From The Belly Of The Beast Pt. 1

I have been lucky enough to meet a lot of people who have lived in Iraq, still live in Iraq, have fought in Iraq or are still fighting in Iraq and the stories are amazing. Some sad, some sick, some scary. This week I will tell a few of them, consider it a multi-part series. I’ll start with this, the luckiest man on earth.

A friend of mine returned from Iraq about a year ago, his experiences were average at best, his convoy was attacked on his first mission, he drank a lot of beer and “had lots of fun”, surprisingly I hear that often. A few months into his deployment his group was sent out to inspect an abandoned hotel that was believed to have insurgents. He stepped out onto a 4^th floor balcony when he began to receive enemy fire coming from the ground approximately 200 yards away. He quickly knelt down and began to return fire, what followed was his very first fire fight. They fired back and forth at each other for around 30-45 mins, finally two insurgents came from around an adjacent building and pointed a rocket propelled grenade launcher directly at him. One man took aim while the other laid down covering fire (basically one aims while the other one shoots at anyone trying to stop him from launching the rocket). When the covering fire stopped he looked up just in time to see the insurgents fire the rocket propelled grenade. He bent down, closed his eyes and welcomed his imminent death. Several seconds went by and no explosion, still in one piece and still alive. He looked up to see the rocket tail sticking out of the wall above his head, the shell was defective and failed to detonate.

BTW: look at this space cadet fighting in sandles!!! The U.S. troops are struggling against dudes in sandles! Why?