Sorry for the delay but I'm in transit to a new location. They are pretty much shutting down everything in the West (US military wise). The camp that I was in by Herat went into full retrograde mode when we got back from this mission. I didn't come here to shut down camps so I am now moving to the East where they are still getting after it.
Day 5. The good news about this day was that it was our last scheduled day to be out there. The choppers were scheduled to pick us up and 2000 (that's 8pm for the military time challenged).
After 4 days of sleeping 4-5 hours (with guard shifts in between) on a mountain at night and getting in gunfights every day, I was starting to feel my age.
The bad news was that all day long we were getting chatter and intel from the birds overhead that a big group was moving in on us and setting up mortar positions to hit us with. I hate mortars because there's no where to hide or anyone to directly shoot back at. It's a helpless feeling. The ANASF was going through villages kicking in doors trying to get information about where the stolen weapons and nods were. There were a few shots in the villages but nothing directly at us. With all the intel about the mortars and massive group headed our way, HQ did a good job of keeping Apache helicopters in the air to keep their heads down. In the afternoon, the birds had to go back to refuel. That was their chance and they took it. For the first time we started to take fire from two sides. The mountains lit up from the Southern and Eastern ridges. The bullets where flying everywhere. We started laying down our own fire…..60mm mortars, SACR's, SAS's, AK's, M240B, SAW's and M4's were all headed their way. That lasted about an hour until the calvary came in. FA 18's dropped GBU 500's (500lb bombs), Apache helicopters made gun runs and a Specter gun ship even showed up for the party. That put an end to that. Then it was time to count the bodies. I have no idea how none of our guys even took a scrape in that mess but we were all good. Fortunately we didn't get mortar'd either.
The next order of business was to get to the PZ (pickup zone) to get the heck out of Dodge. When we were about an hour out, word came down that we got pushed 24 hours to the right. Talk about a downer. :W: We had already come out of the mountains and were carrying all of our gear. It was decision time. The enemy had already honed in on our positions and we had been in the same place for too long. A few guys took the ATV's out to scout our some new hilltops to occupy. They didn't really like what they saw. No good defendable positions in the area. I told the ground force commander that we only had 30 min of light left and we had to get somewhere fast. I suggested that we take a compound on the edge of a village. It would make us much less likely to get mortar'd and give us walls to defend from. He liked that idea and that's what we did. We invited ourselves in as started setting up defensive positions. There was one hilltop to the North of the compound that we set up another OP on as well. It worked and there were no more attacks that night. These picture were taken the next day.
Stay tuned for the ending with a couple more crazy twists to the plot. LOL
