My Favorite Close Call: A Tale of Survival

Drivin through the streets in our humvee it's dark as f*** and my driver can barely see. Why? Because intrepid friends we all know we don't use headlights when driving our happy go lucky asses around the wonderful adventure land of Iraq. Nope, we tape those sumbitches up and throw on our night vision optics and roll out like Mad Max: Fury Road. This story is my favorite close call.So one night, your friendly loveable, author (me) is riding his happy go lucky boot ass in the gun turret. We're the third truck in the convoy so our gun is either at the three or nine o'clock position. This evening, I happened to be at the three o'clock position. Our first section peeled off to do some satellite patrolling and we stuck to Route Michigan.Oh, MSR Michigan, you f***ing bastard of a road. I'll never forget the night someone thought it'd be a great idea to take a bunch of high-level Iraqi diplomats in unarmored bongo trucks down MSR Michigan and it ended up just as you'd imagine. Beaucoup firefight.Getting back to our story at hand. As the first two humvees peeled off to do their thing, I brought my turret around to face what we call el front, or the front. While I was doing that, this conversation (as best I can remember it) took place between my vehicle commander (VC) and driver (D).VC: What the hell is that in the road?D: I don't know I can't tell.VC: Well if you don't know then don't hit it, f***.D: Roger.I do seem to recall the exchange was a bit more heated than that. But with tremendous skill and maneuvering, our driver swerved and missed the object by what I'm guessing was mere inches, as I could barely make out the far end of the unknown object off to my right from the turret.We set up a cordon around checkpoint 295 and EOD was called because guess who else found something? That's right, the first two humvees that split off found a pressure plate IED. So since EOD was already going to show up in like 6 hours when they got done playing Zelda or whatever, we figured it wouldn't hurt for them to take a look at our mystery object as well.So after waiting...and waiting...and more waiting combined with more waiting, EOD finally showed up and took care of the known IED, then they went to check on the other object in question.Friends, can ya guess what they found? Do you have an inkling based on the title? It was a pressure plate IED with anti-tank mines! Hooray! Needless to say, that would have ended poorly for moi had we hit it as well as everyone else in the gun truck. I would have done my best impression of Superman and failed hard when I hit the ground if there were even still complete pieces of me.So, I guess what I'm trying to say is. Thank you, Scott and Matt. I've really enjoyed continuing to live.