The Big Battle
Yesterday we had some excitement out on a patrol – we got into a battle with some insurgents! Fortunately this time someone had a camera, so I have pictures that I can share with you. Here’s what happened:
We were just on a routine patrol and were passing through a local village when some people stopped us. The villagers told us that there was some suspicious activity around one of the buildings in their village. One of the villagers said he got a phone call saying that if he talked to the Americans about that suspicious activity, the village’s new school would get blown up! Another villager said a teenage girl had been badly beaten because someone in that building didn’t like the way she was dressed! That didn’t seem very nice. We decided to check out the building. We approached it very carefully.
Suddenly an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) flew over our heads, and we started taking small arms fire! We immediately took cover.
Snort began to return fire with his SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) and I started firing my 40mm grenade launcher.
Meanwhile, the porpoise (who was farther back, behind cover) got in touch with Brigade and requested air support.
Within a few minutes, air support was on station.
Unfortunately, the air support couldn’t figure out what was going on. They perched for a while and evaluated the situation.
They took off and circled a few times. Then they apparently saw some pigeons in the distance, and that was the last we saw of them…
Fortunately, at that point Winston and Ian showed up in a British Warrior Fighting Vehicle and began to give us covering fire:
With that additional support, we were able to advance on the building. Snort stayed back to cover us with the SAW, and Steve and I took turns covering each other as we ran up to the building. Since I’m squad leader, I went up front:
Snort had an idea. He stopped firing his SAW, charged the building, and made a new opening for us to go in. Unfortunately, that kind of took him out of the fight:
Steve and I went in the breach he made in the wall, and immediately came face to face with an insurgent!
True to his namesake, Steve tackled the insurgent and quickly subdued him.
I then had a bit of a dilemma as I tried to figure out how I was supposed to put the cuffs on this particular insurgent:
Eventually I figured out a solution:
While Steve took the insurgent to a vehicle so he could be transported back to base, I went to help out Snort. I had to dig him out of the rubble.
He wasn’t badly injured, but he did need help getting back to the vehicle:
Once Snort was on his way to the aid station, and the insurgent was on his way to the detention facility, the rest of us searched the area. We found that several insurgents had been killed in the battle – here’s us finding one of the bodies.
Fortunately, none of my squad was seriously injured. The medics gave Snort some Motrin and told him to take it easy for a couple of days.
As we continued to search the area, we found a weapons cache. We picked up everything we found and brought it back to base. The next day, we catalogued it all before turning it over to the intelligence analysts. Hopefully some of our smart intel people can figure out where these insurgents are getting their weapons and training!
After cataloguing everything we had found, we turned the weapons, ammunition, and manual over to Nicole. Nicole is one of the analysts in our Brigade S2 (Intelligence) section. She is from the Florida National Guard.
Nicole said that we had really found a lot of useful information. She said that it would take her a couple of days to digest it all, but she started immediately:
I’m glad that nobody in my squad was injured, and it looks like we stopped some very dangerous insurgents! I’m glad they won’t be able to terrorize the people in that village any more. I hope Nicole can figure out where they got their weapons and training!
