Steaming Bowl of Suck, part III

Ok, so the whole reason I started this post was to help explain what it means to be a Soldier. It means being able to tolerate all manners of Suck and still get the job done. It is what binds us to each other as Soldiers - that shared risk, and the knowledge that the Soldier to your left and right will endure with you, that they won't break for cover, or shirk their duty, leaving others to carry more of the load.

Now where I left of in the story we had the area secure and broke an element off to go search for an Extremist weapons cache. The rest of us continued to try to retrieve the STUCK-VEE from the shitpond. All the while it continued to rain, and the mud got worse and worse. Somehow we "acquired" a pay loader and spent some time rigging the humvee up to it, but the mud was too slick. We even tried to bulldozer the mud away to get to dry ground, but that didn't work either. Eventually, we had to give up on what we call "self-recovery" and call for help, which came in the form of a 5-ton wrecker. After many different attempts, and some shoveling by hand, we finally freed the wretched vehicle, and got everyone back to base. It took some time to clean the thing, and it still doesn't smell right to this day.

As we went thru this 13 hour ordeal, we had to rotate guys in and out of the humvees to try and get warm, as hypothermia was becoming a real risk - everyone was soaked to the bone, and it was cold. It purely sucked. And it will be a story we'll all remember years from now.

But the bright part of this story is that just when we were worried most about how we were going to keep our men warm enough, one of the Iraqis in the area opened his home to us, built a warm fire and started baking bread for us to eat. The Iraqis eat unleavened bread so he started whipping out bread fast. It was amazing - the flour he was using was the only food he had in the house, but as Arab culture dictates he would share his last scrap of it with a guest. Just amazing.