Afghanistan ER--Firefight

“Hey, Curmudge. We haven’t heard from Mack recently. Is the war in Afghanistan over?”

“Don’t I wish, Julie? Mack was in the States for a mid-deployment leave, but he’s back over there now. He copied me on this note to a friend:

‘Hi Rich,
It's been a decent week here. We had a ground assault mission three days ago; was nice because it was only one day. We left at 0400, got back at 19, in time for hot chow. The purpose was to hunt for bunkers and weapons/explosive caches. We found a lot of stuff and blew it all up. In the afternoon we got into a rather large firefight. The Taliban were actually hitting with more than their usual accuracy, meaning they were hitting the grape rows in front of us. We fired a ton of ammo, not really sure if we hit anyone, but certainly stopped their shooting. What the enemy usually does is fire on us for a short period of time, then simply break contact and disappear in the grape rows. They usually shoot from buildings like houses or grape huts but not for long. If they did we would get a bead on them and destroy them. They are usually not very accurate; their plan is to get us to pursue and lead us through fields where they have planted IEDs. We don't usually go for that anymore. The best part of this day was that no one stepped on an IED or got hurt. I'm all scuffed up from crawling over 5-foot high walls, etc. and destroyed a set of ACU pants. I'm certainly the oldest one out here, at age 49. Most everyone is in their 20s.
Mack’”

“It probably doesn’t make Mack feel any better to remember that he was an infantry platoon leader (prior to med school) before some of the younger soldiers were born.”

“Julie, if Mack slows up the troops any—and he probably doesn’t, I’ll bet they are still glad to have ‘The Doc’ come along with them.”