24 may 2007

So "Murphy" decided to pay us another visit yesterday. Like most of his visits, it involved the vehicles, though this time it was a humvee and not a Bradley. Looking back, its now comical, though at the time laughter was the furthest thing from anyone's mind.
The day started off straight-forward enough; our mission was to escort the Physician's Assistant (PA) to a clinic in town and let him do his thing, which essentially means that we were his private taxi service.
When we prepped the vehicles, the only thing apparent was that one truck was low on fuel but had plenty to make the trip to Camp Hit where we were to pick up the PA. Once on the base, we were able to fill up the truck without much difficulty. This is where things stopped going our way.
After the PA showed up with a medic humvee, we all piled back in the vehicles to take off...the truck I'm driving (which has one person riding "shotgun" and the guy in the turret gunning) won't start. Apparently the battery is low, and needs to be jumped; out come the monster-sized cables...it still won't start. We decide that we can run the mission without this truck and start moving all our gear into the 3 remaining vehicles. Someone walks by and just on a whim tries to start it, which it does. Gear now goes back in the original vehicles, and we start moving. We're not even out the gate and another problem strikes...one of the radios isn't working properly. So we shuffle the order of trucks so that the one with the radio problem is in the middle in case something goes wrong (that way they won't get left behind on accident.) We now have 3 trucks from our infantry company and the one truck with the PA and two medics, one to drive and one to gun. We have to go back to our original base to pick up an interpreter, and drop off a sick Soldier. In the meantime, they've managed to fix the radio.
We get to the clinic in town and park the trucks so we can pull security down all the roads; since the building is on a corner, this means we can't see 2 of the other trucks. The PA does his thing, and we're turning around to head home, thinking that our day is done...here is where Murphy pulls out his masterpiece. I'm now driving the truck which is in the rear of the column, following the medic humvee driven by a guy whom I wouldn't trust to hold a spork. This guy misses the turn, and since I can't see where the other trucks are, I don't realize anything is wrong for another block. When it finally becomes apparent, we make the call over the radio and attempt to turn the truck around; the streets are too narrow, so I have my gunner back me into an alley so I can start what would have been a 3 (or more) point turn. As soon as I put the truck back in "D" it dies. Nothing is wrong with the gauges, but nothing will get this truck to restart. I'm angled about 45-degrees in the wrong direction, but the medic truck can squeeze past to get close enough to jump us. We try for half an hour to get this truck to restart, with no luck; during this time, I discover that my door will not open, but since I'm not going anywhere for the time being it doesn't pose much of a problem. Its now approaching noon, and all we want to do is get back to the base, so we decide we'll just tow it back. Would have been a good plan, with only three small hitches; A) we can't free the tow-rings on the front bumper, so we'll have to tow the truck backwards (these trucks don't have useable side mirrors and have a solid back, so no rearview mirror, either), B) the truck (already overweight because of all the armor) no longer has any power steering and C) with no power we have no AC...not even a fan to keep us cool. But hey...things might work, right?
We now have to push the truck into the street so we can hook the tow strap to the back bumper; in the meantime, we've drawn quite the crowd of civilian onlookers. We later joked that it was like a Saturday morning when your mower breaks and all of your neighbors come over to drink a beer, offer advice and stare at the broken piece of equipment. At one point, we even had some of the residents helping push the truck.
With the tow strap on, we start moving; unfortunately, my truck is still at an angle, and I almost immediately end up running into a wall...much to the merriment of the onlookers. After pushing my truck into the approximate line of travel, we try this again with some success for about 20 feet. We're now faced with our first obstacle...a tight, 90-degree corner. We made sure that the driver of the towing humvee knew to take the corner extremely slow, since I'd be trying this "dead stick." Apparently, he thought slow meant "go as fast as you can," since thats what he did. High school physics teaches that any heavy object in tow tends to take a wider arc than whatever is pulling it, and thats exactly what we did. Physics also says that an object will stay in motion until acted upon by another force; for me, that other force was a wall, which acted with great force to bring us to an abrupt halt. During our brief but wild ride my gunner (who is giving me directions, since we're facing backwards) is yelling for me to turn, and eventually just hangs on for dear life; he later said that the instructions were more for his benefit than mine, and that he could have said anything but it wouldn't have mattered. For the second time in 5 minutes I've hit a wall; since its on the right side of the vehicle no one can get out to see whats going on. After much exclaiming and threatening of grievous bodily harm to the driver towing me, he finally bumps us off the wall enough that I can get straightened out on the road. As we try this once again, we scream over the radio that if the driver doesn't take it slow around this next corner he would soon find himself as the next visual aid for our internal anatomy classes.
After successfully negotiating this corner we have a stretch of road approximately a kilometer long, so all I have to do is keep the truck in the middle of the road. It is at this point that the temperature inside the truck is now approaching 150 degrees, and we still have a long way back to base. The next obstacle is the fact that the intersection where we need to turn is a giant sinkhole, negotiable only on one side but that safe path has a giant dip approximately 5 feet deep; the sinkhole also adds to the problem that to go left we first must turn right to circumvent this lurking disaster. This is the corner the driver should have flogged the truck for all its worth, but instead he took it slow; the result: my truck coming to rest at the bottom of the dip. After many attempts and further threats, we're finally pulled clear; however, the driver of the towing humvee stopped without announcing his intention and we promptly slammed into him, further invoking the wrath of all occupants of my truck. My humvee is now facing the base, so the truck that was previously towing us can now push us the remaining .5km back to base. The logical method would be to slowly make contact, and then once the trucks are bumper-to-bumper begin to push; he instead opted for the "slam into the backend...over and over and over" method, even though by this point we were screaming at him over the radio how he needed to be driving. Besides being a bone-jarring ride, this also presented a problem as we approached the gate to the base. We have barriers set up in a serpentine fashion so that no one can simply ram the gate at full speed; the problem is that at every turn the Bradleys have started digging more dips (like the one at the intersection we just negotiated.) After being slammed into, we don't have the requisite momentum to make it up the far side of the dip; his answer: take a running start and hit us harder! We finally made it to the motorpool where the mechanics could attempt to fix our broken and battered humvee, where we actually had something go right for the first time in hours...my door opened on the first try. Unfortunately, after I peeled myself out of the truck I was immediately greeted by the driver of the tow/ram humvee who's first words were "That wasn't my fault you hit that wall...it was yours." If only looks could kill...

Besides that little adventure, things continue to go well. We're constantly seeing improvements made throughout our town; bridges have been repaired to accomodate vehicles, new businesses have begun to open up along the river, the city government has become more self-sufficient, and the IP's have earned more trust from the residents (enough trust that they are now receiving tips from locals regarding possible insurgent hideouts and weapons caches.) This once very dangerous town has really started to turn itself around.

I hope you got a laugh out of Murphy's latest escapade, I know we sure did though not for several hours afterwards. Just goes to show that all the planning in the world can't stop Murphy's Law.


All the best,
Troy