ONE LAST CIB |

ONE LAST CIB
Name: Eddie
Posting date: 3/13/08
Stationed in: Iraq
Milblog url: Eighty Deuce on the Loose
Email: [email protected]

The other night, the CLC Group (Concerned Local Citizens) swung by the outpost with a guy they had detained. Apparently they found him out walking around and he had what looked to be a homemade grenade. I had never seen one like this. It had a plastic body and just looked old-fashioned. Over the past week or so there have been a few incidents with people throwing grenades at IA (Iraqi Army) and IP (Iraqi Police) checkpoints, so I can only imagine that this is what this guy was going to do. So far they haven't targeted any US personnel with these grenades.

Once we had this guy in our custody, they began questioning him and apparently at some point he stated that he would take us and show us where some more stuff was. A group of our guys headed out to go hit this target building, while myself and the rest of the guys of my squad continued to pull our guard shift, knowing that we were probably going to be extended because the guys going out were the ones that were to relieve us.

Eventually we got word that they had found quite the little cache of more grenades and other stuff. The platoon that was out on patrol that day sent out a dismounted element to link up with our guys. Shortly after they left we heard some shooting off in the alleyways a little bit, but we didn't think too much of it. It wasn't until a pretty loud burst that we wondered, especially when the call came up to us in the towers asking if we heard any gunshots. They usually don't do this without a reason, and we later found out that was the CLC guys who had come in contact with a couple guys shooting at them. Nothing major though.

Some more time passed, and we were well into the next guard shift when we heard a couple bursts of AK fire a couple hundred meters down the road from the outpost. I stood up and headed outside the tower as all hell broke loose for about a minute or so. There were a couple explosions that I could see and of course hear, and we called those up. That's when we learned that it was our guys that were in contact. Sons of bitches! I was officially jealous at this point.

While I was standing on the roof scanning around, from off to the side of the outpost a shot rang out and flew overhead, coming from an area a good distance away from where our guys were in contact. After a minute there was a short burst, again fired from the same area and in our direction. The thing was that since I really didn't know the locations of our guys, I couldn't just indiscriminantly fire into the area the shot came from. Oh well, its not like they were hitting close to me, just definitely shooting in our direction.

After a little while the guys returned to the outpost and of course the rest of us were eager to learn what had happened. Apparently while they were on the roof of the place where the cache was, a couple guys a couple rooftoops over began shooting at them. They of course returned fire, launching a couple high-explosive grenade rounds from the grenade launchers, which explained the explosions we heard.

The other platoon's guys went to maneauver on them, and I guess at some point they were shot at as well and returned fire. All in all it was a pretty quick little engagemnet. The one thing of note was that the last guy in our platoon that had not received his CIB (Combat Infantryman's Badge) was out there that night. So now, at the very tail end of our deployment and running combat missions, he finally earned his CIB.

How crazy!

Comments

[DennisTheBald]

Congrats, I guess.

I mean it's kinda hard to congratulate someone over getting shot at. But I'm glad your guy earned his CIB and nobody earned purple hearts in the process.

Wish you were here, protect yourself the best you can until you are.