the war in baghdad

In the dim foggy morning, the group in the war I am stationed with are tired and hungry.  We have been walking since we were dropped in the Syrian Desert going to Baghdad.  It was scary and I had a sniper but I still to cry. We have fifty miles to go before we hit Baghdad. So we push forward. We are starving and want to eat.  We stop to rest with forty miles to go.  We grab something to eat quickly, rations that we carry.  When we are done eating and we quickly gather our gear and push forward.  With thirty-nine miles to go, Jacob is exhausted, he appears as white as a ghost and weak and eventually throws up.  Even though I feel bad, I cannot stand to watch him so I keep walking. I eventually stop and wait for the group; they are about one hundred feet back.  They finally arrive when I am but I am still tired. We walk until we have approximately twenty-five miles to go and then we set up camp. It is only noon but we are all tired so we stop.  At this time, two will sleep and two will stand guard.  With Jacob and I sleeping, Ethan and William will be on guard duty for an hour.  Ethan hears a noise and looks but he cannot see anything. Then an hour goes by and we wake up and they go to take their turn to sleep.  Jacob hears a noise, and goes to investigate it. I watch his back and I see a strange man who is quickly behind Jacob and brutally stabs him in the spine. I shoot the man that had stabbed Jacob.  It was very scary when I saw Jacob get stabbed.  For a moment, I thought, we were going to lose him so I ran to Jacob as fast as I can. When I get to him, he is barely bleeding, it turns out the man had barely lodged the knife into my comrade’s back.  I help Jacob to stand again, he is going to be okay but he is filled with intense fear.  After the incident, we are all a little nervous and ready to leave so we packed up our gear and headed off.
We are still walking and we have about fourteen miles ahead of us. We are extremely hungry but we are not going to stop now.  We keep pushing on in the deadly silence. We are all wondering if we are going to make it alive or if we are going to get captured and wondering if  our lives will end in horrible manner.  After being lost in thought, I hear a gun go off.  The noise was very sudden and distinct. I drop to the ground and my group was doing the same.  We are too scared to get up and had to take cover.  I took my sniper out and looked at the direction of the gun shot noise. I see a tribe of soldiers in the distance that seemed to have killed a pig.  I am not sure where the pig came from, but I assume they killed it for food.  So then we start to crawl without a word but I wanted to scream from the tension and the uncertainty of not knowing if I or anyone in my group may be killed.  So, we just keep crawling in silence. We are now, I would say, about two  miles away from base.  I begin to whisper to my group trying to ease their minds  the fact that we are “only one mile away”.
Now, being one mile away, everyone becomes excited with the expectation that we were going to be safe so everyone starts to walk faster.  We got to the base about at six in the evening.  We went directly to eat in the mess hall.  It was not a great place, but we were all so happy to be safe and so hungry, it did not matter if we would have had to eat on a rock.  Afterwards, we headed to the showers.  Nothing feels better than being under clean warm water and relaxing.  Even your worst thoughts seem do disappear.  After we hit the showers, we go to bed for about what seemed like an hour. We had been given orders to go to the battle field as we were part of the new sniper unit, so our commander wanted us there immediately after resting. When we set off for the battle field, we have two weeks’ worth of food each; we will be gone for a week, based off the Sergeant estimation.  So the place we are going to will be three miles away.  So with one mile to go it is only eight at night according to my watch and we keep walking the path we are supposed to take to make it there safely.  Time and the days seem to go on forever.
When we arrive, we start to set up our temporary camp that consists of four small tents. Having a fire is necessary to provide warmth but we will also use the fire to have a small meal before we head off to bed. When I wake up, I see the fire is still going and I keep it going to make breakfast for me and squad.  I make food at a quick pace and then I take guard until I get the rest of the men up at seven AM.  When they get up, they immediately eat as if they had been starved.  We will take our positions before eight in the morning.  When we get to our positions, I look at the time. Unfortunately, it was only quarter after seven.  It was quiet until we heard one piercing gunshot followed by two grenades. They sounded close. So we looked and saw two Baghdad people.  I aimed to take a shot and notice one man had dropped to the ground and appeared to be bleeding to death.  I saw the other guy ran to safety in a fallen down structure. It appeared to have been a small white house that had gotten blown up by heavy artillery.  I assume something like a canon or anything that was similar blew up that house.  So we all continued to watch for him to reappear, but we see our Army storm the building. A familiar voice sounds over the radio. Our men had cleared the building and killed five people that were shooting out a window at us.  So they start moving forward and they told us to watch their backs, as well as our own.
At nine, we move off of our positioned camp and we hear someone behind us. I turn and see someone behind Jacob and I pull my suppressed desert eagle weapon off my back as quick as a cobra. When I do this, he shoots Jacob in the back of the head and I fire three shots; bang, bang, bang.  Everyone in the unit turn to look at Jacob. He is bleeding heavily from the shot wound in the back of his head.  We applied pressure on his head but we fail to stop the fate of my dear comrade. It was such a hard thing to watch and even harder to image that he was gone.  We carried him to a safe place.  The thought of his death could not be erased from my mind.  It was only noon and already one man was missing from our group.  It is so sad to think that we lost a group member in the line of battle without even being in the midst of it.  We sit together in a silence and had a said a small prayer, awaiting a truck to come and get Jacob’s body. It’ll be shipped back to the states. His family will be devastated. With what little time we have to wait, reality sets in, some soldiers begin to eat from a can and drink the cold morning’s leftover coffee.  Others are too distraught to even think about eating.  The truck arrives to pick Jacob up. It is a sad sight indeed. Ethan looks ready to cry. Ethan is the youngest of our group, maybe 19. This must be hitting him pretty hard. William stands and walks away, disappearing into his tent. The men in the truck don’t say a word to us. They simply check the dog tags, jot down a few notes about his body condition, placed him in the bed of the truck and leave. I refuse to cry, I have to be a man.  I am not sure why, I refuse to cry.  Maybe it is my way of getting through this horrible day.
The lookout is over once Jacob’s body is removed from our area. It is half past twelve. William and Ethan had taken the time to pack up our equipment. We begin to move, the dead body of the Baghdad man still lies close to us. It makes me sick. We were given orders to move further into the heart of the war. I’m afraid to die now. I want to be able to go home again, to see my family and friends.  When we are heading deeper into the war, we are all talking about death and not making it like Jacob, so we all hope and pray that we do not die.
Finally after a long horrible day of fighting on the front lines, the rest of my troop made it back to base safely.  Once we returned, we said a small prayer of thanks and remembered our fallen hero.  That night, I cried myself to sleep.