City of Death by Ephraim Mattos

Author:Ephraim Mattos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

I walked back over to the abandoned house where we’d be that night and noticed David in the armored ambulance, intently typing an email on his iPhone. His ability to be in the field while simultaneously running his organization’s operations in Burma and Iraq from his cell phone was beyond impressive. Neither discomfort nor exhaustion could keep him from replying to emails and returning phone calls. (If you’ve ever received a correspondence from David or read any of his newsletters, there’s a high probability that he wrote it sitting in a bombed-out building or in a ditch somewhere on the other side of the world.)

“Did you kill them all?” Justin asked, smiling as Kevin and I entered the courtyard.

“Oh yeah, they didn’t stand a chance,” I said, laughing.

The team was busy discussing defensive positions in case of a counterattack. The building was on the high ground, facing ISIS, but unfortunately we couldn’t see over the outer wall. It was a perfect place for ISIS fighters to walk right up, throw grenades directly into our courtyard, and then scurry away. To make matters worse, the portion of the outer wall that “shielded” the door and front windows of our house was made out of flimsy metal. The simple, inward-opening gate would be useless against bullets, and it completely exposed our only way in and out of the house.

“So, do you guys think this place is defendable if we get attacked?” I already knew the answer.

“No,” came the replies, followed by a dark laughter. We all understood we were screwed if ISIS attacked. But as terrible as our fighting position was, there was nowhere else to go.

“We should have pushed farther into the city. We need a bigger foothold,” Sky said, and we all knew he was right. We only occupied the very first row of houses in the city. If ISIS pushed us out of this building, we’d have to run across a mile of open, low ground with no cover to get to safety. Our options were either to die defending this position or die with a bullet in the back running for safety.

Luckily, we owned the high ground and had a dozen Iraqi Army Humvees with mounted machine guns and about fifty soldiers to hold the line. These soldiers and mobile machine guns in coordination with the tanks and BMPs would certainly keep us from being overrun if ISIS attacked.

The sun disappeared below the horizon, and the last bit of its glow quickly gave way to dark-blue skies, while we reinforced our position. We stacked bricks in front of the metal gate and created a sandbag fighting position for our BKC machine gun within the house itself.

“The roof provides no cover, so in the event of an ISIS assault, we’ll have to defend our position from the ground level as long as we can,” Kevin said, taking charge of our defensive plan for the night.

We nodded in agreement. If we got on the roof, we’d die.

My job would be to man the BKC machine gun.

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