IStock Photo 2265622 © Rockfinder

Had a very early morning today. We are now sharing our tent with another company that just arrived in country and they are not quite used to the time change...as a result they are awake and crashing around the tent at about 4:00 am.

Went for a long run to clear my nose out from the mucus build-up from the previous night. Part of living here is dealing with the constant crud you build up in your nose and throat from the dust. It comes out in a yellowy brown sludge and going for a jog in the morning is the best decongestant you can find. Regardless, I told my mom I needed Sudafed and she passed the word to a few people...within a couple of weeks I was waist deep in Sudafed. Started handing it out to my guys like candy.

Been dealing a lot with trying to open up a lot of secondary routes to safe passage for CLP’s (Combat Logistic Patrols). The Taliban has made a bold statement that they wish to hold the freedom of tactical maneuver in the rural farmlands and they made good use of the terrain. It is the rainy season so there are many canals that are flush with water and vegetation; it stands as a stark contrast to the featureless desert and craggy mountains of different regions of our area of operations. Oftentimes we are engaged with small arms fire from a wadi, ditch, sometimes a prepared fighting position. We have had to develop the discipline to not fire back immediately until we have positive identification of the target. We roll with heavy weapons on our vehicles that are capable of severe collateral damage to innocent civilians and so we must exercise more restraint.

It is a well known technique of the Taliban to fire on us with assault rifles and light machine guns, giving us the impression of a heavy ambush. They want us to react in panic, stomp on the gas to get out of the kill zone, and drive into a large IED accompanied by a complex attack from multiple directions. A few days ago we rounded a corner and immediately drove into a classic L-shaped ambush. My gunner stayed low in his hatch, scanning the two farmhouses flanked by drooping ancient groves of date palms to our 9 o'clock. I could hear the metallic ''click, click, click, click'' of his turret as it traversed back and forth. Our lead gunner was yelling into the radio. He was jumpy and he kept repeating ''no target no target no target'' spaced out with a vitriolic stream of profanity.

Part of me wondered if the commander was listening to our radio net...he doesn't like poor radio procedure...my thoughts were interrupted with a loud stream of curse words from my gunner. In an instant my world exploded as he depressed the trigger on his heavy machine gun and began to spit glowing tracer rounds into the shrubs one hundred meters to the left of the farm house. The weapon shook all 18 tons of my armored vehicle, almost like a paint mixer. The methodic thumping of the gun in 5- to 7-round bursts flooded my brain with a second wave of adrenaline. I began barking orders into the radio to repel the ambush, but part of me doubts anyone was listening. Soon the grenade launcher to my rear joined the volley, with its muffled ''crump crump crump crump”—it shredded the foliage like an explosive food processer.

As fast as the fight started, it ended. A pair of scout helicopters began to circle overhead, but they spotted nothing. To the west, almost a kilometer away, they saw several men running, but none were carrying weapons. I let out a long drawn out sigh. ''We got something ahead'' called my lead vehicle. Sure enough, a telltale orange wire led into a small mound on the shoulder of the road. It was just over a rise, and had we pushed on at a high rate of speed we may have not seen it. I radioed up the report, but EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) was busy.

The Hurt Locker is a movie about EOD... it is a rather inaccurate depiction of how EOD works. They don't roll around with three guys in a Humvee like cowboys waiting on calls to dispose of car bombs, and they hardly ever dress up in a bomb suit and walk up on an IED. They have very expensive robots to do that job. The insurgency knows they are difficult to train and will not hesitate to detonate a bomb on them. Other than that? Good movie I guess.

We work a lot with EOD and they are often embedded with our patrols, but they won't even think about approaching a possible IED without some serious firepower providing overwatch. It is a long and drawn out process to dispose of an IED, and I am a little annoyed at the blatant glorification of the whole thing.

This 60 minutes segment will give you a better idea of what I do.

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