A couple months ago I wrote a small post on San Diego Blog about local soldiers who are blogging while serving in Iraq.

Ever since then I’ve been sorta keeping my eye on some of those blogs. The viewpoint is biased of course, but there is no better way to know what thoughts are going through the soldiers heads than to read them for yourself. Today, Jason from Just Another Soldier updated his blog. Here are some of the more provacative excerpts of a post you should definitely read.

There are a lot of dogs that roam around these areas and there were about half a dozen going berserk barking. It’s kinda pointless trying to achieve any kind of stealth through noise discipline when you have a pack of dogs announcing your position to the world. I could tell that Cesar was a bit nervous how close one of the dogs was getting to him and Matt even pulled out his pistol. Then in the distance I heard someone whistle loudly. The dogs stopped barking and scurried away. That was nice, I thought, These dogs must belong to this guy who has gotten them to shut up and come back to the house.

Then I heard a familiar metallic sound. “Kuh-chunk”. I looked over toward the sole structure in this absurdly empty land of dirt and I could barely make out someone in a white man-dress holding a rifle pointed up diagonally. I knew what was coming next. “Boom!” The muzzle flash and the bang were not quite simultaneous, he was probably 150 meters to the left of us. I went down to one knee and started deliberating whether or not I wanted to shoot back. I knew most likely this guy just wanted to scare off whoever was lurking around his home, but I thought, Then again, this is the same story we’re always told when farmers shoot at us. This thought process went on for about one second, then “Brrraaaaaaappp!”, Cesar let off a long burst with his SAW. Then a few other rifles immediately started to chime in. I saw the guy with the gun run around to the back of the house. I though to myself, Okay, I guess we’re shooting. The hell if I’m gonna miss out on this. I rotated Wazina’s selector lever from safe to semi, looked through the Aimpoint, but the green dot on the roof of the house and I squeezed the trigger. “Click”. What the…?

Whatever the reason, my first round fired in “combat” was a dud. This was very disappointing and frankly, quite frightening. I assure you this will never happen again. I charged another round, aimed at the roof and fired. I have to admit that it really felt good to finally shoot.

Cesar was really going off with his SAW. I yelled to him, “Don’t shoot at them…” At the moment I didn’t know how to best explain to him that I wanted him to shoot, just so long that it wasn’t actually at anyone. I didn’t believe the guy with the gun was much of a threat and I didn’t want to kill him per se, but I saw no reason to not supress him. I continued to fire rounds into and over the roof of the house. I noticed that most everyone else’s tracers were also going over the roof. I don’t know if this is because they were thinking the same thing I was or they just don’t know how to shoot at night very well. When it’s dark and you don’t aim properly, your rounds always tend to go high, it’s a known fact. Anyway, this shooting the roof thing felt really stupid, so I scanned for a better target. The windows? No. The car? No, no one’s trying to use it and no one’s even standing anywhere near it. The tractor? No. Goddammit, there’s nothing worth shooting! I put a few more rounds into the roof then the Lieutenant called a cease-fire.

There were four men, one AK-47, and a ton of women and children. Apparently Allah didn’t will any of the bullets to hit the family this night, (thank god) except for a few fragments of one that struck one of the young men in the chin. He bled on his man-dress a bit, but he was fine. We seized the rifle but we didn’t detain anyone. The scene was the same as it always is when we raid homes: The men were fairly collected, the oldest woman wept, wailed, and beat herself, and the young boy was ecstatic at the sight of soldiers. I took pictures of all the men then the youngest boy tugged on my sleeve. He didn’t want to be left out, he wanted to have his picture taken too. As I pointed the camera at him, he did just like the other men did and he tried to put on as serious a face as possible. After the picture was taken, he went back to hyperactively running around like he was at Disneyland.

We then gave them a box of MREs, a box of bottled water, and tried as hard as possible to emote, “Sorry we almost wasted your family, please take this gift of food and water as a consolation.”

To be totally serious, I really like these pictures because they are of people who we didn’t kill. Something about having pictures of people who you almost killed seems really weird to me, but kinda cool in way. I’m just happy they’re not dead.

The original post contains photos of the family he almost killed.