It was mid afternoon…sometime between 2 and 3 PM and I was lying down to take a short nap before the early evening patrol. It was cooling off a little but it was still over 100 degrees outside. I heard the muffled sounds of mortar rounds striking nearby and then the triple chime of the PA system coming up to inform us that we had incoming fires. More rounds hit…5 or 6 in total over a period of 15 to 20 seconds and by the time the last had hit I was in body armor and helmet with weapon in hand heading out the door to make sure all my Joes were accounted for and unharmed. Minutes later we were rolling out the gate headed to the POI (point of origin) while our own 88mm mortars returned fire to that location.

How did we know where the POI was? Well….there is this cool Radar that picks up the flight arc of artillery and mortar fire and back plots it. It will give you a 10 digit grid coordinate to the launch point. That’s good enough to put you within 10 feet of it.

Today, it was within a couple of miles. If you are familiar with country dirt roads you know they cut around the countryside and you can be sure that the locals know them like the backs of their hands. Over there it’s the same….except that each one has an irrigation channel of some kind running along it the usually prevents you from driving where you’d like. Needless to say, it took a little while to get to the exact POI. When we did it was a field and my dismounts and I swept it and the surrounding area for about 150 meters looking for the launch site…….and the impact points of the Counter Battery Fire. We found neither. It is possible that the launch system was in the back of a truck and that it was long gone before we even left our gate but there was nothing to indicate that anything had happened here…..no base plate imprints, no foot prints but ours and no residue.

After an about 30 minutes we gathered up and started moving down a dirt road towards the location our vehicles were to link up with us. About 300 meters up the road we came to a village……and there we found the impact points of our Counter Battery Fire. The first thing that gave it away was the wall around the Mosque that had a hole blown into it……Then we started seeing people come out and trying to talk to us and pull us to see more damage. I went into a courtyard with 3 of my Joes while the others provided security. I was rubble, broken glass, a truck that had been hit in the cab area and blood. We called it back to the FOB. Counter Fire had hit this village. One house had taken 2 or 3 hits…the truck and caught a lot of shrapnel, a wall between 2 houses was blown down, the wall around the Mosque had been hit and there had been some injuries. A woman and her newborn baby had been hit as well. The locals had taken the injured to the local hospital. They had their own little clinic but it had been closed for quite a while for lack of supplies.

It could have been worse……much worse. If it were not summer and still in the heat of the day then people would have been outside. The children at the least would have been out playing. Hell….had it been a couple of hours later they would have. As it was, there were only a couple of injuries, the property damage and the baby.

We came back here several times in the weeks and months that followed. We brought our medic to check on the injured, supplies for the clinic, clothing for the children, supplies for the school (which had been missed by about 50 meters) and Civil Affairs to talk with the Village Leaders. By we…I mean my platoon…my Joes. Others may have come but I don’t know who or when. We did escort a truck from the FOB there with more school supplies but I don’t know what else was done, if anything. An investigation of the Counter Battery Fire was done but I don’t know what happened with that either. I wasn’t important enough to know. I know that village though…and some of the people….I see them all the time.

**Please note.....some of the details at the beginning are fuzzy. Its been nearly 2 years since this event and I have never written about it beyond the initial AAR. From the time my feet hit the ground though this is as exact as I can make it. I think about this place and these events a lot.**