COL Nighthawk, Day 1

Alrighty, so it's been a quick minute since I've posted, and I think I may have been burnt out a little on it. So I'm going to change the style up to make it a little easier to write and read. Plus, my recent training is all been good story material, especially the parts I'll never put up here...

Today was our first day on COL Nighthawk. COL (Coalition Operations Location) is the new acronym being used instead of FOB (Forward Operating Base) these days. Since most of our bases over in the box house other country’s troops, it seems to make sense. But in a weird way it makes it seem less lethal, which doesn’t sit well with me. Our whole reason for spending the weekend at the COL is to go through some convoy training, IED training, and some live fire exercises.

This morning we had to sit through a slew of classes, covering everything we are going to go through here. Convoy operations and IED reaction training were hit on the hardest, as we had a convoy ops set up for this afternoon. We started the convoy feeling pretty confident in our training, that from the class earlier and our own real world experiences.

I don’t think we had the best crew in our vehicle for the convoy, but we made it through. Our driver was SPC Complainer, whom I obviously don’t feel to great about. She’s a selfish and lazy female that always seems to play the female card when it’s convenient for her, and she is way too timid at the wheel of a humvee. The convoy commander, my section sergeant who I call Chicken because of the way he runs, was sitting in the front seat or Vehicle Commander’s seat. The VC normally mans the radio and calls the shots for that vehicle, but Chicken was running the whole convoy of 5 vehicles. It is much more difficult than one would think. In the CLS (Combat Life Saver) seat was Moon, my Japanese buddy that’s seen a bit of the real world over in Iraq a few years ago. In the other seat behind the VC was one of the trainers for this event, making sure the VC didn’t get us too lost or messed up. He also called the shots on which vehicles had wounded in them when we were hit. I was up in the gunner’s turret, taking aim behind my big ass 240B and keeping a sharp eye out of IED or enemy. I could see the Jap spinning the turret on the humvee in front of me, and I gave him a sarcastic wave and smile before we headed out. Gunners in a convoy have alternating sectors of fire, left and right, while the lead vehicle covers the front and the caboose covers the rear. The Jap is one of my best buddies, and I was glad to know that he’d be covering my six when we rolled out.

We started off pretty good, falling in the third vehicle slot so we could have positive control of the whole convoy. We spotted the first few IEDs pretty early, thanks to Chief Running Moon. Chief is a young specialist that went to high school with my younger brother. He’s a good kid, and I hope he doesn’t take in too much of this sub-par leadership we’ve got. I routinely call him different “Chief” names, mostly from all the western books I read, so they’ll change as this goes on. Anyway, Chief Running Moon has a good eye and spotted a lot of IEDs that day. We missed some though, and had to react to losing and recovering our lead, second, and last vehicles all at once. Chicken got hit by a sniper that I missed in a second story window of a town thought to be abandoned, and we also were hit by an IED and had to be towed out. We also got stuck on a muddy stream bank thanks to our sissy-footed Complainer and had to be towed out. She still swears it wasn’t her fault, but everyone knows that if you stop in mud, chances are you won’t get out.

While we were roaring through a particularly thick part of the woods here, the lead vehicle’s antennae hit a low branch over the road. Well, there was a red wasp nest on that branch that fell and hit the second vehicle’s turret. That left all the wasps turret-high in the middle of the road for guess who…yeah, my turret. I tried to duck in time, but I didn’t want to lose my sight on my sector or lose anything I had loose in the turret. I swatted and smacked, but I still got stung in the face underneath my right eye. I had to ride out the next couple of hours with a swollen right eye and half my sight on my sector. And things got worse, to my dismay. It started raining. I arrived back at the COL tired, swollen, and soaked, only to sit through briefing after briefing. I went to bed miserable and with a mean headache.