A Draft of an Article About Caches

Here's an article I started writing about finding a weapons cache but ultimately gave up on. Rather than just leaving the unfinished article on my computer, I thought I'd put it up here in case some of you guys were interested. (This happened almost a month ago now.)
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PFC Chicoine digs into a hillside along the Diyala River, pulling out rusted boxes of 14.5mm machine gun ammunition. Roots grow through some of the boxes that the soldiers believe are left over from the Iraq-Iran war. There’s a chance they might be used by insurgents, but this matters little to Chicoine in the early phases of Iraq’s summer heat. “I don’t know what I would want more, for us to have to dig this up or for (insurgents) to just fire us up,” he says rummaging through the dirt for loose rounds.

Through a combination of luck and a willingness to explore, White Platoon has found several of the largest weapons caches ever discovered in the Diyala Province. Caches consist of anything from small arms ammunition to artillery rounds and improvised explosive device (IED) making equipment, they’re usually buried, and sometimes locals’ tips lead help unearth them.

Several days before finding the cache along the Diyala River, high ranking officers from 1-68 Combined Arms Battalion’s headquarters visited a small village outside Narwhan. While villagers had always been friendly with American patrols in the area, it wasn’t until headquarters passed through that they decided to mention several 155 artillery rounds in dried up farming fields. Insurgents commonly use these massive rounds to make some of the most lethal IEDs.

Headquarters dispatched White Platoon to help search the fields and detonate the rounds. Soldiers fanned out across barren fields while villagers crowded around them trying to tell them things most couldn’t understand.

With only one interpreter, AT4, and an entire village working with the local population frustrated soldiers. AT4 often tends to act as a lone agent on missions. As soldiers scoured the vacant farmland and amassed rounds, AT4 would run off with villagers to examine the validity of their reports. Although he’s generally quite skilled at finding what the soldiers need, without him nearby soldiers struggled to function as villagers gathered around them calling out to them in Arabic.

A group of boys and men started to drift in a pit Sfc. Mike Greer and several other soldiers had begun placing artillery rounds and landmines in for detonation. The villagers ignored Greer’s gestures urging them to stay away. No one knew where AT4 was. Greer became irritated as villagers started to get in the way and endanger everyone carelessly milling about a pit full of land mines and artillery shells. One soldier fired a pistol into the air and momentarily scared everyone away, but in less than five minutes everyone returned.

Finally, Greer enlisted my limited Arabic to tell the people to wait at least 100 meters away. Few listened to the warning and demanded money for showing soldiers the unexploded rounds. Though Greer intended to pay the villagers for the find, he explained he was too busy to sort through compensation issues until he finished disposing of old rounds.

Once word spread among villagers that Americans were paying for rounds, everyone wanted to show soldiers something. During the Iran-Iraq war Saddam used to leave artillery cannons and tanks in fighting positions throughout the country. Tank and artillery crews buried weapons caches next to the vehicles, so there’s no shortage of rounds. The problem is that Americans were only interested in disposing of high explosive rounds; smaller rounds are of little to no danger.
Kids produced endless rusty, large caliber machine gun rounds and shrapnel from old artillery rounds. The multitude of erroneous reports soldiers to tune out the villagers. Offerings of candy satisfied some children enough to leave, but others rejected the candy demanding money or pens.

After detonating the old rounds, paying the villagers confronted soldiers with the most difficult problem of the day. The battalion commander had told Greer to pay informants, but hadn’t given Greer any money or indication of how much to pay. The platoon doesn’t carry a stash of petty cash, so they had to pay the village from their own personal funds. Uncertain of whether or not battalion would reimburse them, Greer orders several soldiers to keep their money and decides to give the village fifty dollars.

So many people came forward that no one was certain who showed the platoon what and everyone in the village expected something. Greer had AT4 find him the village elder and Sgt. Nicodemus delivered the fifty-dollar bill, explaining that it was to be divided among the villagers. The man asked what he was supposed to do with fifty American dollars, and AT4 told him to find an exchange or go to the bank. White platoon leaves behind an arguing crowd as they drive away from the village.

Back along the riverbank, there’s no one to bother soldiers. Though the cache find is substantially larger than the earlier find and requires substantially more digging, everyone seems more relaxed. Sfc. Greer picks an onion from a field, peels it and passes it around the small group around him to taste, as Pfc. Russo and Pfc. Gundy search the area with a mine detector.