Candygram For The Insurgents

An empty house at the end of the road. No Iraqi men around. It just looked suspicious to the troops on patrol in Ibrahim Al Markhur in Iraq. Then a cell phone rang inside.

An interpreter with the guys from the 1st Battalion, 68th Armor picked it up. It was the insurgents who had just run away, calling back to warn anybody left behind, "‘Hey, coalition forces are here, go ahead and run away. Go and run into the palm groves all around here."

So the troops looked around the palm groves and found RPGs, hand grenades, a couple AK-47s and a brand new sniper’s rifle (see photo). I wonder where that came from.

The insurgents kept calling back, wondering what the Americans were doing. The interpreter played them, as if he were spying on the troops, setting them up. The insurgents told him they were coming back in ten minutes to attack the Americans. Seven insurgents walked into the American ambush.

“The first guy that came in the door just dropped like a rock. The other two guys behind him got hit pretty hard, too. The rest grabbed their wounded and just ran back off,” said Staff Sgt. Art Hoffman, 30, of Baltimore, Maryland.

Said Sgt. Nicholas Hake-Jordan, 23, of Springfield, Oregon, "I love this shit."