powerful that it had completely engulfed the truck and nearly whited out our night vision goggles. It also did that weird thing that fire does where it illuminates everything in the foreground but makes it impossible to see anything behind it. To avoid getting clipped by one of the combatants hiding in the blind spot, we organized our assault in a linear formation. This would also reduce the odds of getting fragged by the truck firing AK rounds in every direction like a drunk Decepticon.
From the ISR footage we knew that there were six of these mangy cats that we had to herd. We found the first three right away, lying on the ground in front of the burning vehicle with their weapons beside them. They were playing dead. Their wounded breathing gave them away. Along with a couple of my squad members, we engaged directly before they could return fire or clack off their suicide vests. Play time was over. America three, Terrorists nil (that’s soccer for zero).
As we pushed past the truck, we spotted the fourth man, who had the truck’s PKM pointed at me with its 7.62x51mm hundred-round belt ready to rock. How the guy didn’t cut me in half with that thing before one of my squad members put two in his head, I’ll never know. I got lucky a lot in war. 4–0, America.
That left two more combatants to find. They weren’t dead in the vehicle, and they weren’t within the typical area of destruction you find after a meet-and-greet with an AC-130 gunship. They could be on foot, stalking us from somewhere beyond the halo of the fire. They could be mortally wounded and no longer a threat. But we didn’t know, so we couldn’t assume they were neutralized.
Finally clear of the vehicle, I crested another small berm to get a better view of the surrounding area. There were no obvious structures in the immediate vicinity that would have made for a good terrorist hidey-hole, so I knew that the remaining bad guys were probably super close. That’s when I saw the top of the head of one of them, no more than twenty meters away, as he presented himself from a prone posture to a kneeling position a little ways down the sloping berm. He was trying to aim his AK-47 up at what I imagined was my silhouette, backlit by the raging inferno behind me. Unfortunately for him, I was locked on and at the high ready with my weapon. I immediately engaged the threat with multiple rounds. (5–0, Good Guys.) As he fell, right behind him the sixth member of the Iraqi Village People finally showed himself. He was unarmed, but he was not empty-handed. Then, just as quickly as he popped up, he disappeared…in a large explosion and a blinding cloud of dust.
Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction at the beginning of “The Bonnie Situation” when Jules and Vincent are in an apartment to retrieve a stolen case for Marcellus Wallace and they forget to account for the guy who’s hiding in the bathroom? Remember when the guy bursts out with a “goddamn hand cannon” and unloads the entire clip at point-blank range and completely misses them? That’s exactly what it felt like as we stood there, well within the blast radius of a typical suicide bomber, not just alive but without a scratch on us. Final score: USA 6, Enemy Combatants 0.
Had we seen the vest before it detonated, maybe one of us would have had a spiritual awakening like Jules did, but since it happened before any of us knew what was going on, all we could really do was thank the lord that these assholes had more faith in the Prophet than they had in tactical precision. By blowing himself up against the side of a dirt defilade, at the bottom of it no less, this fucking assclown gave his bomb no room to explode. When our man hit the trigger, most of the shrapnel either blew out the back of his vest, away from us, or out the front, directly into the side of the embankment. Whatever didn’t go there sailed harmlessly up over our heads. When the sand settled and the smoke cleared, the only evidence in the immediate vicinity that this guy had even existed was the pothole where he had just been standing and the blood that coated the ground around the hole, like some kind of Salafi spin art.