MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME |

MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME
Name: Eddie
Posting date: 12/18/07
Stationed in: Iraq
Milblog url: airborneparainf82.blogspot.com
Email: [email protected]

In the past few months, I can honesty say that I have not been on any raids. Not that raids were not happening, it just worked out to where I didn't end up on any. It seemed as if for me there was going to be no more kicking in doors, rushing into homes/businesses and all the craziness and excitement that comes with them. It has been so long since I engaged a known enemy, and raids were the last form of rush and excitement left.

All that changed over the last week. In one of my previous posts I talked about a nighttime raid with masked and armed local guards. Apparently that was to be the first in a series of raids for me and the others of my squad. The next raid was to go after some guys that we wouldn't mind capturing. These were to be "snap raids", where we get info at the last minute and head out to the target location without any real plan. This isn't a bad thing, because we have been doing these for a while and everyone knows what to do as far as the little stuff. The major stuff usually gets hashed out between the squad leader, myself and the other team leader quick-like and then we roll from there. We've gotten quite good at this and it allows our reaction time to info to be quick.

The first place we ended up going to was a bust, so we headed out to our next location, which was in a "business" type of section. The place we entered was pretty big for the number of guys we had -- nothing new -- and we quickly cleared the floors and rooms. Again, no luck. There was only one occupant, but there were some cups of chai tea (the typical Iraqi tea drink) that were still warm, leading us to believe they had escaped as we were got there or just before.

We weren't going to call this one quits just yet and began searching around to try and find them. While searching the home we found some vests with body armor, and ammunition vests. Now we really wanted these guys.

The roof connected to many other same-level or close-to-the-same-level roofs. At one point while searching these adjacent rooftops the other team awoke a family living below, and out of fear they fired a couple of warning shots from their AK rifle. The shots ringing out had us on high alert and careful going into that home. Like I said though, it just turned out to be a man trying to protect his big family from unknown invaders.

We never ended up finding the guys we were looking for, but it was good to get out there as a squad and conduct these raids and get back into the swing of things.

Another day we had some good info on a meeting that was taking place for some of the local militia, and we decided to act on this quickly. We headed out with a good amount of people for this raid and my team was to be the lead team. We linked up with the leader of the local armed security guys and they went with us to the location. As we started getting close, these guys began running and then sprinting, trying to get there as quick as possible, and of course we had to keep up with them. The thing is, I'm not sure the guys up with me knew where they were going, and we began running all around this one neighborhood, but not towards the area we were supposed to go to.

It was exhausting, and to make matters worse, no one really brought any water because we figured this was going to be quick, in and out. Now we were exhausted from sprinting around all over the place and had almost no water to replenish. This was beginning to suck.

We finally made it to where we were going and it ended up being a huge area. With the help of the security guys we secured it and rounded up all the people that were around there, for identification. This was where it got crazy, because there had to have been over 100 people, and we herded them all tightly together and began the long process of identification. I can't recall how many we ended up taking in but it turned out to be a lot.

The crazy thing was how many of the local security guards had showed up to help us out. It had to have been over 30 of them, which in many ways makes our job easier. Like when we were on the way back with the detainees, the security guards had gotten word from someone along the way about a possible weapons cache, so we stopped real quick and my team along with several of these guys went in to this "yard" and immediately began searching around like crazy. We pretty much just sat back and let them do the work. I'm not going to lie, it was pretty nice.

We didn't find anything, and so we finally headed on back after many hours of being out. We were all exhausted and thirsty and it was nice to finally chug a good bottle of water.

It's been good getting out there and doing these raids again, especially when they yield the positive results. Hopefully this trend will continue and we can continue to be as proactive as possible.