Going back to the villagers, how some of
them wanted us, some of them didn’t.
This one particular day we were just doing
a presence patrol through a village looking
for Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the villagers kept
saying, no, no, there’s no one here,
there’s no one here. We said alright but the
hairs on your back kind of twinge a little bit.
We kept asking and they kept telling us no
and then we were ambushed by a
significant force that were waiting for us.
One of our platoons was cut off and we
had to go and so they were behind us and
we were spread out in formation, them behind
us so we had to backtrack to try and try
and get them away from contact.
So when we initially headed backt hey had a
secondary ambush set up that hit my team
and I was in a small unit that day because
we were just trying to help the village so
I think there was maybe fifteen of us.
And we came under contact right away.
We took up a defensive position in these ruins.
We engaged the enemy long enough for
that our quick reaction force could get to us.
I don’t know what happened to the village
people that we were talking to.
They just all disappeared.
It’s like a ghost story.
It went from being a pleasant day walking
through this nice farmland, canal area to
all kinds of hate and discontent getting thrown
at you and seen some guys get wounded.
You know having to do the extraction and
then extract ourselves pretty much and
get out of there. That’s what you are
dealing with. You don’t know when it’s going
to happen, you just know it’s going to happen
every day. Every day we left that wire in
my time in 2007 we came under contact.
First civilian contact is enemy engagements.
We were engaged with the enemy every day
we left the wire, sometimes twice.