Ten years ago I survived a pretty big boom.

I was driving a humvee north on 60th street in mulhalla 824 in the Al Doura district of Iraq. The bomb exploded under the engine, lucky for me and the other two dudes in the truck. If it had exploded even a second later, all three of us would have been killed. This is the hood of that truck. I found it in the motor pool a few days after the incident, and I still have it in my garage.

I remember the boom, the truck rising into the air, my head hitting the roof, and then the is a lapse in time I have no recollection of. I don't know how long it lasted or what happened during that time, but I was told I was out for a few seconds. I came to hearing the truck commander calling up to the LT over that radio that I was dead, and I remember thinking, "well that sucks."

The engine was fucked. There was mud and soot and all kinds of engine fluids all over everything in the truck, and it smelled like burning sewage. I started feeling the gunner all over his body looking for blood, but I didn't find any. Later we learned he had broken his nose on his SAW.

I tried to continue driving, but the truck wouldn't move and I didn't understand why. I figured I should shift into drive, not computing the fact that I was *just* driving. The shifter was gone, and where it once was lay my M4, bent nearly at a 45 degree angle. The only thing I could think to do was press the gas again.

Another truck dragged us out of the area. My LT pulled me aside, and I now know what he was going to say because in a subsequent deployment I felt a lot of guilt as a leader, too. But before he could speak, shots rang out, and the moment passed. We're still friends to this day.

He wrote a book about our tour and titled it "Dead Rabbits", which was our platoon name.

Unrelated- This is my grandfather's plane from WWII. He was a tail gunner in a B25 weather plane. This is just a cool picture.

Dog tax. This is Mac. He passed away a year ago. He was a good boy.