In one incident last week, Charlie Company of 4-9, which runs the Tarmiya JSS, took fire from a mosque on the edge of town; in the resulting firefight a soldier was killed and an Apache was eventually called in to take out the al-Qaeda fighting position with a Hellfire missile. In the Mushada area, down the road from Tarmiya in Alpha Company’s area, armed fighters aren’t as much of a problem as IEDs are: MSR Tampa, the country’s main north-south highway, runs right through the place, so the stretches of road entering and exiting Mushada are actually the two most heavily bombed roads in all of Iraq. That’s where I was going.
