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Michael Yon: Hunting Al-Qaida, Part 2 of 3
. . . At around 1005 we started moving to contact (meaning: trying to engage in the fight). We walked south, moving toward the firing, linking up with SSG Michaels squad and the IA with him. By now the fighting was a few hundreds meters away. All small arms. I didnt hear any explosions. Some civilians were caught in the crossfire and a woman got shot in the neck and was slightly wounded, though we did not yet know this. The fighting was light: maybe 1 PKC machine gun and 4-5 AKs. But often big fights start as other elements, friendly and enemy, are drawn in. . . .As we crossed the field, at about 1020, the silver van started driving in front of us. We could see it driving from our right to our left on Route Burga a couple of hundred meters to our front. The van was well within accurate small-arms range. I was unaware of the radio chatter about the armed men in the van, and the white sack; so to me it was just a van that was driving near us with four men, while a firefight was going on nearby. But to Captain Morris and the others hearing the chatter, and to those Soldiers in the Bradleys peering with excellent optics, the men in the van were clearly armed and not displaying any sort of recognition signal. The van was in an area where there was fighting going on, and where American forces had killed about 7 during the past 24 hours, and where we knew for a fact that al Qaeda was. My video had been running for several minutes. One of the Bradleys saw what he thought were bullets kicking up in our direction, as if someone were shooting at us, or at least in our direction. But at this timethe silver van now nearly directly in front of usI heard no shots nor saw any contact. As the van closed the range at about 200 meters, our guys fired several warning shots. The van sped up. The Soldiers rained heavy small-arms fire and were kicking up dust, and Corporal Antony Johnson fired a 40mm grenade, but the van just kept speeding away whenBOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!a Bradley fired 4 shots from the 25mm cannon. All four high-explosive rounds impacted and the van careened off the road and crashed out of sight. . . . Posted by: Mike 2007-09-17 |
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