War Stories

In 2004 our team was in Afghanistan during the Afghan conflict on a routine mission, we were holed-up in a rocky rural area when twenty enemy fighters attacked us. Enemy RPG’s destroyed one of our vehicles and immobilized another. This was followed by heavy machine gun and automatic rifle fire. Apiata was sleeping on top of one of the vehicles when a grenade explosion blew him off it while shrapnel injured two more of our men. Ethan was one of them and Corporal D was the other man, Apiata picked up Corporal D and made his way over 70 meters of open exposed territory with our comrade on his back and got him to relative shelter with the rest of the patrol while the five of us that were left in the area had taken what cover we could and laid down suppressive fire while moving Ethan to a more sheltered area. Apiata had re-armed himself and joined in the counter strike. The six of us shot back the hostiles and held our ground while waiting for an airlift. Alex and I snuck around behind the hostiles and took out the RPG then gunned down the remaining men, by the time the airlift had arrived we had secured the area and stabilized D as best we could.

OPERATION SOLID STRIKE

In 2007 my last mission was a very different and spooky one. My team (Ethan, Alex, Michael, Daniel, Tim, Dante and Ben) were pinned down in the middle of the street in a classified area in the Middle East (I can’t tell you where, the only reason I am writing any of this is because this is stuff I am allowed to write about) while aiding U.S. Marines get out of a hotspot. There were fourteen of us and we were running low an ammo, Alex and Ben popped smoke grenades trying to give us some cover but unfortunately it only made things worse. The hostiles went crazy and shot everywhere in an effort to kill us, when the smoke started to clear a man with an RPG appeared on the top of a building opposite us and fired it directly into the group. It was like time stood still and everything went quiet, I stood up and could see my team helping one another up and then I turned away to see where the hostiles were but they were gone. There was a woman standing in the middle of the street with half her guts hanging out and blood all over her body. Ethan grabbed me by the shoulder and as I turned around my hearing returned and the shooting started up again. The fourteen of us slipped down an alley and made our way to the extraction point but we were ambushed before the chopper landed, an RPG was fired and took out the chopper and our way out of the hot zone. Fortunately a convoy of American soldiers heard our radio chatter and decided to help out. We cleared out the hostiles and joined the convoy seeing though they were heading back to base anyway.

That is two war stories that I unfortunately have taken part in, before anyone says anything I have cleared this with CO’s and it is alright for me to write about this. The second paragraph was a mission that isn’t supposed to be listed but that may be reconsidered.