Under Contact with the Enemy

Going back to the villagers, how some of them wanted us, some of them didn’t. This one particular day we were just doing a presence patrol through a village looking for Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the villagers kept saying, no, no, there’s no one here, there’s no one here. We said alright but the hairs on your back kind of twinge a little bit. We kept asking and they kept telling us no and then we were ambushed by a significant force that were waiting for us. One of our platoons was cut off and we had to go and so they were behind us and we were spread out in formation, them behind us so we had to backtrack to try and try and get them away from contact. So when we initially headed back they had a secondary ambush set up that hit my team and I was in a small unit that day because we were just trying to help the village so I think there was maybe fifteen of us. And we came under contact right away. We took up a defensive position in these ruins. We engaged the enemy long enough for that our quick reaction force could get to us. I don’t know what happened to the village people that we were talking to. They just all disappeared. It’s like a ghost story. It went from being a pleasant day walking
through this nice farmland, canal area to all kinds of hate and discontent getting thrown at you and seen some guys get wounded. You know having to do the extraction and then extract ourselves pretty much and get out of there. That’s what you are dealing with. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, you just know it’s going to happen every day. Every day we left that wire in my time in 2007 we came under contact. First civilian contact is enemy engagements. We were engaged with the enemy every day we left the wire, sometimes twice.