Braxton McCoy

It was...

Yeah, it was busy, man, for sure.

And typical kind of war.

Tons of guys have way more combat experience than me.

You know, a few gunfights here and there, some sniper fire.

We crashed a CH-46 one time.

The pilots called it a hard landing, but it felt like a damn crash to me.

We were like two minutes off this objective, and the 46, those things are like Vietnam War or Korean War era or something.

And it got like an electrical fire or some kind of thing, and we ended up back.

And we made it all the way back to Fa Brumadi and hit the PLZ, that big concrete one there.

And then, of course, got right back on a bird and flew back and did the stupid mission.

So that was kind of a lot of log pack security type bullshit to, you know, a handful of actual PSD stuff.

But for the most part, they just tasked us out into, we were very generalized, you know.

EOD needs a lift somewhere, someone's in a tick, you know, just kind of that sort of stuff.

And then on the 5th of January, we were providing security for this Marine element that was recruiting Iraqis in order to send them over to a different country to be trained up to be police officers.

And my understanding as just an absolute idiot on the ground was that they were having a problem because they were trying to use Shia to police Iraqis.

SUNY neighborhoods in Ramadi, and that was just not working out.

So they said, okay, well, let's recruit some SUNYs and see if that might be a better gig.

So that was kind of the idea.

And on the third day, so the fifth would have been the fourth day, but on the third day, it was supposed to be the end.