LRS 1-3

The desert below was a sea of black. It was the hour of complete darkness, and my thoughts were wandering somewhere in that surreal blackness. An explosion sounded, and the fuselage was flooded with an ominous red flash of light. It came from the helicopter’s automated flare system, which was intended to ward off enemy heat-seekers, but more than likely we had been shot at with another rocket-propelled grenade.

Back home, people were looking forward to taking time off work, reuniting with family, and celebrating with lavish Thanksgiving meals. Meanwhile, I was freezing my ass off in a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter over hostile territory along the mountainous Iraq-Iran border. The desert nights were growing colder as the season sunk into winter, and the high-altitude air felt like a subarctic wasteland. The helicopter crew and other passengers were bundled from head to toe with cold weather gear, but my team and I had been suffering the cold for more than half an hour.

Unlike the others, we wouldn’t be returning to base. We would be living out of our packs for the next few days. The short flight didn’t warrant the unnecessary weight of packing extra snivel gear. Fortunately, we were only minutes away from our drop-off point. Soon we would be trekking through the black mountains with kit weighing well over one-hundred pounds. As the communications specialist—the RTO—I carried the team’s radio and the equipment needed to communicate with the tactical operations center back on base. My gear and rucksack were the heaviest, weighing in at one-hundred forty-eight pounds, not including my M4 rifle and its attachments. Soon the cold would be the least of my worries.

            Our mission was to confirm or deny the presence of enemy forces in a village along a major supply route between Iraq and Iran. It was already known that the area was occupied by enemy forces, but what concerned command was where the forces were coming from. Recent strikes on Coalition Forces in the region had been well calculated and devastatingly effective. It was believed that the border forces in the area were facilitating the passage of trained foreign fighters into the country. My team would try to positively identify hostile forces in the village, and submit a surveillance package so that Special Forces currently on stand-by could assault the village and round up prisoners for interrogation.

After a couple of stops at false landing zones, our First Sergeant came over the radio and announced that we had reached the true LZ. It was time for us to go to work. Like machines of war, the four of us switched into combat posture. I positioned my night optic device over my left eye, attached my suppressor to the muzzle of my weapon, and racked a round into the chamber. Amidst the drum of helicopter blades and the darkness that surrounded me, the snap of my rifle’s bolt was a reassuring sound.

Our team leader, Staff Sergeant Bryant, conducted a radio check with our senior scout observer, Sergeant Fuller, and me. I used a headset while we moved to maintain communications with the team leader and the SSO, both of whom carried small multi-band inter-team radios. The fourth man on our team, the machine gunner, Specialist Reilly, didn’t carry a radio. His primary role was support, a position filled by the lowest ranking man on the team. Ironically, however, Reilly had more combat experience than Fuller and me.

Reilly was a rambunctious soldier, which caused trouble for him in his previous unit—a conventional infantry line unit. After suffering a field-grade Article 15 for disrespecting a superior officer that stripped away his sergeant stripes, Reilly tried out for our LRS Unit, hoping to get away from the conservative Big-Army bullshit. He performed well during his assessment, but the other team leaders were hesitant to add him to their rosters because of his record of insubordination. But Bryant was a different type of leader; a rarity in the infantry world. He only cared about performance and competence. He was able to look past Reilly’s unruly attitude, and he picked him up for our team.