Egress back to FOB Hit

After the excitement had died down and the adrenaline subsided, we lapsed into another long and anxious wait for our withdrawal. We staged our backpacks and then at around 10:00 at night were tasked with covering the first couple of rounds of the withdrawal from the high ground flanking Bronze. We went, and the air felt chilly as we climbed up to our respective positions and the wind whipped at us.

Large, menacing dogs came up and began barking at us. They looked hellish in the dim moonlight and through the night-vision goggles, and gave me the willies. It felt more like creepy Halloween portrayed in some weird and gloomy independent film than like the happy Ramadan we had enjoyed irreverently earlier in the day.

Just before midnight we were ordered to our Humvees, and we loaded them happily, if warily. The ride back to base, via the Bronze-Uranium split, would be hairy with the threat of IEDs.

I was particularly on edge because half the company had already been taken back to the Split, which served as our company’s rally point for the big movement back to base. The enemy would be alert. I needn’t have worried, though, as we rolled through the dark we encountered nothing more than constant flashes of lightning that heaped on more eeriness.

An autumnal desert thunderstorm was blowing up from the southwest and as we drove south on the Iraqi highway individual, massive bolts materialized in the flashes, forking across the night sky. As the storm drew nearer, thunder hammered down, Allah’s pointed reply to mortar fire and 500-pound bombs.

The wind picked up to a veritable whipping, but for some odd reason dust wasn’t yet blowing. As per standard operating procedure, we drove with no lights and I began to grow more fearful of a vehicle accident than either the enemy or the weather, particularly because the drivers sped madly in a dead rush to get back to the relative safety of the FOB.

Lance Corporal Saul “Little Guerra” Guerra, drove our Humvee, at the rear of the formation (the other Guerra, Jeremiah “Big Guerra,” was Second Platoon’s Preacher Man, the Baptist missionary with a degree in philosophy from Texas A&M).

The lightning capturing photograph flash-frozen images of helmeted heads and rifle muzzles and monstrous seven-ton trucks and the overpass over the train tracks. The convoy was flat hauling ass, going at least 50 miles per hour, and Little Guerra was having a hard time seeing the road through his night-vision goggles with the blackness and strobe of lightning, and he continually swerved off both non-existing shoulders of Uranium when we had reached it. He corrected each veering off with small fishtailing skids that threatened to flip us that invariably sent him swerving off the other shoulder. I was positively cold with fear.

If we veered far enough off the shoulder and onto the steep bank Uranium was built on, the Humvee would surely flip, and that would be the end of us, just as so many Marines and Lance Corporal McDaniel had been killed in training, in flipped Humvees. Nammie was sitting directly across from me against the vinyl-clad cab, and I kept telling him he needed to make Little Guerra slow down, but it really wasn’t an option to be left behind, since we were the very last vehicle in the convoy. Through my own NVGs things did not look very well illuminated at all.

Some nights, the very dark ones, the night vision equipment that relied on ambient light just didn’t work, and this was one of them. Amazingly, and a great credit to Guerra, we reached Route Paige without flipping and being killed, and without being ambushed. Guerra turned left on the perpetually muddy track and we slowed considerably. I relaxed. The thunderstorm was fast approaching, and the bolts seemed bigger than most I’d seen in my life.

It was a boiling, angry type of storm and I felt like it was stalking us. We pulled back into the FOB and it was impossible to hide our silly glee. The base, which looked at its best like the Third World hellhole that it was, felt the same at that moment as Grandma Levings’ house in Fort Worth had felt at Christmastime when I was a little kid with a vinyl parka and a plastic shark.