The Pharmacutical Plant

Today I was thinking about our time north of Baghdad in a city called Samarra.  Our company had been tasked with searching and securing a large government "Ministry of Somthing" campus which included a very tall office building, probably five stories tall.  Everything was pretty much abandoned at the compound as the war had been going on for nearly three weeks already.  Our squad made entry to the office building and found ourselves at the beginning of a very long hallway lined with office doors.  The doors were solid wood with heavy knobs and, of course, they were installed to swing into the hall as opposed to swinging into the office, which is what we would have preferred.  See, if they had swung inward we would have been able to "mule kick" them until they opened or have used one our breeching tools.  Faced with an entire hall of these doors on the first floor alone didn't appeal to me, particularly when we didn't know what (or who) was behind them.  I was standing perpendicular just to the side of one of the first doors we encountered with my squad leader, Sgt. Jay Landis, and a couple others as we contemplated how to make entry into the room when Sgt. Landis raised his M-16 and fired two shots in quick succession into the doorknob.  I can still hear the shots ringing in my head as I write this, I was facing parallel to his rife barrel and muzzle from about three feet away and the muzzle blast hit me right in the face.  It must have been a purely involuntary response on my part, but I remember opening my mouth wide and closing my eyes.  Luckily no shrapnel from the 5.56 rounds or the doorknob hit me in the face; after we made entry we did a hasty search of the office, found nothing of any consequence and moved back out into the hall.

Shortly thereafter we nixed the idea of searching and clearing the rest of the offices in the building and moved on foot into the rest of the campus.  As we patrolled throught the campus towards several large warehouses and auxillary buildings I heard an automatic mini-gun firing in the distance, either mounted on a AH-1 Cobra or more than likely on a UH-1 Huey.  The rate of fire was so high it made one continuous buzzing sound as it rained down lead on its objective.  We began a systematic search of the warehouses; it was pitch black inside as there was no electricity, we used our flashlights and were surprised to find stacks upon stacks of shrink wrapped pallets containing various types of medicine bottles and supplies.  After clearing several offices at the rear of the warehouses we made our way to to the front again, cutting into the pallets and spilling open the boxes of medicine bottles onto the floor, at first to investigate what the pallets held, then just to satiate the desire to destroy somthing we percieved to have belonged to the enemy with no restraint or fear of consequence.  Our platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Casey, put a quick halt to our wanton destruction.  We were always told from boot camp on up that Marines always left any given place cleaner than when they arrived there.  Unfortunately we didn't always live up to that creed.  Lesson learned.