I lied in my last post. I have not begun my slow voyage home. But here I am posting again. But that's only because I wanted to get this story out there.

The other night, the CLC (Concerned Local Citizens) group swung by the outpost with a guy they had detained. Apparently they found this guy out walking around and he had what looked to be a homemade grenade. I had never seen a grenade like this. It had a plastic body and just looked fashioned.

Over the past week or so there have been a few incidents with some people throwing grenades at IA (Iraqi Army) and IP (Iraqi Police) checkpoints, so I can only imagine that this is what this guy was going to do. So far they haven't targeted any U.S. personnel with these grenades.

While standing on the roof, a shot rang out and flew overhead, coming from an area a good distance away from where our guys were in contact.Once we had this guy in our custody, they began questioning him and apparently at some point he stated that he would take us and show us where some more stuff was.

A group of our guys headed out to go hit this target building, while myself and the rest of the guys of my squad continued to pull our guard shift, knowing that we were probably going to be extended because the guys going out were the ones that were to relieve us.

Time goes on, and eventually we start getting word that they had found quite the little cache of more grenades and other stuff.

The platoon that was out on patrol that day sent out a dismounted element to link up with our guys.

Shortly after they had left, we heard some shooting in the alleyways, but we didn't think too much of it. It wasn't until a pretty loud burst that we wonder, especially when the call came up to us in the towers asking if we heard any gunshots. They usually don't do this without a reason, and we later found out that it was the CLC guys who had come in contact with a couple guys shooting at them. Nothing major though.

Some more time passed.  We were well into the next guard shift when we heard a couple bursts of AK fire a couple hundred meters down the road from the outpost. I stood up and headed outside the tower I was in, as all hell broke loose for about a minute or so.

There were a couple explosions that I could see and, of course, hear.  We called those up. That's when we learned that it was our guys that were in contact. I was officially jealous at this point. While standing on the roof, a shot rang out and flew overhead, coming from an area a good distance away from where our guys were in contact.

After a minute from that original shot, there was a short burst again fired from the same area directed in our direction. The thing was that since I really didn't know the locations of our guys, I couldn't just indiscriminately fire in the area that I heard the shot. Oh well, it's not like they were hitting close to me, just definitely shooting in our direction.

After a little while, the guys returned back to the outpost. Of course the rest of us that were there were eager to learn what had happened. Apparently while they were on the roof of the place where the cache was, a couple guys a couple rooftops over began shooting at them so they of course returned fire, launching a couple high-explosive grenade rounds from the grenade launchers, which explained the explosions we heard. The other platoons guys went to maneuver on them and I guess at some point they were shot at as well and returned fire.

All in all it was a pretty quick little engagement. The one thing of note was that the last guy in our platoon that had not received his CIB (Combat Infantryman's Badge) was out there that night! So he now officially qualifies for his CIB. At the very tail end of our deployment and running combat missions, he finally earned his. How crazy!

Written by Eddie Watson