I’ve talked briefly before about the life on a FOB in Iraq, at least when I was there. It’s about the closest thing to ‘normal’ that we experienced while we were deployed. We didn’t actually get to spend a whole lot of time on any base we were stationed at so when we did we took advantage of it. It was always my policy that when we weren’t on a mission and got to be on base that I was going to do whatever it was that I wanted to do as opposed to living in fear of something happening, such as an attack on the base, of which there were a number of. When we were on the base I liked to go for a run, usually at night as our base in Baqubah had spots that could potentially be targeted by snipers, but that was my ‘home’ at the time, and I wasn’t going to live in fear while at home.

We were also subject to mortar and rocket attacks while on base. They weren’t overly common, but they happened. It was always something in your mind, but not something you worried about. Mortars and rockets were usually blind shots in the dark since they couldn’t be fired from places with direct lines of sight, or we’d be able to see the people firing them just as they could see us and then it was easy enough to deal with. Mortars and rockets are what you could call a ‘fire and forget’ weapon in that once you fired it the path of the rocket was out of your hands and it was going to hit wherever it was originally aimed at. And if you were on the base that was being fired at it became a game of playing the odds. Is this one tiny explosion going to occur in the 25 meter radius where it might actually hurt me? Sure it was always a possibility, but statistically probably not, and those odds were good enough for me.

But once in a while the bad guys were able to put together a decent assault on our base. It was rare, and in all but two cases in my 15 months the base guards were able repel any assaults, and only once did we actually become involved in fighting off the attack.

In Baqubah, we had just gotten back to our base after a mission of a few days. I was sitting on my bed trying to watch a movie while my buddy next to me was reading a Harry Potter book and giving me unwanted updates on the story when we were interrupted by an enormous boom. One of those that was so big you could feel it rattle your body. We knew the sound and that it sounded like it landed just outside our tent. Without hesitation we sprinted out of our tent and into the concrete bunkers that were outside to take cover. As we sat inside the bunkers a few sporadic mortar rounds came in and landed relatively near to where we were and then there was some gunfire.

What had happened was some guy had driven a very large suicide car bomb with large canisters of chlorine inside towards the gate and it was detonated too early causing the large explosion and a rather pungent cloud of chlorine vapor to spread over the area we were living in which lingered for a few days. The sporadic mortar rounds which had apparently been intended to land on the base after the failed suicide bomber blew up the gate landed harmlessly around the base. Another attack thwarted by incompetence, and we lived on to fight another day.