Some typical quick reaction force duties There is an incredible amount of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Iraq and the method in which it is discovered varies. A lot of the time locals will report it, sometimes they'll point it out while we're out on patrols, and sometimes we find cache sites when locals rat each other out. Sometimes we'll find it on our own, be it from patrols on the ground or from aviation units that spot it. And of course there are times that UXOs are found the hard way. Not long ago there were some local contractors on our base cutting steel with a blow torch. What they were cutting was on the ground and just below the surface were some armor piercing rounds. The torch hit a round and it exploded, injuring a few of the men. One guy caught some shrapnel in his neck and rather than waiting for us to give him a ride to the hospital, bleeding, he grabbed a cab and caught a ride into Baghdad. Sometimes Iraqis do some pretty punk rock stuff. Baghdad is a bit of a commute from our base. Regardless of how they're found, the collection is usually a matter of the explosive ordnance disposal guys driving out to the site then picking it up and putting it in their truck. Here we have an EOD guy carrying what I think is some sort of tank round. We find these quite often. They have fins on the side that unfold when fired. A field was recently discovered, full of buried UXOs, apparently by a Republican Guard camp when they hightailed it out during the invasion. EOD dug them up with a backhoe. This is usually when I put a Humvee between myself and the EOD guys. EOD is the only unit that seem to wear the kevlar groin protection religiously. Once EOD has collected enough UXOs, they load them all into a dump truck and we escort them out to a remote area for destruction. While they prepare everything, we create a security perimeter around their work area in our Humvees. On this particular day, the temperature was well into the stupid hot range, and simply sitting in our Humvees while EOD prepared to detonate their stash was incredibly painful. So I took a walk over to where they were working to ask them if they could possibly work any fucking slower when I saw this. I told them that I intended to bust their balls for working so slowly, then I told them that on second thought they can take all the time they wanted. A lot of the stuff they were handling looked unstable as hell and I didn't want to be anywhere near it. On the walk back to my Humvee, I noticed something smoking. Like an idiot I walked toward it and realized that it was an artillery round, it's ass end on fire. I didn't know what the hell to make of this, other then the fact that it was probably dangerous. I later found out it was most likely a white phosphorus incendiary round. It scared the shit outta me. I ran (sorta for my life) back to my Humvee and backed it way the hell away from the flaming ordnance. That's how hot it was: shit-spontaneously-combusting hot. On another day, we got a call to help recover a vehicle that had run over a land mine. This is the first land mine I've seen detonated in the traditional running-over-it method. Sometimes tank mines are used in roadside bombs, but they are usually rigged for command detonation. In this case, the mine was a type that didn't really contain or create much shrapnel, so these guys lost the tire to their Humvee and that's basically it, no one was hurt. On the way back to our base, we got a call that there was an Apache down. We were all like, "What?" Apache down? Are you kidding me? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?" But apparently it was real. It was frustrating as hell because we were the nearest unit to the Apache and not knowing what the situation was exactly, we assumed the worst and wanted to get there as soon as possible. But we had a tow truck with us and this stupid disabled Humvee and couldn't move very quickly. We finally managed to pass the tow truck off onto another unit that responded and we moved out to the site of the crash. Once we made it to the crash site, we found both the pilots and they were fine. One immediately started telling us about how someone on the ground fired a rocket at them and when they did the evasive action thing, they ran into some high tension power lines. They definitely clipped some power lines, two different sets to be exact, but no one seemed to buy their "guy with a rocket" story. I felt pretty bad for these guys, especially when the brigade commander flew in wanting to know what the hell happened to one of his birds. First they severed these power lines, then they managed to get this set too on the way down. Impressive. Like a lucky combination shot in pool, only I think house rules would call this a ball-in-hand scratch for the enemy. The power lines tore the bird up a bit doing what the recovery guys said would cost about twenty million dollars to fix. Ouch. After night fell, the Apache was carried back to its base by a Chinook. Here's a short video of that recovery: http://www.justanothersoldier.com/apache_recovery01.wmv