I have some news to tell you, you won’t like it, but the mission is over and I am fine.
I needed a ride to the ECPs, and the only one was with the XO. He wanted to see the ECPs and so I jumped on. Along the way we got a report of a weapons cache in the heart of Fallujah, so he made the Humvee convoy go straight for it. We had to go through some nasty stuff on the way, there was small arms fire all around us. We honed in on the grid coordinate with the GPS and stopped in front of a house that was totally intact, then we got the word over the radio to dismount. So we all climbed out of the trucks and left one marine and upgunner per vehicle. Upgunners are the marines that man the 50. cal machine guns and 40mm grenade launchers on the top of the vehicles.
The 8 of us got into patrol formation, with the Lt Col leading from the front, and went to the house, we waited to see if everyone was ready and then stormed the front gate and cleared the yard and front porch area. We then busted the front door down and started clearing the house from bottom to top. There was nobody in the house and no weapons there, so we went to the next house and the next. Nothing. Then on the fourth house area we found the weapons cache, there was a lot of ammo, grenades, rockets and other crap that had been burned in place. The ammo was not usable, but we had to document it for our intel. The XO had the driver of my vehicle write down all the crap, so I grabbed the Doc and we stood guard, in case there were any snipers in the area. The patrol went into another house to check around and found some IDs and then we packed up and moved on to the ECPs.
I have to say, I had a blast!!!! I was scared but excited as well. I knew that we could be hit at any second, but I was hoping to encounter resistance and get into a fight. I guess boys will be boys. After we got done with the ECPs we drove around the city looking for MUJ, bad guys. Everything is fine though, and I am safe again. I will be calling infrequently due to bad satellite connections.