Stress is an ignorant state. it believes that everything is an emergency.
-Natalie Goldberg
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An IED (improvised explosive device), possibly an EFP (explosively formed penetrator), tore through a Stryker in my platoon today on Route Tampa West, Baghdad. Some 100 pounds of explosives burned the fucker to the ground, but nobody got hurt.Stryker soldiers will tell you that they'd rather ride in a Stryker than a humvee. Strykers are faster and have more armor. Outside of EFPs and deep-buried IEDs, nothing can touch Stryker passengers. But everyone else talks about how Strykers get torn up left and right, how Strykers piss off the locals because they're so huge that they demolish the streets and rip up the power lines and phone lines they roll through. Non-Stryker soldiers criticize that Strykers are nothing more than big rolling targets.
Yesterday an IED blew up a block away from one of my buddies on patrol, hitting another Stryker. No casualties--in fact, the Stryker just rolled through the kill zone. The 82nd Airbone cats I'm with right now, they laugh at my unit because when the 82nd gets hit with an IED, they dismount, cordon off the area, question bystanders on the streets, and dare the bad guys to come fuck with them some more. Maybe that kind of courage comes with experience, because I can only imagine 3rd platoon's green PL shitting his pants when an IED goes off and screaming at the driver to de-ass the kill zone.
We've been in sector for a minute, and we've already been blown up 4 times. And now I hear rumblings of a massive, squadron-wide 3-day-long mission that will almost certainly become a 2-week-long mission.
The cats from Arrowhead Brigade that trained us up in Taji weren't kidding. Once operations begin, things get heavy quick.
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