Photo Story Monday!

"Today marks the beginning of a new weekly series. Every Monday I'll bring to you a riveting story from my tour in Iraq with pictures I've taken, unless otherwise noted.

This week's story: The Firefight of March 24, 2007

Ten days after arriving in Baqubah, we hadn't had a break in mission tempo. We went into Al Qaeda's Alamo without an understanding of the tactical importance of the city, but in the first hours we realized very quickly. We set out into the dense palm groves that blanket both sides of the Diyala River Valley without the support of our Stryker vehicles and a limited amount of visibility for Apache helicopters. We spent nearly five days walking through the groves, hopping over streams and slippery ditches. Given the large distance from our vehicles, we couldn't resupply food and water at whim. What we could carry is what we got, until we made our way back to an abandoned house on the edge of the groves every night. Carrying a backpack full of propaganda fliers, chemical detection spray, binoculars, signal panels, shotgun shells, extra ammo, grenades, 7-10 key locks (!), shotgun and disposable rocket launcher, I didn't have much room (or strength) to carry a lot of water. I opted for two quarts a day, one in my backpack, the other in my cargo pocket. I didn't even attempt to carry food rations. I'm pretty good at conserving water, but we'd start at daylight and I'd be sucking the last drops before noon. Our only option was to pick the oranges off the trees and eat them as we walked by. They tasted like a cross between sauerkraut, horseradish and evil, but biting into those oranges on the brink of heat exhaustion felt incredible."
Army of Dude

Lucky me he's starting a new series of war stories now, because I missed this whole blog while he was deployed