Last convoy

This is a bit dated, but now I've got the internet access I've needed...

I’ve written about the few other convoys I’ve run on my private blog for family to know about just how scared I was. For the rest of you, I was never scared.

The last convoy run I made just last Thursday (10 April 08?)- not a bad way to spend my last full day at An Numaniyah- actually only part of it- half of it was spent at Scania. In a nod to The Office, I was named ‘the Assistant “to the” Assistant Convoy Commander’- 3rd in charge- (kind of like when Pam secretly helped out Dwight!). We made the typical run for mail, stop by finance, and the maintenance shop to get some of the vehicles worked on. We got to see the typical sheep and camels on the side of the road, and thankfully, another uneventful run in terms of enemy activity.

The only two remarkable pieces to this convoy were that 1) we had one of the new team in the lead, rather someone from the old crew, and 2) we had a couple of “Iraqi Army (IA) gun trucks” (nothing more than pickups with gun stands in the back) in the convoy as well. They had come along to get “Rhinos” mounted on the fronts of their trucks (the Rhino is a deceptively simple device to defeat IEDS- what normal people call “bombs”).

Why were Iraqi Army trucks getting Rhinos? Well, because the 3rd ITB team wanted to keep their guys alive. Primarily for their food runs, especially bread. The Iraqi Army guys have to make convoys just like we do for stuff, and given that much exposure on the road, it was one more way to keep them alive and keep the samoon coming. Got to keep the soldiers fed. The IA vehicles are much more vulnerable to IEDs than our vehicles are.