Easy Run

Ok, so our mission to Camp Speicher yesterday was described in the following ways prior to leaving.

*cake
*turn and burn
*quick
*nothin to it
*back early

Do you ever have the feeling that Fate gets a little irrated at Man's attempts to control his purpose and destiny?  No?  Well, come to Iraq and run convoy logistical patrols and you, too, will become a believer.

Camp Speicher is approximately 150 km north-west of Balad.  Most of it is on Route Tampa and passes by Samara and Tikirit.  These two cities are hotbeds of love, admiration, and resepect of all things American.  (Tikrit was Saadam's hometown and just for reference it is interesting to note that the Trouble on Tampa post detailing the break-down adventure was also on a run to Speicher.)  Yours truly was tasked as the Trail truck TC for this mission.  That truck has a different set of responsibilities than the CROW truck or the flex trucks which was great because I wanted to have a chance to learn yet another job on the fly.  Nothing like on-the-job training in a combat zone.  Relaxing!  

Because of the distance to Speicher our departure time was earlier than normal which meant that our MoPo report time was earlier.  Noon, for crying out loud.  However, due to a small nod by the weather gods to Zombie it was only 112 during prep. After prep and mission brief it was time to get the party started.  Our hero, Sgt. Scar, was assigned as the Beechmaster which sounds kinda tough and powerful, but really just means I was in charge of getting the guntrucks in the correct OOM (order of movement).  Um, this is essentially making things line up that don't normally do that on their own in nature. Being a teacher l've had a fair bit of experience with this so I was pretty confident I could pull this off.  Here is how I made it happen:

Me: Guntruck One pull to the MoPo gate and hold there.
One: Roger.
Me: Guntruck Two pull behind One.
Two: Roger
Me: Three follow Two. 
Three: Roger.

I'm not going to confuse you with all the intricate workings of military manuevers, but in short order all the trucks were lined up correctly by the talented and overly-qualified Beechmaster.  Just sayin.

Then it is off the the staging lanes to meet up with our lot of KBR tractor-trailers. In a bit of good news we discovered that we would "only" be taking 27 on the run North.  Trail is also responsible for positioning at the exit of the staging lanes to insure the "pockets" of KBR between guntrucks is correct and the total number of vehicles.  The first guntruck comes to the intersection and takes a right instead of a left and drives off in a cloud of dust.  Good start.  Once we got him turned around and headed for the actual exit it was game on.

Trail "rogers" reports from Scout and the command vehicle, closes checkpoints, and reports when major turns have been completed on the route.  This means a fair amount of radio traffic for me which did help the time go by faster.  The wait at Speicher set a Zombie recored:  SIX HOURS to load 26 trucks for the run back to JBB.  Seriously?  Are you loading these trucks by hand or something?  Here's an idea: use a forklift!  Finally we meet up with the trucks, I count everyone out, and we hit the road.  Well, not really the road yet because we get stopped at the last gate over some paperwork issue.  Zombie sat in the Entry Control Point for almost 40 minutes while some negotiations went on between our leadership and the security team.  Finally the LT came to my truck since it was last in line and we backed it up 400 meters to the main gate so he could have a quality dicussion with the person in charge there.  There was a rainbow of colorful language that lit up the night. Once we cleared that obstacle we start for home. 

Then we get a message from our TOC (Tactical Operations Center) back at JBB that the Squadron Commander had tracked our progress to Speicher and determined that we got there too fast.  He was convinced that the trip should not be possible in less than 3 hours (we had made it in about 2 hours 40 minutes) so he directed us to slow down to a max highway speed of 30 mph except for the NAIs (Named Area of Interest.....trouble spots in other words of areas where there have been recent IEDs, rockets, or small arms fire) where he wanted a max speed of 15 mph.  Hmmmmm.....so we should slow to a crawl in the danger areas?  To provide better targets or just to make sure we stay in those areas longer than necessary....or both??  Good call, Sir.  By now it is 2am and those thoughts before the mission about how it would be short one were fading fast.  Easy?  No, silly Americans, this is Iraq. 

So, we are looking forward to the drive back taking about an hour longer due to Colonel Cautious, and hoping for no mechanical problems or pesky IED ambushes to stretch it out even longer.  We dodged a bullet at one point when the guntruck closest to our front called in that there was a large box in the road that may have come off one of our trucks.  There was some radio traffic about stopping to assess what it was and possibly begin retrieval operations.  About that time Trail comes through the area and sees the box has been hit by traffic or just split when it landed and items are spread out over both lanes.  Understanding the importance of time-management when I am trying to get home and go to bed I called the convoy commander and advised him that it looked like batteries and printer supplies, that it was spread all over the road, and that the nearest KBR truck to it was already a kilometer past.  He decided that we should continue on since it wasn't sensitive material.

 Hmmm, well, I didn't really get too good a look. It might have been semi-sensitive. It could have been the codes to our nuclear arsenal for all I know........but those would be in English and Ahmed wouldn't know the difference between that and lyrics to a Neil Diamond song.  Just sayin......

Total mission time (including the MoPo and brief times) equaled  18 hours.  It should have taken 12.