The second time I got hit by an IED in Iraq was exactly one week after the first time, and one of my first thoughts was ‘GODDAMN IT!’ But not for the obvious reason.
Standard procedure, after a close call with things that go boom, was for everyone who was in the truck to get checked out at the aid station, just in case someone had a wound that hadn’t been noticed in the confusion. Believe it or not, this happens a lot. All hell breaks loose and everybody’s adrenalin gets flowing, and its ten minutes later before a guy wonders why his side hurts, only to find a wound or bit of shrapnel. When things go bad, you get a bit of tunnel vision.
So, at the aid station, both my gunner, Pettit, and I get the once over from the medics, and they find that both of us have slight damage to the eardrums. They also notice that my blood pressure is elevated, which gets written off as a side effect of just-almost-got-blow’d-upness, though it turns out later that it’s actually because of the hundred doughnuts I’m carrying around as subcutaneous fat. But that’s neither here nor there. At the medic’s suggestion, both Pettit and I are pulled off of driving duty for a week, and end up doing approximately 350 hours of guard duty. Six days of six hours on/six hours off shifts, sitting in little towers, watching a lot of nothing, bored out of our freakin’ minds. One guy, a particularly useless cook named Lang, had gotten pulled off of guard duty permanently for shooting cats, which struck me as quite stupid, until I was on guard myself. Granted, in a war zone, boredom is preferable to excitement, but by the end of the week, it had gotten to be a little much. Both Pettit and I were happy to be going back to running the road again.
So part of my mind was dreading a return to guard duty. Granted, it was a small part of my mind, the rest being occupied with ‘Am I dead? I don’t feel dead. That’s good right? If I’m feeling stuff, I’m probably not dead, and that’s good…’ type thoughts.
This time, instead of stopping and taking a jog, as I had the after the last explosion, I did the right thing. I jammed the pedal to the floor, and we got the hell out of there. I remember Sgt. Simmons yelling up to Pettit, the gunner, and asking him if something was wrong with the radio antenna, because he couldn’t get any response on the air, and Pettit yelling back that the antenna was gone.
What none of us realized until we got onto the post we were headed for was that most of the back of the truck on the driver’s side was gone. The IED had gone off just after we had passed it, and spent most of it’s fury on the rear of the truck. The trunk lid was gone, and the guys in the truck behind us later said it had gone about a hundred feet into the air, higher that the dust cloud from the explosion. The rear driver’s side door had been bent in spite of the armor on it, and the door’s window, made of double-paned, inch-thick safety glass, had come close to being blown into the truck. The entire driver’s side behind the rear seat was just as gone, exposing the wheel to the air, and everything in the trunk had been forcibly ejected, including a box of Kellogg’s cereal cups we had for snacks. There had been a brief storm of Frosted Flakes and Coco Puffs for the following truck to drive through, apparently.
That was the part that hurt the most. We really liked them cereal cups.
So Pettit and I got checked out again, and again, there was a bit of damage to both of our eardrums. A small pain in the ass there, as the ringing from the last IED had faded away just the day before, and now both of us could expect at least another week of trying to sleep with a constant hum that no one else could hear.
Sgt. Simmons consulted with the medics, and then came out to talk to me and Pettit.
“Well, the doc recommends…” He started, only to be cut off by Pettit.
“I’m not doing any more goddamn guard duty, Sergeant. No fucking way!”
Sgt. Simmons looked at me.
“I’m with Pettit, Sgt. Fuck that.”
Thank god Sgt. Simmons agreed. Apparently, our replacements the previous week had rubbed him the wrong way.
Then the mechanics took out truck away, as it was too damaged for safe driving, and Sgt. Simmons, Pettit, and I had to cadge open seats in other trucks for the ride back to our post. We also spent a lot of the day sitting around the staging area, waiting for the other trucks to finish whatever they had to do, so we could get under some cover.
Getting under cover was important, as that particular day was the only on during my entire year in Iraq when it was 40 degrees outside, with mixed rain and hail.
Good times.
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