“Incoming!”
It was yelled out in a concerned yet uncertain tone of voice. I wasn’t taking any chances, especially only two weeks into our deployment.
“Get up, get up! Get into the corners!”
Our rooms are made out of reinforced concrete walls capable of stopping a rocket or mortar blast. However, the entrance to our room is just typical interior door, hollow and rickety. The last thing I wanted was my guys and I to get hit by shrapnel darting through the doorway. These thoughts all sunk in at about one-thousand miles per hour, only half the speed the shrapnel would be traveling at until it found a nice, supple target.
“Let your boys know there was a controlled detonation that went off. There will be another shortly, probably within five minutes,” smirked the runner from the Company CP (Command Post,) as we all stood near our rooms with an amount of hyper vigilance.
He was a short, thin guy who apparently took some kind of pleasure in knowing that he wasn’t scared of something that many others were nervous about. But that’s what you get after fifteen months of this place.
“Welcome to Baghdad,” he smiled again. His name isn’t important, but I’ll probably never forget that face.
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