Page 847 - Total War on PTSD

The 2nd worse firefight of 2006...and my alive date is June 6th, 2006. The worst firefight was four days later on the 10th of June. They used our fight on the 6th as a diversion to take over the top of the mountain over in Kunar Province where they ended up mortaring the Marine and Army base. We were in the initial firefight that the insurgents used as a diversion to cause a distraction so that all forces would focus on that firefight while they took over the mountaintop.
So, on June 6th, when our riverboat went to go pull up a unit, we went to a village that supposedly had a population of about 1,000 with maybe 30-300 bad guys. Well, it ended up that the entire village was bad. The boat came up to get the medic extraction, and my buddy and myself both stepped out of the boat, he started patrolling forward to go where the unit was. About three or four IEDs went off...our boat flipped over...and we were trained to get as much equipment off of that boat as we could and set up a ground station from which to fight and fortify ourselves. Well, when the last IED went off and flipped the boat over then the boat, along with our 50-calibers was stuck in the mud and all we had to defend ourselves with was our sidearms, our AR-15s, and a couple of mortars. There were a couple more explosions as well. They corralled us with the explosions. We ended up going down an alleyway and going into what we thought was a very secure building, and sheltering inside that building. They also ended up blowing that building up too. I have nightmares of us being buried in the rubble and being dragged out of the rubble and then hearing screams of people being murdered. I don't know why but, for whatever reason, I wasn't murdered or hurt. My Kevlar helmet was crushed in so maybe I just wasn't a pretty enough trophy to take...I don't know. I was found tied up and made an example of. I got flown to Fallujah then to Ramstein, then to Walter Reed, and then Phoenix and home.
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