firefights.
T
he Gustav turned out to be one of our most effective weapons
when we came up against insurgents shooting from buildings. We
had LAW rockets, which were lighter and easier to carry. But too
many of them turned out to be duds. And once you fired a LAW,
you were done; it wasn’t a reloadable weapon. The Carl Gustav
was always a big hit—pun intended.
Another weapon we used quite a bit was the 40-mm
grenade
launcher. The launcher comes in two varieties, one that attaches
under your rifle and another that is a stand-alone weapon. We had
both.
Our standard grenade was a “frag”—a grenade that exploded
and sprayed an area with shrapnel or fragments. This is a traditional
antipersonnel weapon, tried and true.
While we were on this deployment, we received a new type of
projectile using a thermobaric explosive.
Those had a lot more
“boom”—a single grenade launched at an enemy sniper in a small
structure could bring the whole building down because of the over-
pressure created by the explosion. Most times, of course, we were
firing at a larger building, but the destructive power was still intense.
You’d have a violent explosion, a fire, and then no more enemy.
Gotta love it.
You shoot grenades with what we call Kentucky windage—
estimating the distance, adjusting the elevation of the launcher, and
firing. We liked the M-79—the standalone version that was first
used during the Vietnam War—because it had sights, making it a bit
easier to aim and hit what you wanted. But one way or another, you
quickly got the hang of things, because you were using the weapon
so much.
We had contact every time we went out.
We loved it.
Taya:
I had a hard time with the kids after Chris deployed.
My mom came and helped me, but it was just a difficult
time.
I guess I wasn’t ready to have another baby. I was
mad at Chris, scared for him, and nervous about raising
a baby and a toddler all by myself. My son was only a
year and a half old; he was getting into everything, and
the newborn happened to be really clingy.
I remember just sitting on the couch and crying in my
bathrobe for days. I would be nursing her and trying to
feed him. I’d sit there and cry.
The C-section didn’t heal well. I had women tell me,
“After my C-section, I was scrubbing the floors a week
later and I was all good.” Well, six weeks after mine I
was still in pain, still hurting and not healing really well
at all. I hated that I wasn’t healing like those women. (I
found out later it’s usually the second C-section that
women bounce back from. No one told me that part.)
I felt weak. I was mad at myself that I wasn’t
tougher. It just sucked.
T
he distances east of Ramadi made the .300 Win Mag my rifle of
choice, and I started taking it regularly on patrols. After the Army
took the hospital, they continued taking fire and getting attacked. It
didn’t take too long before they started getting mortar fire as well.
So we bumped out, fighting the insurgents
who were shooting at
them, and looking for the mortar crews.
One day, we set up in a two-story building a short distance from
the hospital. The Army tried using special gear to figure out where
the mortars were being fired from, and we chose the house because
it was near the area they identified. But, for some reason, that day
the insurgents decided to lie low.
Maybe they were getting tired of dying.
I decided to see if we could flush them out. I always carried an
American flag inside my body armor. I took it out and strung some
550 cord (general-purpose nylon rope sometimes called
parachute
cord
) through the grommets. I tied the line to the lip on the roof,
then threw it over the side so it draped down the side of the
building.
Within minutes, half a dozen insurgents stepped out with
automatic machine guns and started shooting at my flag.
We returned fire. Half of the enemy fell; the other half turned and
ran.
I still have the flag. They shot out two stars. Fair trade for their
lives, by my accounting.
A
s we bumped out, the insurgents
would move farther away and
try and put more cover between us and them. Occasionally, we’d
have to call in air support to get them from behind walls or berms in
the distance.
Because of the fear of collateral damage, command and the
pilots were reluctant to use bombs. Instead, the jets would make
strafing runs. We’d also get attack
helicopters, Marine Cobras and
Hueys, which would use machine guns and rockets.
One day, while we were on an overwatch, my chief and I
spotted a man putting a mortar in the trunk of a car about eight
hundred yards from us.
I shot him; another man came out of the
building where he’d been and my chief shot him. We called in an
airstrike; an F/A-18 put a missile on the car. There were massive
secondaries—they’d loaded the car with explosives before we saw
them.
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