Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
6:53 | "Get up! The world's ending. I'm making eggs." His roommate's words woke Blake Bourne on 9-11 and his whole world changed over the next few days. Savagery threatened the Norman Rockwell world he had grown up in and it led to his graduation from Ranger school as an Army officer.
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He had joined the Army to go find the bad guys. It took him seven years after 9-11 but Blake Bourne was finally going to be deployed when he got a call from his commanding officer. Instead of a rifle platoon, he was going to command a support platoon. He wasn't even sure what that was, but when he found out, he was mad.
The enemy had learned not to directly engage American troops in Iraq. Their main tactic was the use of IED's, improvised explosive devices of several kinds that were almost impossible to spot. Blake Bourne found one of them when he decided to take a different route one day.
Blake Bourne expected to do cool "guy stuff" involving weaponry and bombs when he joined the Army. He remembered that and laughed when he had to navigate nearly impossible logistics to supply an ice cream social for some Arab sheikhs.
It was an odd return home for Blake Bourne, single and based in Germany. One thing he noticed was the tighter bond with his fellow soldiers who had served together in Iraq. He also encountered the best commander he had ever met, LTC John Meyer.
Blake Bourne's second deployment to Iraq was more exhausting than his first, not because of more action, but because of less. He spent long night shifts staring at a computer screen, monitoring less and less action as the war wound down. Eventually, he was one of the last soldiers to leave Iraq.
