The Weekly Standard published a fantastic article by Michael Fumento on troops in Ramadi. He has now placed a copy on his own website, with the addition of links, photos and videos. You need to read it all to get the in-the-action flavor of the piece. Here are a few excerpts:

Ten days before I arrived, during the night of April 9, 1st Battalion suffered its worst casualties of the deployment in a mini-"Black Hawk Down" situation. An IED flipped a Humvee, killing the driver from D Company. An M-1 Abrams tank went to retrieve it. For good reason, Corregidor has a large complement of tanks and other armored vehicles. Unfortunately, another IED made a lucky strike on the tank, cutting the fuel line and setting it ablaze. The men inside scrambled to safety, but now things got really messy...

So the troops set up a perimeter and waited. As with the real downing of the Black Hawks in Somalia, the burning tank attracted bad guys from throughout the city. They kept pouring into the area to kill the infidels. But with their night-vision equipment and laser pointers, Americans own the night. The enemy came in droves and they died in droves. "The insurgents were so desperate to gain momentum against us that they were literally running into the streets to plant IEDs right in front of us or throwing them over walls," says Claburn. "It was purely amazing." By the time the rounds had stopped flying and the tank was recovered, 30 jihadists were confirmed dead. Disaster had been averted. But the price in blood was high. Two more soldiers from Headquarters Company had died when another IED ripped their Humvee apart. Later the engineers whose job it was to detect and remove IEDs came into Col. Clark's office, apologizing with tears in their eyes. "I told them you tried; you did your best; but you can't get all of them all the time," Clark said....

Right place at the right time indeed. I look where I had been standing exposed to the windows. About where my head had been there's a large pock mark in the opposite wall. The bullet might have drilled me had I remained there; I can't say. Then I see the window. There's a nice clean hole just where my upper right side was – where my body armor has absolutely no protection, much less the new side ceramic plates everybody in 1st Battalion wears. This puts me in a pensive mood. No Killionesque whoops. But there's little time to contemplate my mortality before the order comes to "exfil" for real and start trekking back to the pickup point at a good trot. All quiet on the OP Hotel front. Or so I think. But now it's going to get really bad.

Posted by: cbjohnson at 08:19 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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