Vulnerable

10 Aug 05:

We hit an IED today.  I thought Letcher was hurt bad at first and that fear was mind numbing.  We were driving west on a main route through the city and Roddy saw some shop owners quickly shutting their doors while others were simply running away.  Letcher saw something under some concrete slabs in the median on the left side of the road.  He realized it was a 155mm artillery round and was about to say something when all of a sudden we heard a loud explosion and felt a powerful concussion.  The cab of the HMMWV was instantaneously filled with black smoke and dust and we could not see anything.  The windshield had a jigsaw puzzle of cracks in it but none of the shrapnel penetrated the ballistic glass.  The dust in the cab was so thick that we were having difficulty breathing but no one dared to open a door in case there was another IED set up for a secondary blast.  Finally the dust started to clear and I realized that we were still rolling forward and the BFV that was in front of us was now about two feet away on our left side and a telephone pole was approaching rapidly from the front.  I told Roddy to stop and back up away from the telephone pole so we could get out of the kill zone.  I kept yelling “Is everyone okay!?” Roddy responded with “I’m okay” and Mr. T (the interpreter) said he was fine.  However, the blast had thrown Letcher down from the gunner’s turret and he responded with “I have shrapnel down my back!”  I didn’t see any blood, but I thought he said “I have shrapnel in my back” and when I saw him try to get back into the turret and fall down, I feared the worst (He fell again because he was still stunned and shaken up from the blast).  I told the patrol leader that we needed to get to Patrol Base Razor, but as we started to move, Letcher said he was okay, but just had some shrapnel fall down his back and it burned him.  So I told the Bradley that was escorting us that we did not need to go to Razor.  They dropped us off at a nearby OP and went back to secure the IED site.  I got out of the truck and assessed the damages to be three flat tires along with a cracked windshield and a cracked side window.  Most importantly, no one was hurt and that was all that mattered.  After returning to the patrol base, Doc Alladin sent Letcher to Razor in order to get a 2^nd degree burn on his back checked out.  It was a patch a little bigger than the size of a silver dollar.  They bandaged it up to keep it free from infections and sent him back.