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8 HajiGetsBlownUp I rediscovered that slightly edgy feel I used to get during a busy shift on the ambulance, situationally aware, tactical, and on my game. Having resolved my moral questions, I came to embrace this combat mind-set. It was a good feeling, but I would also be just as content to ride around in the hummer all day doing nothing. One morning in early December, while I was on patrol with B Troop out on MSR mobile, we stopped at the main gate and were visiting with the medics assigned to Voodoo Mobile when we heard a huge explosion. Our other humvee was inside the FOB getting an interpreter, and so we responded alone. Our OPs were reporting that a suicide bomber had detonated a car bomb on the highway and that U.S. humvees were hit. We rolled out to find none of the marines were hurt, but an Iraqi bystander was killed. The blast flipped an eighteen-wheeler with a tandem trailer on its side, but the truck shielded the marines from the blast. They were extraordinarily lucky. We found them forming a security cordon around the blast site, from a long way out. Initially we had no radio communications with them, as they were on a different frequency, so it heightened our concerns for them and we had to physically run over to them to make sure they were OK. I positioned our vehicle to block traffic from our end, and Sgt. Sorrento and I got out, I grabbed my aid bag and my rifle, and we ran in. We did not know what to expect, and we thought the truck driver was likely to be badly injured. He had already been removed by civilian bystanders and was being taken to a local civilian hospital by a private vehicle. We could not determine for sure if he was dead or just wounded, because the bystanders spoke only Arabic and we didn’t. After checking the vehicle, Sorrento and I ran the rest of the four 104 saber’s edge hundred meters to the marine vehicle damaged in the blast. We found five marines inside who were not injured, and they helped maintain the security cordon. When our lieutenant arrived, he took command of the scene, and we took our place on the perimeter. I spotted the bomber’s hand lying in the road, and retrieved it for identification purposes. The marines discovered the bomber’s testicles in the back of their humvees. Radical Islam holds that if you die a martyr, Allah will provide you with seventy-two virgins in heaven. We all got a huge laugh at the prospect of the suicide bomber going to reap his supposed reward of seventy-two virgins, only to find he had no balls. If that isn’t hell, I don’t know what is. Shortly after the bombing, we got a call from one of our observation posts a few miles away. They were receiving sniper fire, so we rolled out there in a hurry to support them, and the marines took over the cordon. We went through the town in a big way, searching for the gunmen, but found no one. A few hours later they called us back there, for sniper fire from a different direction. We searched more houses, but still came up empty. the firehouse bomber Positioned out in the open, right up next to the edge of Route Jones, was an Iraqi fire station. There were shops across the street and houses built right up against the back of the station, and some of the fire officers lived in them. The houses provided an ideal safe passageway, allowing firefighters and insurgents alike to approach the edge of Route Jones undetected by our observation posts. The station and some of the small shops near it had commanding views of the open areas nearby, and offered an excellent place for a triggerman to hide. While the firefighters were supposedly neutral in this conflict, we suspected they were insurgents themselves or allowed the insurgents to use their building as a vantage point. Many of the IEDs on Route Jones were placed suspiciously close to the firehouse and the shops across the street. Some days IEDs were placed directly in front of an auto-repair shop. When enough of their bombs detonated we had had it. Clearly, the insurgents could not have placed the IED without the shopkeeper knowing about it, and the attacks continued , despite...

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