Veteran's Day Special - Better Blogs VII: Lightning From The Sky
I figured for Veteran's Day, I would do something I'd been meaning to do for a while. I've been meaning to feature this blog on Better Blogs for quite some time; but the election and everything else got in the way.
Lightning From The Sky is the blog of Marine Corps Captain Charlie Benbow. Charlie is a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Iraq - his first tour in Iraq was the beginning of our latest adventure there in 2003 (Operation Iraqi Freedom). He's served as both an infantry officer and is now serving as an ANGLICO (Air/Naval Gunfire LIaison COmpany) officer. To put it simply, he paints targets for air strikes - which makes him quite the target, too.
Even though he's been in the Marine Corps since before his 2001 graduation from VMI (he enlisted as a reservist) and he's already been awarded a Purple Heart - I have a hard time forgetting the lanky Junior in Willa Moose's Trig Class at Concord High. He'd often be fast asleep at his desk while the rest of us endured the vagaries of Sin vs. Arcsin. Given his many mishaps with vechiles during high school and college - I was glad to hear that in most cases, he wouldn't be doing most of the driving.
The last 10 years yielded quite a different guy - and I've just started to wrap my mind around the fact that he commands other highly-trained professionals in high-stakes situations. Charile is a good friend of mine. Even though this is what he's chosen to do and I generally agree with the policies that send him to the places he's gone - I sleep a little better when my friend is back home and not "over there"
Here's a brief excerpt of one of his posts from a patrol:About a week before all of this happened, we inserted a large patrol in the same area using Army Blackhawk helicopters. I wasn't sure how the Iraqis would handle the helicopters, but they took it in stride and were very quick to adapt to basic heliborne operations. The operation went very smoothly, and we surprised a car-full of bad guys while searching a couple of houses. The Iraqi jundi, with no prompting or assistance from the American advisors, stopped a passing car and detained the men inside the car once a cursory search turned up a car battery, copper wire, and several digging tools. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that these guys were geared up to plant an IED somewhere. The jundi pulled the car off the road and set it on fire, and after we had left the area, we heard two large secondary explosions come from the burning wreckage. The rest of the patrol was pretty uneventful as far as enemy activity.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE
There's a lot of talk about what we're doing in the Middle East, about what it means to "support the troops", what's the next step. Now that we have the opportunity to get largely unfiltered accounts from the guys wearing the boots on the ground - we owe it to ourselves to listen to what they have to say.
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