historically, this means attacks, IEDS and such will be on the rise because the insurgents hold to the belief that one infidel death equals 1000 infidel deaths in the eyes of Allah during this period. (I also think they are just grumpy from not eating or drinking.)  It also means that we had a bunch of classes on being “culturally sensitive,” i.e. we can’t eat of drink in front of Iraqis during the day.

I also perfected my “night vision shot” technique with my camera.  Its neat to have a camera that does this.  I did blur the above photo in The Gimp on purpose though, just to avoid any issues.

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