There was only one time I ever laid hands on a soldier. We were deployed to Afghanistan, and were tasked with Route Clearance. I was the "lead truck", which actually didn't mean that I was in front, but that I was the lead gun truck. In front of me were two Huskies, scanning the ground for buried IEDs. Being a one man truck (the two man Huskies hadn't come out yet), they didn't have guns on them. So my truck was the truck right behind these two, pulling general security for the front of the convoy, plus pulling overwatch for these two trucks.
Well, since we had non-gun trucks with us, when we bivouacked for the night, we circled up with our gun trucks on the outside, and our non-guns inside. We usually had two gunners awake on shifts, with other gunners napping, ready to man their guns if needed. One of our Husky drivers took a shift on the gun one night. More on why that's important later!
Below our elevated position was a canyon that we had to drive through to get back and forth from a little FOB. We couldn't go around it, as the sand was too loose for our trucks with four-ton rollers to maneuver through. So we had to go through it. We called it "ambush alley", as it would have been the perfect place for someone to RPG our front and rear trucks, and we'd be sitting ducks. You could barely maneuver two trucks side by side in there, and then you'd be scraping the walls. So we couldn't pass each other.
We get ready for the day, and head out through ambush alley. One of my husky guys had taken a shift on the gun the night before. I need to stress that again. But, he's driving, and he stops suddenly. He doesn't call to explain, so I called him up.
"H2, this is 21A, what's going on?"
"21A, I'm just checking on something. Got a possible hit."
So we wait. He backs up, and then pulls forward over the spot again. It was the usual procedure. If you got a hit, you backed off to clear your screen, then pulled forward again to see if you got the same hit. Well, he stops in the same spot.
"H2, this is 21A. Talk to me."
"21A, I think it's fine, but I'm going to check one more time."
So he backs up again, and pulls forward again, stopping one more time.
"21A, this is H2. It's nothing. We're good."
He then pulls forward. Then BOOOM! He gets blown up. His radio was blown out, so we resorted to our physical means of communication. He opened up his hatch slightly and threw out a green chem light. Green chem light meant he was uninjured. Red meant he was uninjured. When my joes once asked me what chem light to throw out if they were unconscious, I made them do push ups.
So I call up my PL.
"Wolfpack 26, this is 21A. Husky's comms are out, but he's ok. I'll have to maneuver somehow to get close enough to where he can enter my vehicle without touching the ground."
"Roger 21A."
That was our common practice. No walking on ground that hadn't been scanned. So I had two choices, either move my truck up where he could climb over, or dismount our dismounts while someone scanned with an IED detector (similar to a metal detector, but also detects differences in density in the ground. Will detect buried items, even if there's no metal). So I start moving up my truck.
After literally an hour of maneuvering, I finally get to where he can step onto my truck. Our policy was to never have joes exposed without an NCO, and you never want only one man exposed anyway in case he goes down. So I climbed out of my truck and met him where our two trucks met.
He said to me, "I should have known that there was something there after I saw those flashlights down here last night."
I looked at him and said, "You're telling me that you got a possible hit where you saw flashlights last night, and you called it clear?"
"Roger, Sergeant."
So I hit him. Knocked him down.
We finally get back into my truck, him nursing a cut on his eye from my punch. Our PL calls me up.
"21A, this is Wolfpack 26. That seemed to take a while. Everything ok up there?"
"Roger, 26. I sent H2 back to his truck to make sure he had all of his sensitive items, and he slipped on the frame of his truck. We're closing up a cut above his eye right now."
"Roger 21A. Just don't let Wolfpack 6 or 7 know how he "slipped"."
LT had seen the whole thing...
