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Welcome to The Sandbox, our command-wide milblog, featuring comments, anecdotes, and observations from service members currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is GWOT-lit's forward position, offering those in-country a chance to share their experiences and reflections with the rest of us. The Sandbox's focus is not on policy and partisanship (go to our Blowback page for that), but on the unclassified details of deployment -- the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox is a clean, lightly-edited debriefing environment where all correspondence is read, and as much as possible is posted. And contributors may rest assured that all content, no matter how robust, is currently secured by the First Amendment.
MORTAR MORNINGS
You're frozen. For a split second every muscle in your body tenses, and your mind draws a blank. Was that incoming? Wait for the alarm. If it was an incoming round, the siren blares off with a recorded voice and electronic bell "Incoming! Incoming! Incoming! Bing bing bing. Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!" Stay calm, get to cover, listen for the splash, look at your buddies and smile....Wait.
Everybody has their own "So there I was getting mortared" story. I was once pulling gate guard on my little FOB with a young infantry private I had never met before. We sat in a 113 (Armored Personnel Carrier) that acted as the gate. If someone needed to get on or off the FOB you just started the vehicle and threw it in reverse, let them drive by, then pulled back into your place. So there we sat one morning. I was in the driver's hatch and Pfc. L was behind me in the crew compartment with his SAW. We heard the first round strike about 100m's away, inside the FOB. We looked around for someone to tell: "There's incoming!!"
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