I suspect all of us were thinking the same thing; was it even feasible to see this job through, or did we need to cut our losses and try to get out? That presented its own problems, especially as I was pretty sure our employers back in the States probably wouldn’t be too keen on helping us extrac...
We had even steered around Al Kut and Amarah. Coming into Basra itself, however, had required crossing the bridge over the Euphrates to get to Bani Malik Al Sharqiya. That had meant a police checkpoint, with two IPs trying to look important while the Basra PPF, in their tan unifor...
There was no resistance at all for the first mile. Nobody even seemed to take a second look at the line of PPF trucks and unmarked HiLuxes with Western contractors riding in them. We’d been working Basra for long enough that we’d become a common sight, and anybody who wasn’t ISIS on one side or...
