Most of the stories here are either based on something that happened to me, personally, or else based on something that was told to me by someone I know which, accounting for fallable human memory, I consider to be just as accurate. Like many authors, I move incidents around and put things together that took place years apart, for narrative purposes, but it’s not total fiction for the most part. Like, 50th MRBC really did a raid with Bridge Erection Boats where an Iraqi soldier helped an American down who’s drag handle had got caught on a door frame, then got shot in the face the same night. Really happened - simplified for the story.
These next handful of pages - starting from Page 16 - are an exception. Full disclosure: I am not aware of any specific incident in which a MITT Team Commander took off into the desert in PTs for nine hours hunting mortar POO sites. I doubt it ever happened and I made it up. It’s PLAUSIBLE, barely. If you’d done that kind of thing all the time, you’d have gotten killed as the insurgents would have caught on to the pattern VERY fast and blown your soft-skinned GAZ-69 up, or shot you. First time you did it, you’d have had the element of surprise and it would have been perfectly safe. If you had some kind of death wish, you might have tried it.
By 2008, when I got to Iraq and about three years after this story takes place, the distinction between “inside the wire” and “outside the wire” was very great. Inside the wire was Salsa Night, Steak and Lobster Tails every week, Korean cigarettes for $5 a carton, rip off DVD and cheap tailored suits sold by Turks, PT belts enforced by Sergeants Major &c. We had a nice little war, and then an garrison broke out. In contrast, every movement outside the wire, even by a couple hundred feet, was treated as a combat patrol, with full combat equipment, armored vehicles, electronic warfare, machine guns test-fired, trip ticket filled out, CONOP painstakingly filled out in MS PowerPoint and paired with a risk assessment to be approved by the first LTC in the chain of command no later than 24 hours before SP, the whole works. I did that 144 times - I counted the trip tickets before we redeployed.
That was all well and good, but sometimes it got silly and we ignored it. Not to the extreme and exaggerated extent that the guy in the comic is, but a bit. One time, after a VBIED attack that killed a bunch of people very close to COS Marez, we got the mission to build a HESCO wall right on MSR TAMPA on the Western boundary of the base, to increase standoff, which was, to be clear, tactically sound. It was literally spitting distance from the ice cream side of the wall, and equally close to thousands of Iraqi cars on a four-lane urban highway. In theory, to recon the site prior to building the wall would have been a mission in and of itself, taking a dozen or so men and at least three gun trucks all night. In reality, what happened was my Platoon Sergeant and I locked and loaded one magazine into our M4s, climbed over the T-walls, and walked down MSR Tampa in our shirt sleeves pacing off distances and kicking the dirt. Anyone in the hundreds of cars right next to us could have shot us dead, or even just run us over, but they didn’t. Regular Iraqis didn’t want to, and the insurgents didn’t expect it and so weren’t ready to take advantage of our recklessness. We climbed back over the wall when we were done, which was disturbingly easy, and no one above the rank of 1LT/SFC was ever tracking it.
Likewise, once you were past the gate, the supervision level necessarily went way down. Anyone in theatre could see where each gun truck was on BFT, and sometimes you’d get someone who thought he’d used the magic of satellites to find a better vehicle fighting position from ten miles away than you could from the driver’s seat, but a man on foot has no BFT transceiver and needs no permission to start walking.