Being EOD

In the EOD world, most of what we do are response missions. A unit finds an IED, calls us, and we respond to get rid of it. Sometimes though, a unit will ask that we go with them on an extended mission because of the expectation of encountering explosive hazards. These are what we call planned operations (ops). As a rule, we try not to take part in planned ops because the units that are still patrolling will be without EOD response support. Every now and then, however, we make an exception. Operation Ghar Sapaar was one such exception.

This is how we ended up on a Blackhawk helicopter headed south, closer to the Afghan-Pakistan border. This part of our AO (area of operations) is known as “the Wilderness.” At its southern most point is a former combat outpost that was abandoned by the US because of the volume of attacks. So with this is in mind, we packed up our gear, loaded up in a bird, and headed out to join our brothers patrolling down there. We weren’t on the ground 30 seconds before we were told to drop our bags, grab some bang (explosives) and go check out a hole being dug by three men south of our position. Hiking down the wadi (dry river bed) with some heavy packs, we noticed the sheer number of people watching us from above. Groups of 25-30 Afghans all squatting on the mountainside above us, just staring as we walked. Turns out, that was pretty much their plan for the entirety of our stay. Everywhere we went, they were watching. This particular hole, however, was empty. Either they really were planting a tree, as they claimed when the Americans grabbed them up, or one of the many “watchers” let them know we were coming and they abandoned emplacing the IED. We’ll never know. Unfortunately, that’s the closest we ever came to finding an IED the entire time we were down there, causing us to be glorified infantrymen for a few days. Basically we walked with really heavy crap on our backs for really long distances. We walked into villages and stood by through the searches just in case, except when we came to a home with women inside that kept our men from searching. Then I went in, awkwardly searching while the women cowered in a corner with their children. Simultaneously feeling angry, disgusted, and apologetic, I went through their home with my glasses and Kevlar (helmet) off so that they could see my face better. Emerging back into the light of day, I looked at the deep blue sky and thanked God that I was born an American. Here these women submitted to the men, but those very men had no choice but to listen to what I said and follow the orders that I gave. A small point of satisfaction in an otherwise uneventful couple of days. That is, until we were getting ready to leave.

In the planning process for this mission, I said to myself, “Don’t forget those SealSkin socks you have.” And then I promptly threw my bag on my back and left without those very SealSkin socks. Now, this would have been completely unremarkable if not for one very important detail: the wadi we were walking through wasn’t exactly dry. The snow run off had created a fairly deep stream with a few additional offshoots that we had to cross. SealSkin socks, if you didn’t know, are waterproof. Yeeeeah, now you are beginning to see the ramifications of forgetting those socks. In fact, my teammates and I had only packed three pairs of socks and one pair of boots each. So two days of walking through the stream had left our boots and socks a little bit wet, even though we tried to be careful to stay dry while we were crossing. This leads us nicely into the next poor decision I made, which came at the very end of our last patrol. As we all carefully picked our jump points back across the stream, I said to myself, “Screw it, we’re leaving in just a couple of hours,” and proceeded to bull my way across the water, to the delight of the infantry guys we were with. Impressing them, as it turns out, usually means inviting suffering upon oneself, which is exactly what I had just done. We repacked our stuff and set off for the HLZ (helicopter landing zone) where we would wait for the birds to come and pick us up. Within 10 minutes of dropping our stuff for the hour-long wait, an Afghan National Army soldier decided that he didn’t much like being a soldier anymore, or America for that matter, and quit. He walked up the side of mountain and disappeared, grumbling “America no good” when asked where he was going. Since Afghans going AWOL is nothing particularly new, we kind of shrugged and went back to waiting. Just as our feet started to become too cold for comfort, we heard the most beautiful sound known to man, rotor blades cutting through the air. We rucked up and stood under our heavy bags, relief at leaving making them so much lighter on our shoulders. And then came the moment that will live in eternal infamy for all of us. The First Sergeant came walking up and announced, “We can’t exfil until we find that ANA guy.” Complete silence followed for at least 10 seconds, then “Say again, 1SG?” came out of no less than five people simultaneously. The birds were being called off, and we had been ordered to find the deserter. He’d had an hour head start, it was completely dark and 30 degrees colder than the day had been, and they wanted us to do WHAT? While the search parties set to finding one Afghan in a mountain of haystacks, the three of us on the EOD team hunkered down against a rock wall, arms linked together, literally snuggling for body heat. No amount of body heat could help our soaked feet, however. We stood and walked in circles, held a lighter to our boots, we even pulled our feet out of our boots and did a combat sock change hoping dry socks would help, but to no avail. Our dry socks quickly absorbed water from our wet boots and we were back to square one. After waiting for a few hours in the cold darkness, we were finally ordered back to the outpost we’d been staying in, so we wearily climbed the mountain again and waited for another two hours until the search was called off. Back to the HLZ we went, now without any moonlight to help us navigate the rocky wadi. The silence of our movement was occasionally broken by the sound of bodies and bags hitting the ground followed by muffled curses. Again, we settled in for the hour wait until exfil time. Again, we shivered and tried to ignore the pain in our feet. And again, we heard that most beautiful sound in the distance. Our exhaustion forgotten once more, we jumped to our feet and threw our bags on our backs. We stood listening to the birds get closer, ready to run across the wadi into the back of the Chinook helicopter that would be our savior from the night’s misery. Closer…circling…never landing. And then the radio came alive. “HLZ has shifted, you guys need to move.” Without a word we were all walking quickly, almost jogging, willing to do just about anything to get picked up by the birds. The thwak-thwak-thwak of the choppers overhead seemed to set the rhythm for the soft thumping of our feet against the ground and the steady in-out whoosh of our breath as we made our way to wherever we needed to be to leave the Wilderness behind. Ironically, we ended up directly below the outpost we had walked from earlier, kneeling on the slate covered ground between the various streams we’d been crossing, quickly getting a count to make sure everyone had made it. We looked up, relieved, as the Chinook came down into the canyon between the mountains. We were going to have to cross the deepest part of the runoff to get to where it was landing, but no one cared at this point. We turned our backs to the bird as it came down, the downward force of the air under its blades spraying water over us, and then we ran. Two by two, side by side, we booked it through ice-cold knee-deep water while our faces were whipped by water and dirt, leaning against the hot air pushed out by the whirring sets of blades above us. Almost there. I glanced up at the blades, alight with static electricity, for just a fraction of a second before running up the ramp and plopping down with my bag still on. Sitting with my bag against the outer wall, I watched through the windows on the other side of the Chinook as the mountains gave way to the sky. We were leaving. With the buzzing of a singular sound, it was like silence in reverse, a peaceful loudness that crowded out everything else. We didn’t speak, we didn’t move, we just sat. I leaned my head against my bag and watched the stars through the window, wondering how exactly I could ever tell this story and knowing no words would ever do it justice.

Now that I’ve read this a couple of times, I was absolutely right when I thought about how impossible it would be to put the whole experience into words. I hope that if nothing else, I can convey the part of the story that will never be told on the news. All over this country, American Soldiers are cold, frustrated, and tired, but will only ever complain to each other (and occasionally to Mom and Dad). Despite any complaints that might slip out, the most impressive thing is that the next day they will all go out and do it again. Whatever it takes to get the job done. This is why, even though the Army can frustrate and infuriate me more than just about anything else, I can’t help but enjoy even the worst missions and conditions…I know that we will overcome the misery together and be that much closer for having shared it.

Until next time…

Best,

1LT DeAnna M. Comstock, EOD

Operation Ghar Luma RPG Disposal

So the bad guys are hanging out underground. The suck previously mentioned in an earlier post has pulled in our AO so thoroughly that we’ve hit a new personal record for consecutive days without an IED call. That’s not to say no IEDs have been planted or found, oh no, far be it for me to make such a claim, since our free wheeling Afghan counterparts like to do cool things like straight up pull IEDs out of the ground. For real, this happens on the regular. I haven’t quite figured out why they think this is a good idea, but no form of admonishment has worked yet. Honestly, the Afghans are probably the best robots we have. The huge problem with this is that there are procedures for everything, and like anyone who watches CSI knows, evidence is one of those precious things that you collect with care and precision…so shooting an IED until it is literally leaking homemade explosives is probably not the path to a conviction. Of course, in the back of my mind lies that nagging reminder: “Enjoy the break, because it might be the last one you see.” Despite the crawling minutes, hours, days, and weeks, time continues always to march forward. And with the coming days will arrive that special time of year that Talibs and Haqqani look forward to like a rabid baseball fan looks forward to Spring Training: The Fighting Season. Every time we talk about The Fighting Season, its like talking about the Apocalypse. Like all of a sudden the population will rise up in mass revolt and spend their time dreaming of ways to kill the evil Americans. In reality, only a part of the population will be doing that, the rest will be just trying to survive. Still, with time ticking steadily away to the inevitable devolution into increased OPTEMPO, this is our best chance to take a breather, watch some movies, and harass each other with Nerf guns. And that is exactly what we have done, despite jumping to our feet every time the phone rings or the door knocks. We all lament the boredom of inaction, while also enjoying uninterrupted gym time and watching our favorite TV show over dinner. I haven’t been pulled out of the shower for a call in weeks. What can be better than that?

In the interim of actually responding to calls, I can tell you what isn’t better than that: all day operations that result in only one cache found. Sure, we get to plan around operations because we know when they will happen and what our role will be. We hit the gym, take our showers, and pack the truck up with plenty of time to spare. So why is this so bad? Because for 12 hours we sat in our truck waiting for the supposedly inevitable IED find. Which meant sleeping sprawled across a gunner’s stand (steel) and a cooler (plastic) with my legs propped up on a robot, while still wearing my armor (four ceramic plates).  Call me crazy, but I’d rather wait for a call in our hooch. Even if that means being mid-workout or mid-shower when its time to roll. To be fair though, I have to admit that each of us was happy to hoist our gear on our backs and hike up to the cache that was found. And even happier to then merrily place 60 pounds of C-4 on the bad guys’ toys and blow it all straight to hell, thus completing our role in the first operation that requested our assistance. All in all, any day that we all return to Camp Clark intact (albeit cranky) is a good day, and a day worthy of being called a success. With that in mind, we’re still standing by, still ready to go.

Until next time…

Best,

1LT DeAnna M. Comstock, EOD

Bagging Evidence or Dancing to the Beat? You'll Never Know...

There is a moment during our preparation to roll out on a call that always inevitably comes:

“Who brought their iPod?”

The answer to this question is make or break for the mood in our truck on the rest of the call. If silence or groans follow, it will be a little less jovial, a little less of a party on wheels, if I may. But if the answer is an iPod triumphantly thrust into the air, no matter the difficulties that follow we will be buoyed by the rock/rap/shameless pop music flowing through our headphones. In fact, on the 8 hour call I mentioned in the previous post, at no point did the music stop playing. Let’s all pause here and say a quiet thanks to Apple for this modern day miracle…

Now let me go ahead and explain, because no doubt someone (probably you, Dad) is thinking: “Shouldn’t they be paying attention? Shouldn’t they be more alert to their surroundings? Music surely would be a distraction!” Well, let me ease your minds. Our truck, even at an idle, is so loud that we have to use headsets just to protect our hearing, let alone communicate with one another. Through our headsets we are able to talk to each other while the music plays in the background, while we also monitor multiple radio frequencies so we can communicate with our security elements (the music is automatically muted if we key our mikes to talk to them). So I can assure you, my dear readers, that we do not at all compromise our mission with our background music. In fact, the set up to hook in our iPods is a left over from the previous EOD team out here.

So, next time you envision the adrenaline rush of driving towards an IED, don’t forget to include the image of us singing along to “Baby” by Justin Bieber (seriously, that happened), or the classic “Livin’ on the Edge” by Aerosmith (happened today while we drove along a cliff, I can’t make this stuff up). Also, when you are imagining this, please remember that the two guys in the front seats are horribly off key, while I’m hitting every note up in the turret. That’s what I hear in my headset, anyway.

Until next time…

Rock On,

1LT DeAnna M. Comstock, EOD

The view on my drives to meetings, pre-snowfall.

I often find myself walking to a meeting completely caught up in the beauty of my surroundings. The mountain tops are covered in snow, and seem to be layered on top of each other like some idealistic Bob Ross painting. Happy little mountain tops, all reaching for the heavens. When I return to the reality of this world, however, I am reminded that those mountains are brutal terrain that a few unlucky Army souls are tasked with patrolling. It is their task to walk through the snow that masks uneven, treacherous terrain in the hopes that we can control the passageways often used to move weapons and people into our area of operations. This, as I’m sure you can imagine, sucks. At some point in the near future this suck will also belong to me, albeit temporarily, as my team members head home for their 15 days of free leave in America. Luckily, by that time I will not have to contend with the snow, just the terrible terrain and even thinner air. Ironically, this terrible suck does not come close to the far worse suck (in our book, anyway) of having no calls for an incredible 26 days. This is the suck now attached to my team in the mountains. This is the suck that my team here at Camp Clark cannot help but laugh at and rub in at every turn. This is our rallying point during our suckiest of times. 26 days! Oh, the horror. As the dry spell drags on for our three woe-begotten souls in the mountains, my teammates here have found unique and merciless ways to remind them of our grand achievements (in our minds) in IED disposal. The best, and most fortuitous, of these methods came on Day 23. SGT Wolter had placed a late night call to SSG Talbert, the team leader of our guys in the mountains, to remind him that we had done no less than 10 incident calls since their last one, when lo behold, we got yet another call. Wolter listened quietly to Talbert’s attempted comeback before cutting him off with, “We got another call, I gotta go,” and hanging up on him, much to our delight and amusement. Little did we know, we were about to respond to an 8 hour marathon call filled with both high adventure and extreme boredom. It was one of those calls where the coolest parts of our job met the limits of plain stupidity, plunging us into excitement and frustration all at once. And so it was that at hour 6, as we sat silently in the cold early morning hours, tired and irritated, the quiet was broken over our internal radio. “23 days, can you believe it?” And the ensuing laughter, fueled by exhaustion and irony, went on for an unreasonable amount of time, until cold tears formed in our eyes. A few hours later we dragged ourselves into bed feeling worn and giddy at the same time, making jokes about the misery we had just experienced, and knowing we had scored a win for America.

For the record, while we love to impart misery on our mountain counterparts, my three teams continue to lead the company in incidents cleared. Also, Talbert’s team doesn’t even come close to the current going record for most days without an incident. One team from my company has yet to respond to a single one since arriving in country. Now that SUCKS.

Until next time…

Best,

1LT DeAnna M. Comstock, EOD

I wrote the following on my iPad while driving back home from a college visit with my younger sister, Meaghan. I never gave much thought to sharing it, but I figured it probably gives the best insight of my mindset before leaving. Enjoy.

There is something beautiful about the smell of industry. It’s grime and filth, all too familiar and welcoming on the stretch of 95 passing through northern Jersey. It’s a smell that New Yorkers derisively turn their noses up at, including myself, and yet it reminds me that I’m on the road home. The orange glow of a thousand bulbs lighting parking areas, airports, smokestacks, and shipping ports stretches as far as I can see.  It’s such an unnatural light made commonplace in this busiest of American corridors. Rising to my west is the small cluster of Newark’s biggest buildings, while ahead waits the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple, the city so nice they named it twice. The one and only New York, New York. It rises now to my east as we speed somewhat jarringly toward the GWB. Ten years later I still look at the empty flatness of the southern tip of the island with anger and the flaring despair that strikes me when I try to absorb all of the losses of the fateful Tuesday morning that changed the world. Still, in the blankness of the skyline, I can see the incredible rise of my favorite landmarks for “almost home.” I’d spent my childhood searching out the towering twins as the first sign that whatever long drive I was on would soon come to a close. For a kid with an incredibly small bladder, this was a make or break sign that I could make it home. At 17, I knew all too well that if the towers fell it would be the greatest moment of loss in a day that seemed never-ending in its toll. A loss in lives, to be sure, and an irrevocable loss of New York’s greatest landmarks. Now ten years older, and (hopefully) ages wiser, I see how much more has changed than just the skyline. Neatly encapsulated in the past decade are the flare and drop of American patriotism, the many battles on and off the actual battlefield, the rise and fall of the economy, the final punctuation of revenge brought on the guiltiest of the guilty. How much nicer it would have been to have a swift and clear reprisal on the very ones who perpetrated the most vile act of the new century, but it was not to be. Instead we’ve faced two difficult and protracted wars with less clarity by the year and too little in the way of tangible victory (at least from a civilian stand point). It has been a difficult ten years to be sure. Heading home though, for the last go around before joining the fight started here so long ago, I find myself warily hopeful for the next ten years. I can’t place this hope on a specific reason or reasons, just the vague notion that I have seen with my own eyes the best of America, and I trust that it is going to be okay. I have found my way to fight back against the injustice brought on my neighbors on 9/11, and I know that I am where I need to be. I do not know a better sense of peace than to be where I believe I belong, doing what I believe to be the best job I could ask for. It is a leap of faith, I know, to trust that it will all turn out alright.

That is all I wrote. As I recall, I got distracted by actually really looking at New York and the drive home. Anyone who knows me is aware of my stalwart belief that New York and its residents are superior to pretty much everyone else on the face of the earth…we own the Yankees, for crying out loud. This is why, despite being a Florida resident who is stationed in Hawaii and living in Afghanistan, I identify as a New Yorker and always will.

Until next time…

Best,

1LT DeAnna M. Comstock, EOD

On several occasions now, it has been recommended to me that I start a blog about this year. I can’t promise anything exciting, interesting, or even mediocre when it comes to my observations and musings, but I figure this can be said about 99% of the crap already being posted by maladjusted young people who think the recent Kardashian news is “important.” Not that anything I’ll have to share here will be important, but at the very least it will be the truth. Maybe not the entire truth, as often that falls into the “classified” category, but as much truth as I can deliver from my particular standpoint. If I seem to gloss over details, I apologize in advance, but trust that I will have told you all that I can. Feel free to comment, ask questions, call my bluff, what have you. I will try to update and respond to comments regularly, but please understand that the internet here is spotty at best.

And thus begins The Blog.

Best,

1LT DeAnna M. Comstock, EOD