GreenJesus423

I was an infantry squad leader in the Alaskan Stryker Brigade that got extended for the surge on Baghdad right before your deployment. We cleared every house of every neighborhood (no exaggeration) and the news reported that Iraqi Army and Police were doing over 90% of the clearing. They weren't. Whenever we would bust open a huge weapons cache or whoop ass in a firefight, we would call in the IA/IP and have to wait around for their dumbasses to arrive late, jump off their trucks with untied boots, negligently firing shots off... so we could take pictures of them with our successes to "put an Iraqi face on the war." We even had a newsweek reporter with us in our stryker for almost a week, and we cracked open 6 dirty mosques in one day, all with huge weapons, munitions, and first aid caches...we figured we'd be heroes when the story went to print. I held open an MRE bag so the reporter could blow chunks into it from heat exhaustion during our 12 hour endless patrol of gun battles and house clearing. When we finally read his story, he had only written about our extension and how it was affecting morale, and the only interview was with a pogue supply piece of shit in a line company that never left the wire, but he missed his wife. I will check your book out, friend, and I am putting one together also, but it is going to be more of a contrast of Iraq/Afghanistan so the uninformed (all of America) can figure out that they are two different wars. Good luck, brother!

You betcha!!!!! 172nd Stryker brigade. I did over 17 months because I left on ADVON before my unit. I'm pretty sure Donny Rumsfeld lost his job because of us. Less than 4 months after I got back to Alaska from Iraq I was sent to Afghanistan from Italy for a 15 month tour where we got raped. It was a ride to say the least.