Word: platoons
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...supposed to be a day off for the 1st Platoon. Some of the 300 men at Shkin are watching TV in the fort mess hall, chowing down on grits and eggs. A few are lifting weights. Specialist Richard Solloway is grumbling to anyone who will listen that Hugh Hefner turned down Solloway's request for the platoon to tour the Playboy Mansion on the next home leave...
...Platoon is out on patrol, moving through the draws and brush-covered hills along the border. Armored humvees with gunners inside are parked on the ridges, while the infantrymen below stalk through the wadis, or dry streambeds. One soldier thinks his buddy is playing a joke, hitting him in the back with a rock. But it's shrapnel. Suddenly mortar rounds are screaming in, landing all around the Americans. Sergeant David Gilstrap is bleeding; he has been hit in the face. A jagged dart of shrapnel protrudes from Specialist Robert Heiber's arm. It hurts like fire, but Heiber mostly...
...reinforcements scramble into place. Solloway and other 1st Platoon men toss on their combat gear and are quickly bucking along the Chevy track in their humvees. The platoon heads to a hilltop overlooking the ridges that's wide enough for the humvees and, if needed, for a medevac helicopter to land. The hilltop also has a clean firing line. The vehicles pull up, and company commander Captain Ryan Worthan fans his men out into the scrub pines and along the wadis, to stalk the enemy. In one wadi, Sergeant Christopher McGurk sees footprints and the remains of a fire...
...that the resistance is hardening: the assaults, says a senior military official, "are increasing in sophistication." He cites more frequent use of improvised explosive devices as well as standoff weapons like mortars. "They've been getting more and more organized," says Sergeant Joseph Teague of the 101st Airborne, whose platoon patrols the town of Ba'aj, southwest of Mosul. Teague has been ambushed twice in the past two weeks. "In the last two attacks," he says, "they've shot at us from all sides...
...Fort Hood, Texas, and said Clark "tended to have a blind spot on the human dimension ... And it hurt morale: soldiers respected him, but they didn't love him." When and where is "love" required in military training? I respected but never loved my squad leader, platoon leader, battalion commander or post commander. Yet I guess there must have been a lot of other low-morale, "hurting" people out there. What a bunch of bull, Colonel. If you're looking for love, you're looking in all the wrong places. DAN SZARMACH Pittsburgh...