Armor Geddon

I was doing a review of the mil sites on my blog roll looking for this quote:

"Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Which I found here.

And I came across Armor Geddon. A very interesting site with lots of good war stories. Armored of course.

And I would have been living at FOB WARHORSE, which is paradise compared to FOB Scunion. The food, the gym, the nice phones, the entertainment that comes there. The only group that came here was the 1st ID Band. And they were damn good. God bless them for being the only ones to visit us. And I would not have had to pull force protection and guard duty on the towers in this FOB. And no more tank maintenance and changing two sides of track every 3 weeks. The tank maintenance was blowing us out of the water at the time. We had put a year’s worth of OPTEMPO on our tanks in 3 months. The BRT, on the other hand, had humvees which are a joke in terms of maintenance. And they did a lot of the high profile raids and missions. They were around for most HIC situations.

Well the only reason I turned it down was because of the men I was with. SGT P made me laugh my ass off every single day of the week. SSG Terry. Well he speaks for himself. But I remember him saying again and again how we were the tightest this platoon has ever been. And we were like a family. I loved my crew. And my platoon sergeant was an awesome NCO to be partners with. Laid back, easy to work with and competent as hell. There was no way I was going to choose to give up this family. Plus, I had only been with my platoon for 6 months at the time. I wanted to be with them longer. Now I’m on month 16 and still running. That’s unheard of these days. I consider myself the luckiest platoon leader in the army. I joined these guys before the mission readiness exercise in October of 2003. I went to a gunnery in January and deployed with them. We've been through major combat and now we are all coming home together in a few months. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Go and browse around. Lots of good stuff. Here is some more:

“Hey Langford, pass me another muffin," I called to my loader. He reached over to his stowage box and pulled a few Otis Spunkmeyer muffins for SGT P and me. This and Gatorade was all we had put in our mouths so far. And for me, plenty of Levi Garret chewing tobacco as well. I never smoked cigarettes, except for that one SGT P gave me right before entering Baqubah. And that was only because in the mad dash of things, I had left my chew behind. But the nicotine helped us all stay awake now. And the muffins kept us full. They were like 300 hundred calories each. And that’s all we had eaten for the past 2 days and 2 nights.

Oh sure, support guys had brought chow out to the LRP. But who had time to eat chow from Camp Fallujah when you were in the middle of battle? Well, the guys on the ammo and fuel trucks did. But we came in to get fuel; there was no time to eat. Our wingmen and scouts were in the fight and we just raced back here to juice up the tanks and get our asses back in the shit. If our pigs didn't guzzle so much JP8, I'd never leave the battlefield.

We had spent the night in our tanks again, observing the eastern side of the city with little activity. There wasn't a soul in sight. For all that hype the intelligence folks warned us about the bad guys having night vision capabilities, they sure didn’t fight much at night.

And more:

The 25mm was like a sledgehammer when you were right next to it. Oh man, it made my head hurt. SGT P didn’t feel a damn thing down in the turret. But I loved loud noises. I stared at the gun. Each round was a red laser beam zipping out of the cannon. The car danced with each round that impacted. It looked like a beast was inside and he was punching his way out. The hood rose up. The door blew out. The tire exploded. The roof bowed out. It reminded me of that scene in Ghostbusters 2 when Ray puts that pink slime in the toaster and it starts dancing to music. The car didn’t detonate. “Ok, that’s enough”