The featured image is pre 1999 and I want you to note the Armored vehicles behind us. At this time we had learned that Armor was needed to negotiate the battlefield in Mogadishu. However we could not yet see where this would be employed. When these vehicles were developed, the rest of the Spec Ops community said this was a waist of money. It would never be used and was completely useless. Little did they know within 5 years these armored vehicles would be the life blood of how business was done inside IZ. If you get killed on the way to the target, well, you can’t complete your mission. So making it through hostile environments, this “waste of money” became very necessary.
However what we didn’t know was the number of IEDs we would encounter every time we left the wire. I’ve lived and missed several major IED blasts because of just dumb luck but without the truck we would have never even made it. The beauty of this truck, we’d haul ass with no lights, the savages couldn’t detonate the bomb fast enough, the explosions were late. Hell I had one blow a tire and leave a trail of sparks behind us. At the time I could not understand why everyone was calling us on the radio. Lol. Then when I popped my head out of the top hatch I was like Ohh…I get it. As there was no harm no foul, we kept trucking and got it fixed before the next set of nightly raids.
These armored vehicles did have some down sides like a litter would not fit well in the back. Also had no space for savages. So if we got a bunch of them would make do. One night we had so many, and you can’t just kill them just sayin. We cuffed them to the top and sides of the vehicles and drove through Baghdad. This was a huge deterrent for any savages watching, but it was a no go to the chain of command. The bosses didn’t like that, but we had no choice. So like good commandos we took our ass-chewing and moved out smartly, trying to hold back the personal victory giggles.
Courtesy of SOB Tactical and written by John ‘Shrek’ McPhee
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