It has occured to me that I have not posted man of my "so there I was..." stories from my Iraq deployments. While I may have been an intelligence officer who rode a desk through most of my 3 trips down range I do have a few stories to tell. This is one of those stories, although I confess the ending is a bit anti-climactic and it's likely most of you will see it as a "guess you had to be there" story.
The event takes place in the fall of '04 during my first deployment. My battalion, the 502nd MI had recently acquired up-armored HMMWVs, several months after the unit had arrived in theater and only a few months before we would deploy back to FT Lewis. Better late than never I suppose. The battalion headquarters company was conducting a convoy down to Camp Babylon which was a small base that surrounded the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon, as the name suggests. It was a Polish base that also headquartered some of the smaller nation contigents in the coalition; the 502nd happened to have a company of human intelligence soldiers there as well that gathered intel in the surrounding cities of Al Hillah, Karbala, Najaf, Diwaniyah, and Kut. Our convoy was going down there to drop off some supplies and swap out one of our signal soldiers. I went along because I was the maintenance platoon leader in the headquarters company and went on convoys as much as I could.
The trip down was uneventful as it almost always was. During our brief stay on Camp Babylon our platoon of MPs (the 502nd had a platoon of MPs assigned to it who guarded one of our facilities at FT Lewis and provided convoy security when we deployed) got into a conversation with another group of MPs who were escorting fuel tankers. These other MPs, along with their convoy of fuel tankers, left before us but as we were leaving Babylon we got a call on our radios from them that they required our assistance.
Only a few minutes outside Babylon one of the fuel trucks had taken a turn too sharply and had rolled over on its side. The convoy needed us to guard the tanker while they took the other trucks back to Babylon and get a crane or tow truck to come to the site. Always willing to help out another unit, and not quite ready to go back to Camp Victory, we obliged.
I have no idea how long we watched that tanker which had overturned outside of a Shia village. It could have been 30 minutes, it could have been 2 hours. On two sides there were large date groves as well as the typical house/compounds that were always tucked away into the groves. In 2004 you never knew how friendly or angry the Shia population was towards Coaltion Forces and as the maintenance platoon leader I didn't have the knowledge or much access to the knowledge to know. In any event, the briefing we got from the S2 (intel) soldier prior to the convoy didn't mention any specific threat.
Still, I imaged the compounds and the date groves to be perfect hiding spots for a sudden attack by Jaysh al Mahdi forces. My mind kept thinking of a sudden RPG firing out of the groves, hitting the fuel tanker, and making for a very bad day.
That bad day didn't happen. After a time the other MPs returned and took over security of the site and we drove the 2 hours back home. The civilians that had gathered around us while we guarded the tanker mostly just pointed and laughed...which is what I would do under similar circumstances.
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