Taking Out The Winch

On our way to Ramadi we ran into another one of those car bombs. Luckily, we weren’t at the scene when it exploded. We arrived after the fact. There was debris everywhere and the truck was still smoking. There’s definitely no fire department here because the mess was still there on the way back. It ended up leaving the overpass black. Pieces of the truck were everywhere.

On the way back from Ramadi we ran into some Marines. They had their bot out too, looking for IEDs. So we just drove around them and moved on. At this point, bombs are no big deal. I’ve even heard a story of a local Iraqi boy who picked up an IED to show some guys in our platoon where it was. They ended up giving him candy, money, and cigarettes of all things. I heard he was begging for cigarettes.

This afternoon when we got back we had to stop off at the motor pool to drop off the trailer and some tires. As we left we didn’t realize that our winch had become unlocked and was getting released. We were leaving the gate when some of my buddies from the other team started yelling at me to stop. I wasn’t sure what all the commotion was about. I looked and saw this cable and heard one of the guys say, “you’re dragging a wire!” I didn’t realize what it was at the time. I just went ahead and yelled at the driver, Oregon, to stop. He stopped and they got out to look at it. We actually got lucky cause if we hadn’t have known we might have dragged the fence all the way back to the parking lot.