James Yeager worked as a contractor in Iraq 2004-2005; an account of his service:
After weaving through the Baghdad traffic, the three cars came to a halt in gridlock on Route Irish. It was a few minutes before noon. American troops had blocked the road to clear away the remains of a car damaged by a bomb. Civilian vehicles between the convoy and the roadblock turned off to find alternative routes. The security men, wearing white Arab robes, sat quietly in the line of traffic. Then team leader Johnson climbed out of Ahmelman's car and began firing in the air to warn other vehicles to stay clear - an act which clearly identified the convoy as contractors. "They rang the dinner bell for the bad guys,'' says ERSM staffer Scott Traudt, who was in the company's Baghdad headquarters at the time.
After Johnson's warning shots, the three cars rolled forward some 300 m to put distance between them and the traffic queued behind them. They were still about 1 km short of the U.S. roadblock. There they remained for over 10 minutes, talking nervously on their radios. Suddenly, to their right, a white Chevrolet SUV with blacked-out windows sped along a slip road, made a U turn, and stopped about 200 m away, facing the convoy. From its passenger window, a belt-fed machinegun opened fire. The first bullets announced themselves with a puff of dust beside Yeager's vehicle, then a burst hit Ahmelman in the thigh. The videotape from the dashboard camera recorded the sound of bullets hitting the car, Ahmelman crying out, then a chaos of yells, revving cars and machinegun fire.
"I thought, 'What the f___ is Johnno shooting at now?''' Yeager would later write in a personal account of the incident. As more bullets chew into the cars, another voice can be heard on the tape shouting "Drive, drive, drive!" But no car moved. Yeager recalls hearing "the distinctive supersonic crack of a round pass through our car inches in front of my face ... Stef yelled, 'I'm hit' and he began emptying a 30-round mag out of his window." Yeager "punched the gas to the floor and the engine raced, but the car stayed stationary." The ex-cop had forgotten that the car he was driving had a manual shift, and had failed to engage the clutch or the gears.
Yeager and Mark crawled out of the vehicle on the passenger side and began shooting, while the wounded Surette went on firing out of the side window. "You could see small dots leaving your rifle and rounds pinging off the back of the (attackers') vehicle, and everyone is yelling, 'It's armored, it's armored,'" says Mark, who was shooting across the trunk of the BMW. Surette continued firing until he passed out from loss of blood, while Yeager, unable to see the attackers, blasted away pointlessly at a barricade before running to take cover in a ditch on the opposite side of the road.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1110003,00.html#ixzz2HpY88cmC
= new reply since forum marked as read
Lemme guess....he's watched Fight Club, but he just can't commit
