sapperx8

Well I wish I would have seen this sooner so it wouldn't get buried but... I was there from April '08 to May '09 doing route clearance, building/maintaining that fucking wall and lots of other fun stuff. I was the engineer company attached to TF 1-6. Here's a few pictures you might find familiar:

IRAM at JSS Sadr the day before we got there, had to sleep on/in our trucks.

BEARSEX on Pluto...? Never understood this

Town hall right after one of their Thursday meetings got bombed

Building a tower at that fucking wall

I saw a comment you made earlier about Grizzlies; that route was shit, we lost one of our guys to an EFP there. Sorry we couldn't do a better job clearing, they knew exactly who we were and what we were doing.

Edit: I forgot to actually ask a question. Any chance you'll release just a hardcover copy of the book? More importantly, thanks for telling the story. I agree that this didn't get covered very much at all, and with how hard it is to explain, I can hopefully just refer people to your book.

Also, here's a few more pictures just for the hell of it:

Jamilla Market

Looking down Grizzlies?, maybe Aeros?

Haha, anytime man. If you want to use any of the pictures, just ask and I'll send you the original files.

I think we got a bad rep for having to roll so fucking slow. The guys in the TOC at War Eagle (I wanna say 2 SCR) would follow us on the BFT and bitch if we broke 15kph.

That said, the escorts were always welcomed. The day after we got hit on Grizzlies we had 2 Abrams and 2 Apaches come along for the party.

Good luck with the book man, I'm looking forward to reading it!

It got better, but not good. A little while before I left they built a water treatment plant and also got all the black water out of the Jamilla Market.

They sure can and did for a while. I think it was the summer of '08 that they started fielding additional armor that could break up the copper slug. Though since the armor was bolted on and very obvious, the enemies just started aiming under or above it.

Fun fact: They also could also use them effectively through the 1 foot thick, solid concrete walls we were putting down.