The Blog of War by Matthew Currier Burden

Author:Matthew Currier Burden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Army Sergeant Robert Florkowski is a highly trained sniper team leader and a two-time Armed Forces Europe boxing champion. He fought in northern Iraq and took part in many major combat operations, including the offensive in Samarra. He captures the intensity of his mission as he writes about one of his sniper team’s engagements on his blog, Sniper Eye:

Brian, Walter, and I were two days into the major offensive of Samarra. We were attached to an infantry platoon that had occupied a house with a platoon of Iraqi soldiers that was directly on the phase line their platoon was responsible for securing.

At around 1700, we were inside the house taking a quick break from our hide site on the roof, which I thought wasn’t needed since this platoon already had 3 soldiers on roof guard, when all of a sudden we heard several shots. We simultaneously grabbed our vests and rifles and headed for the roof.

“What’s going on?” I yelled to the roof guard.

“It looks like that convoy up there just took shots from somewhere over there,” the roof guard yelled as he pointed west to a convoy of 5 tan up-armored Humvees stopped at an intersection over 600 meters away.

We could see several people running around there, but it was hard to distinguish what was going on. One of the convoy’s gunners began to fire like crazy. Then a spray of AK47 fire came from behind a building near the Humvees. By this time the entire platoon was on the roof, and, after those AK shots were fired, an area that we could clearly engage became apparent.

The platoon’s M240 gunner set his gun on the roof’s ledge, and he, as well as 10 other soldiers with their M16s, began to let rounds fly. Since our house soared above all the other houses in the area, our engagements did not put the houses below us into too much danger. Furthermore, the majority of the city had already evacuated prior to the offensive.

“Let’s go to the other roof top,” I said to Brian and Walter since our roof top was too crowded, and it looked as if we would have a better viewpoint from there anyways.

I climbed over our roof’s wall, and held on to the wall while swinging my legs over the 2-foot gap that separated the 2 roofs from each other. I landed on the thin ledge of the next roof top, and then immediately grabbed the M24 from Walter’s outreached hand, so that he could climb over.

All of a sudden, out of a tree right next to the convoy under attack, an RPG back blast ripped through the leaves and branches.

Luckily, the RPG missed the convoy. But, I couldn’t believe it; they were attacking from the fuckin’ trees! I couldn’t engage with my M16 from there, so I said, “Hurry up, we got to get set up!”

Brian was right behind Walter, waiting to climb over, and yelled out anxiously excited, “Did you see that? They’re in the trees!

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