A Semester in the Sandbox by Adam Davidson

Author:Adam Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2016-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Camp Korean Village, Iraq

October 31, 2004

The most recent three-day cycle seemed to pick up where the last one had left off. On the first night outside the wire we went to chat with the Goat Man. I carried the radio for the Captain, so was able to listen to the conversation. The Goat Man told us to expect more car bombs, which wasn’t something we wanted to hear. Everyone dislikes the idea of VBIEDs much more than IEDs, and certainly more than being ambushed or mortared. His warning put us all on edge. He also told us that the insurgents were planning to hide bombs in motorcycles with sidecars, which sounded strange since I haven’t seen many motorcycles since we’ve been here. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one with a sidecar. In the classes we received prior to deploying, we were told that the Muj usually make suicide car bombs from vehicles that are nondescript and won’t attract much attention. I don’t think a motorcycle with a sidecar fits that profile. Even so, the Goat Man was spot-on with some of his intel. The day after we spoke with him, a convoy of LAR escorting the water truck from the pumping station back to KV was hit by a car bomb. It wasn’t a motorcycle; instead, it was a car that looked like the mirror image of the one that had targeted us. The convoy was driving west on Mobile, back to base, when a car sped up and rammed the last LAV in the column. For some reason the bomb didn’t go off, so the car sped up again and rammed the next vehicle in line, which was the water truck, but it still didn’t detonate. Finally the LAR guys were able to shoot the bomber as he was attempting to drive towards the next vehicle in the convoy.

We were at an observation post near the city when the attack went down. When the call came in over the radio, we raced west on Mobile and were one of the first to arrive to help secure the area. The suicide car had been riddled with bullets and crashed into a ditch on the east-bound side of Mobile. We quickly drove past it in order to stop traffic coming down the highway. After the size of the explosion from the last car bomb, we widened the size of the cordon around this car so that we were nearly ? mile away. We also couldn’t let traffic pass on Mobile as it would come too near the bomb. I was with Naseem the translator, trying to calm down a group of truck drivers that wanted to go around on the westbound lanes of the highway. There was no way we could let them try and, after a while, they gave up arguing and attempted to turn around. Unfortunately, the second one that tried popped his tires on the median and was stuck, blocking the way for all the others.

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