There was a long wait before anything happened. We would occasionally be told that they were
on their way, and get all the cameras turned on and ready. And then 15 minutes later we would hear that
was a false alarm and that they still hadn’t left the ship yet. I eventually had to go down to the staging
room to setup a battery charging station because of how much power we had
expended on those false alarms. But
finally we heard the rotors in the distance.
The first group arrived on a V-22 Osprey, and circled once before
tilting its wings and rotors upward, and landing vertically on the soccer
field. The first 40 marines jumped out
and formed a perimeter around the LZ.
The V-22 took back off, and then nothing happened for about ten
minutes. I could see them talking and
pointing at things, and a couple of marksmen clearly had their sights on
me. They probably took the approach that
if I did anything aggressive they could take me out, minimizing that potential
threat.
It turns out they were just waiting for reinforcements, and
we soon heard a second V-22 approaching.
It landed in the same spot, and 40 more Marines got out as I got some
great shots. We were all pretty fixated
on it as it took off again, when I looked around and realized that the first
group had just disbursed into the town.
I was quick to point that out on the radio, and a couple of our
operators had already noticed, but the rest hurried to catch up. The next fifteen minutes were fairly
interesting, as squads of marines moved through the streets and secured the
town. I pointed out when things were
happening that we might be missing, and got a few overhead shots when I
could. The rest of the Marines landed in
a CH-53E Super Stallion, and setup a casualty processing area near the field.
They eventually started interacting with the actors around
the blast site that had been setup.
Their Navy corpsmen began treating the wounded, and the officers began
conversing with the actors, who were playing local leaders and witnesses, and a
Navy EOD team went in to deal with the second suicide vest. They dragged it halfway down the street and
then proceeded to “disarm” it. But this
all took another hour, and was actually a very slow process to observe. Eventually as the action slowed down, there
started to be discussion on the radio about conserving camera batteries and
card space. Once the Marines withdrew
back toward the soccer field, I headed down and began processing the first batch
of cards that the camera department had collected.
We eventually learned that it had become too windy to
operate the V-22s, so they were waiting for the helicopter to ferry them all
back in three trips. That ended up
taking a few hours, long waits, punctuated by a few minutes of action when a
helicopter landed and took off. I was
pretty much caught up with the data backups by the time the last group left,
well after dark. I had the last of the
cards copied by the time the crew was finished breaking down our gear. On the drive back to the hotel, I got to
listen to the discussion of changes to be made before the next operation. We weren’t the Marines in training, who were
supposed to be ready for anything. We needed
to know exactly when the assault was expected to arrive, so we weren’t wasting
resources during every false start. And
we needed to know what we were expecting to actually happen, in order to be
prepared to properly record it. I ended
up getting a call from McCoy at like 4am that night, looking for keys to get
something out of the car, which was quite a way to end a very long day.
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