A New Years Eve in Iraq

I'm going to continue with the theme of posting some of my thoughts on holidays including what I was up to a year ago while deployed on this day. New Years isn't much of a holiday but it fell at an interesting time during the deployment.

On New Years Eve we hit 5 months deployed with another 7 to go. The major holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas had passed and I was searching for a new milestone in which to look forward to in order to motivate myself through the next several months. I still hadn't been on leave yet but that wasn't happening until late March...3 months away. There were two major events that I settled on as milestones, the Super Bowl in early February and the Iraqi elections in early March. The Super Bowl would provide an opportunity to relax for a few hours and have a couple of beers (yes, they actually let us have beer, 2 beers to be precise...but of course it was crappy beer); and the elections were the key event of this deployment.

But the elections were over 2 months away and there was much to do. 8 of our high value targets had been captured up to this point and another 6 persons of interest detained as well. I'll be the first to admit that on a few of the captures 1-14 had nothing to do with them, but a capture is a capture and in many cases it was the intelligence we developed that led to their arrest.

In late December the Squadron was planning heavily for the combined checkpoints that we would eventually establish in mid January. There were a lot of meetings, briefings, and PowerPoint slides put together. We were also working an operation to target those individuals we felt would likely attempt to disrupt the elections, which meant pretty much all our bad guys. General Odierno (the senior officer in Iraq) was coming in a couple of days so a brief had to be put together. To top it all off, we were also developing plans on how to bring the rest of the Squadron up from FOB Caldwell to COP Cobra over the next couple of months and how best to deal with the overcrowding and lack of workspace (an issue mitigated when the military training team on Cobra was reassigned freeing up their living and work space). To say we were busy would be an extreme understatement.

The night of the 31st I went to bed around 11 pm or so not remembering or caring that it was New Years Eve.

At midnight I woke to the sound of an explosion. My immediate thoughts as I looked at my watch (11:59 pm) was that it was an extremely unusual time for indirect fire to be occuring. As I was groggily saying "WTF" to myself I heard a cheer which I thought came from the SF compound. This only compounded my confusion as there was no reason why anyone would cheer during an IDF attack.

A second explosion and a second cheer jolted me out of exhaustive incomprehension as I realized it was the SF team setting off some kind of explosives for New Years.

Rolling over and falling back asleep I thought to myself, "fucking Green Berets."