Stories from Drill (#3-Sgt Waters)

So Sgt Waters is one of my favorite guys in our platoon. I met with him when I was first looking at joining up and he gave me a tour of Gowen Field which is my base. He was an MP(military police) when he started and then became a security specialist later on. He also spent time driving in a convoy but I don't know if this was during his time in one of these MOSs or if it was separate. We had a great time going around the base and meeting with Mr. Queen (one of the Apache pilots), one of the fixed wing pilots (whose name escapes me), and some of the other guys on post. Very nice guy.

He's told a few stories about his time in Iraq which I found interesting.

The first story that I remember from him he told when I asked something about whether or not they ever had a problem with rocket attacks or something. He told me of a time when he and a few other guys were driving a suburban around the perimeter of the base. Their base in Iraq had a 2.5 mile perimeter making it a fairly sizable compound. As they were driving around a rocket was fired at the base. It went completely over the base and landed outside the perimeter, about 6-8 feet from Sgt Waters Suburban. They were obviously shaken but when they returned to base he said it was comforting to find the rocket hadn't even scratched the paint and it was nice to think that the people he was fighting couldn't even hit that large a base and their weapons had that small of an effective radius. Now, the point of this story isn't to diminish the fact that the people we're fighting are dangerous and the war in Iraq is certainly no picnic by any means. It's simply nice to know that 90% of the time our enemies succeed it's through luck and we can win this war simply because we are good at what we do.

Sgt Waters told many stories of his time as a driver in Iraq. His job mainly involved driving high powered people from one side of Iraq to the other. He said it was pretty nice driving people of high rank and dignitaries because it allowed him to get good equipment more easily than the other guys. He said it was also cool going around with them because it gave him a different look into what was going on in the area as he drove from meeting to meeting and negotiation to negotiation. He talked about how his favorite thing from his deployment was gaining that perspective and talked about how you can listen to talk show hosts babble all day long and never really know what goes on in the way he does from being there. His stories are very interesting and he's great to talk to because he really seems to have learned a ton while he was over there.

We also spoke for a while about IEDs and the affect that they have. I guess over in Iraq the convoys go absolutely everywhere going as fast as they can (which, for a fully armored Humvee, is about 80mph). They do this because people are smart enough that they no longer attempt to fight us directly except on rare occasions. The fighting is now done simply be a guy with a button who's trying to hit it at the right time to do some damage. This timing is obviously made more difficult as a convoys speed increases. He said they actually had the road explode behind him fairly often. There were a few times though where an IED went off in the middle of the convoy and disabled them and they were ambushed on some of these occasions. Luckily he was there later in the war and our strategies and equipment is much better at dealing with IEDs then when we first went in. The new Humvees are about 2000 pounds heavier than the old ones and have much better protection. One big problem was that the flames from the IEDs would come through the transmission tunnel and the firewall and into the vehicle. This problem has been addressed and that has drastically reduced casualties. They also have changed tactics to where when a Humvee is disabled, the soldiers very rarely get out for very long. Instead they have tow bars they just slap onto the dead Humvee and they drag it to somewhere safe to avoid a second, generally larger IED which is popular after the convoy has been stopped. Because of such improvements his convoy only had two casualties despite multiple IED hits. One man went home due to a piece of shrapnel in his wrist and one with a piece of shrapnel in his ankle. Again, that's comforting to hear. Of course, the insurgencies methods are improving as well but I have faith in our organization and our commanders to stay ahead of the curve.

Well, Sgt Waters has told more stories than that but I'll leave this posting there, maybe I'll have time to put up more later. I still have a few more people's stories to do though.