“Hollywood, this is Batman,” my rear gun truck reports, “my gunner has eyes on and we are laying it down with the fifty.”  Batman and his crew chose to mount a cal .50 heavy machine gun for this mission and at this point, I can tell that he is glad that he did.  My truck and the middle of the convoy are starting to make our way out of the kill zone and for the time being, it looks as though we have pushed through unscathed.  A few more tracer rounds cut through the air as we clear a nearby bridge.  “How we doin’ up top?” I call up to my boys in the front.  “Rubby Ducky…up.”  “Chief….up.”  “This is Hollywood, roger, we’re good too.  Batman, you guys good to go?”  “This is Batman….hooooaah!”  Batman is happy they got to shoot at someone, his answer over the radio sounds more like that of child exiting a rollercoaster ride than a gun truck commander in Iraq.  Later that evening we’ll find bullet holes in a few of our trucks; this is when the reality check comes in to play.  Either way, I’m just happy everyone is okay and we are continuing to push south. The palm groves and small residential areas soon fade into the darkness

and the road ahead slowly transforms into a winding desert abyss.  Depending on your point of view, this can mean one of two things for your convoy as it attempts to limp home without any further incidents.  On the one hand, no more houses and greenery means no more places for bad guys to shoot at you from.  On the other hand, however, this also means city lights and local populous are no longer a deterring factor for the insurgents wanting to emplace roadside bombs.  It’s seems funny in retrospect but these are the things I think about each and every time one of my convoys is approaching a different area or situation. On this particular night, before I am even able to finish that train of thought, the scenario I was anticipating quickly becomes a reality.  “Hey Hollywood, this is Chief, it looks like we got a haji to the 3 o’clock on a cell phone.  He’s about 200 meters off the road standing by one of those mud huts.”  “Roger Chief,” I respond, “we’ll get eyes on.”  This is not good, at 0330 hrs in the morning this is very not good.  It takes a minute for my center portion of the convoy to reach the suspected area and by that time, my gunner is unable to spot any shady, cell phone-toting, characters.  “Chief, this is Hollywood, we got negative eyes on.  Batman, lemme know what you guys can see when you pass.”  I say this out of habit, but unfortunately I know deep down that it is probably already too late.  “This is Batman, roger.”  And that was the last radio traffic that came over the net for a while.  For the next 10 to 15 miles everyone is too busy preparing for the worst to worry about

talking on the radio.  Regardless of the fact that we are trucking along at 60 mph, the road ahead now seems to crawl by as if we were towing a 100-ton boat through the sand. All of the adjustable police spot lights on all of my gun trucks are sweeping across the open desert now in a frantic matter.  We know that we probably wont be able to see the IED that hits us, we’re just hoping to scare off the trigger man from detonating it.  The speed increases drastically, then decreased just as fast.  The guys up front must be getting extra suspicious of every pothole and piece of debris they pass. The only way I can think to describe the feeling that is surging through everyone’s veins at just that moment is to compare it to getting a shot.  It’s the anticipation that gets you really, that moment after the nurse has prepped the needle and you are left waiting for

to the starless desert night; my driver struggles to avoid colliding with them as he squints through his night vision goggles. “Okay, stop stop stop.  We need to scan the area for secondary devices and find a good place to provide overwatch.”  I can see that the driver and passenger have already bailed out of the IED-ridden truck and are being attended to by their fellow Army truck drivers.  “Thank God,” I thought to myself, “everyone looks to be okay.”  “Rubber Ducky, Hollywood, what you guys got up there?”  By now my lead gun truck has zoomed a small distance in front of the blast site and is scanning the endless horizon for secondary attackers and/or fleeing triggermen. “This is Rubber Ducky, Im not seein’ anything up here, you want us to push out?”  And this is the point where my position as convoy commander becomes the most frustrating of all.  My men and I have just been the victims of a complex and well-organized

enough away from the det-site for us to cordon off the emplacement area and wait for EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) to arrive.  These bomb-diffusers by trade have one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq, and god only knows why they volunteer to do it.  On this night, however, I am glad as ever to have them at our disposal (no pun intended).  A few hours flash by and I can hear them contacting me on the radio.  Without disclosing too much OPSEC (operational security) information, rest assured that we worked with these guys long enough that night to determine exactly what it was that hit us and what we can try to do in the future to prevent it. A couple more lonely hours roll by and we have successfully piggie-backed our mangled vehicle onto the one of the flatbeds of another truck.  It’s been a long and intense night to say the least,  but for now we