Three Marks on the Horizon

Yon’s latest dispatch has a lot of great stuff. Read his description of an ambush:

Their Command Sergeant Major, James Pippin, was shot just before Memorial Day. He and his soldiers were in a large ambush near Yarmook Traffic Circle. When the ambush kicked off, Pippin ordered his driver to head straight into the heart of the attack where there were enemy machine guns, rockets and so forth.

Pippin ran out and shot one enemy. The guy had an RPG aimed at the Humvee, but the Humvee came right at him, Pippin jumped out. Pippin told me it was a lucky shot, but he hit the man in the face. A big firefight ensued, and Pippin got some bullet holes, but made his people keep fighting that day until they broke the ambush. This kind of stuff freaks out the enemy: our guys didn’t get them with jets or fancy machines from a distance, but just rushed into them and outfought them. Despite an enemy with perfect surprise, our guys still killed four of them and CSM Pippin was the only American casualty. Countless acts like these around Iraq are a large part of what has given our guys moral authority with Iraqi Police and Army.

Got that? The guys who got ambushed scored four kills. The ambushers only wounded one.

Excellent batallion indeed.

Update:
Michael emails the Instapundit to say:

Alexandra Zavis is an excellent correspondent. She gets around Iraq and I always find her stories consistent with what I am seeing on the ground. Her recent story on Baqubah adds more context to my own dispatches, and I believe the inverse is also true.

Read her for yourself.