One last CIB...

I want to start off by once again stating that whoever runs the Firewall for the computers that we have at the outpost are truly bi-polar. Because once again I am able to log on to blogger from the outpost, a change for like the 12th time! AHH! Also I lied in my last post. I have not begun my slow voyage home, but here I am posting again, but thats only because I wanted to get this story out there.

The other night, the CLC (Concerned Local Citizens) Group swung by the outpost with a guy that they had detained. Apparently they found this guy out walking around and he had what looked to be a homemade gernade. I had never seen a gernade like this. It had a plastic body and just looked fashioned. Over the past week or so there have been a few incidents with some people throwing gernades at IA (Iraqi Army) and IP (Iraqi Police) checkpoints, so I can only imagine that this is what this guy was going to do. So far they haven't targeted any US personnel with these gernades. Once we had this guy in our custody, they began questioning him and apparently at some point he stated that he would take us and show us where some more stuff was.

A group of our guys headed out to go hit this target building, while myself and the rest of the guys of my squad continued to pull our guard shift, knowing that we were probably going to be extended because the guys going out were the ones that were to relieve us. Time goes on and eventually we start getting word that they had found quite the little cache of more gernades and other stuff. The platoon that was out on patrol that day, sent out a dismounted element to link up with our guys. Shortly after they had left we heard some shooting off in the alleyways a little bit, but we didn't think too much of it. It wasn't until a pretty loud burst that we wonder, especially when the call came up to us in the towers asking if we heard any gunshots. They usually don't do this without a reason, and we later found out that was the CLC guys who had come in contact with a couple guys shooting at them. Nothing major though.

Some more time passed, a we were well in to the next guard shift when we heard a couple bursts of AK fire a couple hundread meters down the road from the outpost. I stood up and headed outside the tower I was in as all hell broke loose for about a minute or so. There were a couple explosions that I could see and of course here and we called those up. Thats when we learned that it was our guys that were in contact. Sons of bitches! I was officially jelous at this point. While standing on the roof scanning around from off to the side of the outpost a shot rang out that flew overhead, coming from an area a good distance away from where our guys were in contact. After a minute from that origional shot, there was a short burst again fired from the same area directed in our direction. The thing was that since I really didn't know the locations of our guys, I couldn't just indiscriminantly fire in the area that I heard the shot. Oh well, its not like they were hitting close to me, just definatly shooting in our direction.

After a little while the guys returned back to the outpost and of course the rest of us that were there were eager to learn what had happened. Apparently while they were on the roof of the place where the cache was, a couple guys a couple rooftoops over began shooting at them so they of course returned fire, launching a couple high-explosive gernade rounds from the gernade launchers, which explained the explosions we heard. The other platoons guys went to maneauver on them and I guess at some point they were shot at as well and returned fire. All in all it was a pretty quick little engagemnet. The one thing of note was that the last guy in our platoon that had not received his CIB (Combat Infantrymans Badge) was out there that night! So he now officially qualifies for his CIB and at the very tail end of our deployment and running combat missions, he finally earned his. How crazy!