Safer off the FOB?!?

This is going to be a short one, but as I've promised for a little while now, I'm going to include some pictures that go with this story. Im sure some of yall have gotten sick of my plain, bland, mostly text only blog, so I'll try jumpstarting the imagination a little.

Today was again my turn to be off for this next patrol. I was pretty stoked because this now makes 2 patrols I've had off in between rotations to our outpost. I normally only get one so this extra time off is an added suprise. Well I ended up going to bed at a decent time last night (1230 if your curious) after watching Aliens 2 for the first time with my grenadier. It was a good movie and when it was all done I was ready for bed. One of our trucks apparently had some damage done to it a LONG time ago and it was just now discovered during one of our semi-annual inspections. This was to be at least a day fix and so those of us off had to set up a rotation to go down and watch the truck while they worked on it. I was going to have to get up early, but not really that early.

Around 0600 or so I was awoken to the sound of a loud explosion. It was louder than most that I hear around here and I just figured that it was another big mortar that had landed close to our building. I did notice that the warning sirens were not going off though. I thought this to be a little odd, but that was about the extent of it before I passed back out.

I ended up getting up and heading down to the motor pool to do my shift watching the truck. When I got there, they had pretty much every part of the front end disassembled and I thought to myself, damn, this is going to take a while. They ended up getting to where they needed to, took those parts out and were begining to put the new parts back in and start the slow process of rebuilding it. OK, maybe its not going to take as long. I had brought my book with me so that definately helped pass the time. Once I was relieved I head back to my room.

While at my room I ended up hearing about the explosion earlier in the morning. Apparently it was an RPG that was fired and hit a building right very close to us. That explains why it was so loud then! Once back, I sat down and did some work on some of my old blog posts from back in the day, and then started some work with my Platoon Sergeant to write some memorandums for a packet he was putting together.

While we were doing so, we heard a loud explosion, followed by a crap ton of small arms fire and then another loud explosion. This was not a normal sequence of events for our base, so everyone not on patrol and back at the rooms grabbed our rifles and ammo and ran outside to try to see whats going on. We saw a bunch of smoke down a couple buildings and so we headed down to find out what happened. I guess these bastards tried shooting RPGs at us again, 2 this time. I think the smalls arms fire was mostly our guys returning fire, but I'm not totally sure. Either way, this is not the norm for what these guys do to attack our base. We vowed if we heard that shit again, then we'd get to a location where we could fire back. Fuck these guys. You don't attack our base and get away with it if I have anything to do about it.

So yeah, that was really about it. Oh yeah, and my internet is back down again, so here I am at the damn internet cafe. This is getting old...