In the world of internet forums, there is an acronym used when someone posts about anything they have recently acquired without the requisite pictures thereof. TTIWOP: This thread is worthless without pics. Well, allow me if you will to suspend reality for a single post here, because unless one of the other Raiders has pictures they're Bogarting on me, I am going to have to write up this post without any. And thus, since I have no photographic evidence, these events never occured. Which is probably good for the guys I'm going to give a good ribbing...
A few weeks ago, we got the call from our local FOB owners that they needed assistance. All of their platoons were either out, or currently pulling FOB security, and they needed us to escort the wrecker from maintenance to go pull out an armored truck that had gotten stuck off the side of the road. Apparently, the unit had been leaving a meeting in a nearby town, and noticed somebody up to nefarious excrement on the side of the road. Their two HMMWVs gave chase, and the armored truck driver didn't listen when they told that truck to stay put on the hardball... Well now they were a couple hundred meters off the road, stuck in what had appeared to be a dual-track packed driving path. Iraqi mud is a bitch. There's a 4-5 inch crust of 'dried earth' on the top, and underneath it's all overly soft dirt. The ground pressure on some of our trucks exceeds that of a WWII light tank, so if you're not paying attention, (or if you've got a driver inexperienced in heavy offroading), you can get stuck post haste.
Well we were on it. In less than 15 minutes, we were on the trucks, had our comms up, had the guns mounted and were ready to roll. [foot tapping...] And waiting on the wrecker. When they finally got there, we headed out. There was a small hardball path out past some buildings on what used to be part of the IA ammo base our FOB is carved out of, so we positioned our truck as close as we could w/o getting off the paved surface. We had 2 HMMWVs that day, so they went on in and helped position the wrecker. Which promptly got stuck. Ummm, what now? Raider wrecking crew to the rescue! With help from MSG Jones as a spotter, I got my driver positioned around behind where the first truck was stuck, and then we used our readily prepped tow-strap setup to pull them out. We'd pull some, then the wrecker would lift the front left corner of their truck, then we'd pull a little more, until they got enough purchase to get themselves out. Then again with some great ground guidance, we drove around the side of where the first truck was now sitting to hook up to the wrecker. Having 3 tow-straps to run two off our truck and loop one onto their tow points was a big help, because otherwise we'd have had to drive up to right next to the freshly chewed earth.
Now how to get back to the road... Back exactly the way we came, dammit! About halfway back I noticed a section of the dirt path that we had chewed a little bit on the way in, and I told SFC Scheidt (my driver) "I don't give a damn, keep your foot planted!". We powered through and didn't get bogged on our way out. Team Raider saves the day. Pays to be prepared.
But unless Daly (who is on leave) has pictures, these events never happened. I normally have a quick trigger finger on the camera, but was WAY too occupied trying to keep us from getting stuck by keeping a good lookout from the turret and directing the driver to even think about shooting photos.
In other news: I have the mid-tour video done. I'll hang both the high and low bandwidth vids out tonight after our daytime bandwidth restriction relaxes, and put links rather than trying to embed the video, which was ok for my dragstrip run, but won't do the 1280x720 HD high-res version any justice. The large version is about 36mb, and the 320x240 low-res version is about 6mb. Oh, and you'll all be able to see what I'm talking about with the tow-strap arrangement in the video, as well as where we self-recovered one of our trucks that got mired in a dirt road out on an operation a couple of months back. More to follow...
