Ya I love this assignment. I get to do a little bit of everything. A couple of days ago I way out at a make shift patrolbase just move in to an abandoned structure and set up communications and security to run patrols in the area for a short period of time. In my patrolwe had 5 U.S. soldiers and 30 Iraqi Army. We were given our search areas and out we'd go. looking for terrorists and weapons mainly explosives and machine guns.
After two days of that we get back to our regular patrol bsae and I'm right to work on plumbing, and the generator issues. The generator definitely has issues.
Just about a week ago I was working with a diesil cement mixer, filling blast craters in the local roads and doing other projects aroundour base. I wacked the hell out of my knee starting that mixer, it's got a hand crank damb thing came around and nailed me right below the knee cap. It looked like I had two knee caps when i went to the medic 2 hrs later, I was busy.
Then we were doing route clearance "looking for bombs in the roads". I was on the north with a terp and 2 Iraqis and my buddy was on the south with his guys looking for command wires leading to bombs in the road.
we found no wires but the bomb diposal unit hit a pressure plate bomb at a bridge that took to front end off there lead RG31 "google it". A broken leg and and a couple scrapes and bruses to the crew. The engine block flew a hundred feet and the front axle went twice as far. the left front corner of the thing went easy 300 meters.
We got medevac choppers in for the wounded and secured the area for the recovery team to pick up the pieces
As an Army mechanic I normally wouldn't get the chance to do half of this and at my rank I would be tied down with paper work and would ba begging to get away from the battalion staff and or first sergeant and CO.






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