[HaplessOperator]

Another prior service dude here. Signed up on my 17th to lock in a spot as soon as I could and hang out with the other poolees, moto as hell to get into the infantry to my recruiter's confusion and sadness, and did four years active in the Corps as a rifleman, 2004-2008. Drilled for a while in the Reserve through 2012.

Made the joke frequently that based on every piece of media I'd ever seen about Marines my entire life, I was gonna fight aliens here or somewhere else, but they kept sending me to Iraq.

First tour kicked off in June of '05, advance party for a relief in place of a couple units around Karmah. We ran some pretty large changes; unit prior to our arrival had been hot on running mechanized patrols with a detachment of light-skinned vehicles and a large complement of dismounts walking along, usually doing a couple big daylight patrols around the city at fairly predictable intervals. We changed things up and did most of our work at night, generally with elements no larger than a squad plus a few attachments. Ran loaded for bear most of the time; we had a solid BC and CO, and the BC had dispersed basically the entire armory down to the rifle companies, and our CO mirrored this policy, so we usually had a few M240s and a SMAW that went out with the squad being committed by a platoon for patrol to rub shoulders with the SAWs. Ran LAWs and AT4s like candy. Weapons company was formed into QRF elements in armored humvees, usually a couple trucks with .50s, a Mk19 truck, and a TOW truck with a 240 up top on the dual mount. First few weeks, I think the guys we were fighting thought they were gonna eat good, hitting a nice little squad off on its own, and then a half dozen rockets get launched, a half dozen machine guns open up, and grenades just keep flying for the next fifteen minutes, and then the QRF element rolls in, and then a squad of tanks show up, and then a couple Cobras roll in. Philosophy seemed to work well, and from my estimate was about the best way to deal with the situation we had; make as big a footprint as you can, up-gunned as you can manage on foot, lock down any element that messes with you with about as much fire as a weapons platoon could lay in, and then roll in the supporting arms. Not too much different from running contact patrols with supporting assets in the wings in a conventional fight, come to think of it, and a smart adaptation of it all looking back. Got to knock over a couple cities, Zaidon being one during Trifecta, which had a bunch of jackass bombmakers and snipers from Fallujah set up shop after they got chased out of that town a year or so prior.

Second and third tours were convoy security and raids along MSRs, with a bunch of us grunts attached to a truck platoon to give them some sack for the firefights. Ended up running a security element of a couple dozen Marines in a quartet each of up-armored humvees and 7-tons configured ground up as gun trucks that could dump heavily-armed dismounts, with a setup that'd probably make a couple of y'all T2K players jealous. I'll have to go into that sometime, but I remember thinking we'd be hell on wheels against a bunch of Russians when the 2008 Georgia thing kicked off (and still do, for what it's worth).

Saw a lot of beautiful places there, though, I'll tell you that.

I've got a year left to join the National Guard if the mood strikes. Suppose I'll see how the election turns out; might go for one last hurrah.