Day 14 at NTC

[aadler]

 

My NCOIC woke me about 5:45 AM to tell me the coordination had been set for joining with the other team; they were expected to arrive at FOB King at 7:30, and we’d be getting a fourth man by helicopter by 8:00 AM. We packed everything, went to breakfast, loaded the truck, and headed out to wait by the helipad.

By the time Team 73 showed up (we’re Team 70), the NCOIC had told us to not bother coming back to FOB King. A master sergeant at brigade was trying to volunteer us for silly make-work details to help him look good, and we were advised to stay clear of that. The helicopter brought the fourth man, and we all set up to leave.

(The deal on the extra man is this: The third man on my team isn’t actually trained in our MOS, he’s in our unit but part of the motor pool. Another member of the unit arrived a couple of days ago after finishing an NCO training course; he went to rejoin his original team, and the ‘extra’ from that team was forwarded to us. We’ll briefly have a four-man team, but it probably won’t stay that way.)

There was a simulated base attack, and we had to hold till the all-clear. When the gate opened to let us out, a four-truck convoy cut us off, so we had to fall in behind them. Five miles down the road, an OC realized that we didn’t actually belong to that convoy, and he pulled us out at the first available stopping place: an “Iraqi Army post”.

We waited there while various attempts were made to arrange an escort the rest of the way to FOB Dallas. The problem was that, as of midnight, the rules changed to dictate that every convoy contain at least four gun trucks, and we only had two. Normally the circumstances would have been ideal for writing, but we were crowded together into a relatively small space (a grounded boxcar, that being the shaded area available to us), and pretty much everybody wanted to talk, so I wound up doing barely 500 words on “Zero-Sum Game”.

Eventually it was determined that it would just be too much trouble to set up an actual convoy, so the OCs decided that they would declare a “lesson learned” and have one of their number escort us the rest of the way to FOB Dallas. We’d been waiting at the IA post for over five hours, and there was still the rest of the drive to be done.

When we got there, we unloaded our truck and set up cots in the area carved out for us by the other team. Then I went to chow, then I had to start attending meetings.

Because we’d lost an entire day of operations due to somebody else’s screw-up, everyone was jumping to get us back in the rhythm. Before I knew it, we were tasked to drive to a new base — called the JSS, whatever that is — to support a mission at a ‘village’ called Abar Layla. We’d leave, according to plan, at 6:45 in the morning.

Okay. We’ll cut out a day earlier than everyone else, in order to have time to pack our gear to get back by the cutoff date on our orders, so for all of us it’s now five days and a wake-up. I can get through five days of anything.