It is with tremendous gratitude that I can say that I spent over 80 percent of my career at the company or platoon level. Thus, the nearest story that I have involves a company CP - but I think it is close enough to qualify, since their duties mirrored that of the TOC rats at our BN staff...

During OIF III, our company CP was run by our NBC NCO. He was an easily excitable fellow. At about the midway point of our deployment, we had managed to tame our city such that instead of 1 firefight and 1 mortar attack every day, we were seeing no direct fire engagements and we went about a month without a mortar attack. That is, until the the day of this story.

After a few weeks without a single mortar attack upon our small, humble patrol base, some new mortarmen arrived into the city and announced their presence with a salvo of 82-mm mortars that were among the most well-placed of any of the 100+ that we were hit by over the course of a 12-month deployment. In the past, such an incident would barely cause anyone to flinch. But, I guess that during the month of inactivity, my NBC NCO got a little complacent. The mortar salvo happened to hit while we were eating our twice-weekly hot meal. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that, upon the impact of the first mortar round in the 5-round barrage, my NBC NCO flipped over backwards in his plastic lawn chair and literally threw his plate of General Tso's chicken no less than 8 feet into the air. The CP was covered in the foul-smelling, foul-tasting, wretched slime that is General Tso's cruel legacy. My commander and I were laughing so hard that I nearly forgot to go outside and check for casualties.