Another War Story - Drunk Draft
Told this story to a coworker the other day, and it put me in the mood to share it on here. It's a short story of how I lost my knife.
So, right when I got to FOB PK (Forward Operating Base Pain-Kalay) I found a SOG folding knife left behind by the guys in 10th Mountain Division, whom we replaced. I wore it on my vest for much of my deployment in the beginning. It was a nice knife, used it for random shit like cutting line and other random shit. Became attached to it if only for the reason that I carried it everywhere and it was handy.
Fast forward to later on in our deployment, we were on a somewhat large scale mission to clear Route Chilliwac and some of the villages along it so that it'd be safe for American/Friendly forces to use the road. It was something like day two or three of the mission, and we had moved into a larger village area right alongside the road. The ANA (Afghan National Army) troops accompanied by local militia/police spread out ahead of us since they were particularly good at locating IED's (Improvised Explosive Device), basically homemade landmines.
Now, being point-man for our forces I got to see a lot of what was going on. Not long after our Afghan partners had start to spread out one of the local Afghan Police members motioned to me that he found an IED and wanted to borrow my knife to use in digging it up. These guys had plenty of experience with pulling them out, so I handed him my knife to use. Now, I watched him for a few minutes (from a safe distance.) Then, as he dug the knife back into the ground to remove some of the hard packed dirt...BOOM. Explosion, dust, dirt flying everywhere. He triggered the explosives.
Now, he had some shit luck. It's really unfortunate about what happened to him. I didn't even have a fraction of his experience disarming/ removing IED's, yet I managed to take care of quite a few of them without issue, particularly on that very same mission. But at the same, I never saw that knife again. I like to think that it's still intact somewhere waiting for someone else to pick it up.
That gentleman was the only death on that mission, though several other Afghan soldiers and police got hurt. One lost his foot and several others got cut up pretty good by shrapnel.
So, right when I got to FOB PK (Forward Operating Base Pain-Kalay) I found a SOG folding knife left behind by the guys in 10th Mountain Division, whom we replaced. I wore it on my vest for much of my deployment in the beginning. It was a nice knife, used it for random shit like cutting line and other random shit. Became attached to it if only for the reason that I carried it everywhere and it was handy.
Fast forward to later on in our deployment, we were on a somewhat large scale mission to clear Route Chilliwac and some of the villages along it so that it'd be safe for American/Friendly forces to use the road. It was something like day two or three of the mission, and we had moved into a larger village area right alongside the road. The ANA (Afghan National Army) troops accompanied by local militia/police spread out ahead of us since they were particularly good at locating IED's (Improvised Explosive Device), basically homemade landmines.
Now, being point-man for our forces I got to see a lot of what was going on. Not long after our Afghan partners had start to spread out one of the local Afghan Police members motioned to me that he found an IED and wanted to borrow my knife to use in digging it up. These guys had plenty of experience with pulling them out, so I handed him my knife to use. Now, I watched him for a few minutes (from a safe distance.) Then, as he dug the knife back into the ground to remove some of the hard packed dirt...BOOM. Explosion, dust, dirt flying everywhere. He triggered the explosives.
Now, he had some shit luck. It's really unfortunate about what happened to him. I didn't even have a fraction of his experience disarming/ removing IED's, yet I managed to take care of quite a few of them without issue, particularly on that very same mission. But at the same, I never saw that knife again. I like to think that it's still intact somewhere waiting for someone else to pick it up.
That gentleman was the only death on that mission, though several other Afghan soldiers and police got hurt. One lost his foot and several others got cut up pretty good by shrapnel.
Comments
Post a Comment