1st Platoon’s First Patrol
Daggers Edge Magazine Volume 1, Issue 11
1st Lt. Brian Cooke
April 21, 2007
The night of March 10 was a tense one. 1st Platoon, Alpha Battery 2nd Battalion, 32nd Field Artillery, was going on its first patrol the next morning, and the air hung thick with a feeling of unease that most of us had not before experienced. We sat wordless throughout the tent; the only sound filling the void was the snick snick snick of our rounds as we loaded them into our magazines. Soon though, silence gave way to conversation, stilted at first, mundane in its topics, as we sought to distract ourselves from the next day’s mission. We keep our tents free of food to prevent bugs from entering, yet butterflies flew in and around our stomachs. Someone turned on Black Hawk Down, and then the sounds of Hollywood’s interpretation of battle echoed throughout the space, at once both comforting us and getting us excited for tomorrow’s patrol. We are a generation that has come of age watching the movies of war, and for the last time the big screen was our only preview of the day to come.
We awoke early the next morning, because this is the Army and no morning truly exists unless we rise before the sun. Our vehicles, Humvees with the best armor and electronics the Army can buy, sat in their neat row, ready to be mounted. We installed our crew-served weapons and made our final radio checks, making sure we could talk to each other first, then the Battery and Battalion operations centers. We donned our Interceptor Ballistic Armor, pulled snug our knee pads and snapped closed our helmets. A few men put a final two drops of oil into their rifles, wanting to be sure that they would work perfectly if called to. We gathered around my truck and I gave the mission brief. A map fixed to the hood of the truck before us, I explained the mission, our goals, objectives, and the routes that would take us from the safety of the FOB to the unknown and back. We talked as a group, making sure that we all understood what would happen, and then the sections split off on their own, Section Chiefs ready to reassure their Soldiers one last time before we rolled.
Staff Sergeants Roger Richards, Mark Tutman, and Adam Freeman, all veterans of prior tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, gave their men a few final words of wisdom, relaying to them some of the lessons they had learned, instructing their Soldiers how to apply these lessons just as soon as we exited the gate. Sgt. Vorenkamp was not an OIF or OEF veteran, but his time in Kosovo was spent with a round locked and loaded in the chamber of his rifle, ready to fire if the situation required it, and he used this experience to mentor his young section. As the Section Chiefs conducted their final inspections, readying men and equipment, Sgt. 1st Class Rickie Jackson and I sat back against one of the trucks, discussing our plan for the patrol. Neither of us has been to combat before, but we were as ready as we were ever going to be. The platoon had been together, in one form or another, for over a year. Seven months of artillery training, a month of full-spectrum combat operations training at the National Training Center, and two weeks of intense urban operations training in Kuwait had all culminated in this moment. It was time to leave the wire.
We returned from our first patrol a little over four hours after we departed. I’m not going to discuss the details of the mission, because they do not really matter. This was our first mission, the first of probably two or three hundred missions, and we’ll all have plenty of time to tell our stories when we return to Fort Riley. The details do not matter, but the big picture does. For the first time, 1st Platoon, Alpha Battery, 2nd Battalion, 32nd Field Artillery, had accomplished its mission in combat. Never again could someone call us untested; never again would we be considered strangers to war. The rest of our year in Iraq sits before us, but we know that it is all downhill from here. We twenty-one men were now bonded, and stand ready to accomplish any mission sent our way.
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