PART 1
First, let me say thank you again to everyone who contributed to yesterday's thread. The stories all you guys shared were far better than mine, and shed some much needed light on some of the topics I discussed, so thanks!
I decided to start a Part 2 since I managed to get in touch with some of my buddies and pry some spooky stuff out of them. To a man, they all explained away their experiences as some sort of natural phenomenon, or lack of sleep, stress etc. that doesn't change the fact that lots of guys I know experienced things they couldn't explain at one time or another.
Around the fall of 2008, we were back from Iraq and trying to settle back into the garrison mindset, dial things back a notch as it were. Everyone was waiting to go on block leave for 30 days, and come back ready for round two. It was during that time, i got promoted to Sergeant and put in charge of my first fire team.
Part of every new NCO's duties, is to provide the beer for a platoon wide NCOPD, or non commissioned officer professional development 'class.' Basically an excuse for all the sergeants to get blasted together and swap stories, share advice etc. One of the senior guys in my company had been in the Army for quite a while, he had been to Somalia for Black Hawk Down, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Desert Storm before OIF and OEF.
He told me about waiting on the Saudi side of the berm waiting to go into Iraq, stealth fighters and bombers flying by overhead to knock out Iraqi Army positions, the roar of Paladins loosing their missiles against unsuspecting armor and infantry miles away. They waited in that desert for 6 months before finally crossing into Kuwait.
By the time they got there the war was pretty much over. He was with an armored calvary unit, and saw some limited action mainly against poorly trained and equipped conscript units in ancient soviet tanks. The American war machine swept over those poorly defended positions easily, and within 72 hours the ground war was over.
Now I know everyone has seen Jarhead and seen the news footage of the 'highway of death' my buddy wasn't involved in that part of the ground action, his unit was part of the 'anvil' the retreating Iraqi's hit during their flight from Kuwait. After everything was said and done, they still spent the next few months on the ground basically cleaning everything up.
He told me stories about clearing Iraqi bunkers, and trench complexes, sifting through the remains of entire companies wiped out in bombing or whatever. Up to this point, what he described was pretty typical of a major ground action, but I still can't imagine finding myself in the position of being in a major conventional war. He went on to describe one day in particular, toward the end of his time on the ground.
they woke up from their hastily dug fighting positions in the middle of the desert, wiped the grime out of their eyes, ate a quick MRE, and trucked to a destroyed Iraqi radar site. His platoon was tasked with collecting any intelligence they might find, and collecting dog tags off of the corpses that littered what seemed like the entire Kuwaiti desert. They still had to be careful, a handful of guys had already been killed by booby traps that the Iraqi's strung up before retreating.
They arrived onsite and started their sweep, there were dozens of charred corpses scattered around outside, the site was a relatively deep and well constructed bunker, that contained the CP, and a trench line about 100 meters long. Strewn about were pictures of wives and kids, personal effects, letters, books. anything that hadn't been destroyed in the bombing was collected by the troops as war trophies, or brought back to S2 for analysis.
He found himself alone, down in the bunker. It was a rectangular concrete box, with a machine gun slit in the front, think Saving Private Ryan. The roof was half collapsed, with a large hole punched through it where a bunker buster had burrowed down and incinerated the occupants. There was a dead Iraqi slumped across a DSSHK machine-gun ( the soviet version of out .50 cal.)he said even then, he got a really creepy vibe down there. Aside from the dead machine gunner, there were the remains of at least three others in there, but they were closer to being completely atomized, they must have been directly under the bomb when it fell. My buddy quickly snatched the machine gunner's dog tags off his neck, stuffed them in his pocket, and left back to the surface.
Later on, the platoon was gathered together eating lunch in the scorched sand, he described it like jarhead where every time he took a step it left a footprint of white sand in the blackened top layer. Anyway, the guys were comparing stories about what they had seen, and what trophies they had collected. They got down to the dog tags they had, and started comparing the number they had managed to collect. Some guys had a pile of tags, others only had a few, my buddy had the one set he found on the machine gunner. He went on to tell some friends about how creepy it had been in the bunker and how he felt kinda bad for that gunner, manning his position to the last, maybe covering his buddies' retreat in the face of the Americans. One of his friends asked 'what machine gunner?' He had been down in the bunker and hadn't seen any bodies down there.
Thinking his friend was mistaken, maybe there was a different bunker he hadn't seen, he went back after lunch to make sure. He stepped down into the bunker, and sure enough, there was the DSSHK, with no gunner... He said at this point his hair was standing on end, he was sure the dead guy had been there. Thats when he noticed the drag marks through the charred topsoil. They led across the floor and up the steps to the surface. He followed them out away from the fighting position, about 50 meters. Lying in the sand was the gunner. His body was frozen in a low crawl position, left leg straight back, right knee cocked up, left arm reaching forward and raised off the ground as if reaching for something, maybe a way home.
He assumed one of the sick fuckers in his platoon had moved the body but when he asked no one fessed up. On the drive back, he realized the machine gunner had been facing towards the Iraqi border