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A night or two later, I found myself walking in the dark through a nearby village, stepping over bodies—not of dead people, but sleeping Iraqis. In the warm desert, Iraqi families would often sleep outside.
I was on my way to take up a position so we could overwatch a raid on the marketplace where one of the insurgents had a shop. Our intelligence indicated this was where the weapons in the car we’d blown up had come from.
Four other guys and I had been dropped off about six kilometers away by the rest of the team, which was planning to mount a raid in the morning. Our assignment was to get into place ahead of them, scout and watch the area, then protect them as they arrived.
It wasn’t as dangerous as you might think to walk through insurgent-held areas at night. They were almost always asleep. The Iraqis would see our convoys arrive during the day, and then leave before it got dark. So the bad guys would figure we were all back at the base. There’d be no guards posted, no lookouts, no pickets watching the area.
Of course, you had to watch where you stepped—one of my platoon members nearly stepped on a sleeping Iraqi as we walked to our target area in the dark. Fortunately, he caught himself at the last second, and we were able to walk on without waking anyone. The tooth fairy had nothing on us.
We found the marketplace and set up to watch it. It was a small row of tiny, one-story shacks used as stores. There were no windows—you open a door and sell your wares right out of the hut.
Not too long after we got to our hide, we received a radio call telling us that another unit was out somewhere in the area.
A few minutes later, I spotted a suspicious group of people.
“Hey,” I said over the radio. “I see four guys carrying AKs and web gear, all mujed out. Are these our boys?”
Web gear is webbing or vest and strap gears used to hold combat equipment. The men I saw looked like mujahedeen—by “all mujed out” I meant they were dressed the way insurgents often did in the countryside, wearing the long man-jammies and scarves. (In the city, they often wore Western-style clothes—tracksuits and warm-ups were big.)
The four men were coming from the river, which would be where I expected the guys to be coming from.
“Hold on, we’ll find out,” said the com guy on the other end of the radio.
I watched them. I wasn’t going to shoot them—no way I was going to take a chance and kill an American.
The unit took its time responding to our TOC, which, in turn, had to get a hold of my platoon guys. I watched as the men walked on.
“Not ours,” came the call back finally. “They cancelled.”
“Great. Well I just let four guys go in your direction.”
(I’m sure if they had been out there, I never would have seen them. Ninjas.)
Everybody was pissed. My guys back at the Hummers sat ready, scanning the desert, waiting for the muj to appear. I went back to my own scan, watching the area they were supposed to hit.
A few minutes later, what did I see but the four insurgents who’d passed me earlier.
I got one; one of the other snipers got another before they could take cover.
Then another six or seven insurgents appeared behind them.
Now we were in the middle of a firefight. We started launching grenades. The rest of the platoon heard the gunfire and came hard. But fighters who’d stumbled past us melted away.
The element of surprise lost, the platoon went ahead with the raid on the marketplace in the dark. They found some ammo and AKs, but nothing important in terms of a real weapons cache.
W e never found out what the insurgents who slipped past were up to. It was just another mystery of war.
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