Worked out well for me and I ended up getting Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) for every one of my team members who wanted one and brought them home with me. They're all U.S. citizens now and upstanding members of our community. The guy that saved my life the first time lives on the street behind me and I have awesome Iraqi food on tap whenever I want.

These are guys who quite literally put their necks on the line and their families at risk of being labeled "collaborators" every day for 5 years straight.

These same guys saved me and a 5 vehicle convoy from an IED ambush that would have most certainly turned everyone in that convoy into a pink mist. That's a long story, but it was incompetent/apathetic US soldiers that set those wheels in motion. I'd only been in country for about 3-4 months when that happened and quickly found out I could trust the Iraqis on my team more than my fellow Americans unfortunately.

The main guy who initially provided the intel on the attack was almost executed by insurgents who'd setup an impromptu checkpoint at the ambush point on MSR Tampa (the main highway running north to south through the middle of Iraq) when they found spare parts for US military vehicles in the trunk of his car after he'd brought them to Baghdad to be repaired.

When he saw the checkpoint, he put his credentials in a hollowed out portion of the soles in his sneakers and when they interrogated him at gunpoint on the side of the highway about the parts, he said that he'd come upon a US convoy that had been attacked and he looted the parts off the convoy to sell at the market in Najaf to feed his family. When he returned to base, I could tell something was wrong and after he detailed his experience, I immediately took him to the TOC to report the details to the LTC. He gave them all the details, showed them exactly on the map where he saw them setting up the ambush and digging in the IEDs and the colonel assured us they'd send out a QRF to deal with it.

A few days later, he was riding in a convoy with me and as we were a few miles out from that intersection, he asked me if the Army had taken action on the intel he reported and I told him that I'm pretty sure they did, but then he asked me if I was sure enough to bet my life on it.

I immediately got on the radio to try to get the convoy commander to pull off to the side of the highway so we could radio base and check on that, but everybody knows stopping on the side of a busy highway in Iraq is just asking to be attacked. After pleading with him to stop, we finally began to pull off to the side of the highway about half a mile out from the intersection and were immediately ambushed with small arms fire.

That was the first time I'd been shot at and as soon as glass started breaking, all that "Rambo" shit went right out the window and I completely locked up, accidently dropped my rifle, and all I could do was grab my Iraqi friend and get flat on the floorboard in the back seat area of our unarmored Ford F350. Thankfully the rest of the guys on that convoy were seasoned operators and they managed to lay down enough fire in the direction of the insurgents that they retreated from the area.

After halting all traffic on the highway and setting up a degree of security around our stopped convoy, the commander ran back to our truck, and suspecting the Iraqi traveling with us somehow had connections to the attack, pulled my buddy out by his hair, dropped the mag in his pistol and then used the pistol to severely beat him to the point where he was unconscious and shattered his eye socket so badly that the eye was actually hanging out of the socket. He dumped him on the side of the highway and turned his attention to me and that's when I ended up grabbing the rifle I'd previously dropped and told him there was no way I was getting back in that convoy.

Half the guys wanted to wait for EOD to arrive and the other half were with the convoy commander and wanted to jam, so it turned into a bit of a blue on blue situation on the shoulder of MSR Tampa which in itself is a disaster. The convoy commander eventually relented and waited for EOD to show up and whaddya know? They found 24 clusters of 155mm artillery shells connected to an old school wireless phone receiver with the "paging" button being wired to detonate the IEDs remotely. If we would have continued, it would have been certain death.

After the EOD team relayed what they'd found, the convoy commander started crying like a bitch and my buddy ended up getting a medevac to the Ibn Sina CASH in Baghdad. The convoy commander who was PMC like the rest of us, was ultimately ejected from country and when I finally made it to the hospital to check on my guy, I offered up $20K of my personal money (that's all I had at the time) for saving my life and the lives of everyone on the convoy, but he wouldn't accept it. He kept saying that it would be shameful and that I was his brother, etc. I was getting a bit annoyed by all this, so I finally asked, "WHAT DO YOU WANT? THERE MUST BE SOMETHING YOU WANT?!" And he told me that when I was finally finished with my work there, he wanted to take his family and go back to the US with me.

That dude and the rest of my team of 22 went everywhere with me for the next 5 years and saved my ass on a couple other occasions, but those are long stories too and believe it or not, this is the very abbreviated IED story. I hadn't planned on typing all of this out, but I did so to say, there are some good ones out there. I'm no proponent of opening the doors to our great nation to mass Muslim migration, but these guys were thoroughly vetted and proved themselves time and time again over the course of 5 years. Their contribution to our missions were invaluable and we couldn't have accomplished what we accomplished without them.

EDIT: Spelling, grammar, and clarification (I'm a shitty writer)

Worked out well for me and I ended up getting Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) for every one of my team members who wanted one and brought them home with me. They're all U.S. citizens now and upstanding members of our community. The guy that saved my life the first time lives on the street behind me and I have awesome Iraqi food on tap whenever I want.

These are guys who quite literally put their necks on the line and their families at risk of being labeled "collaborators" every day for 5 years straight.

These same guys saved me and a 5 vehicle convoy from an IED ambush that would have most certainly turned everyone in that convoy into a pink mist. That's a long story, but it was incompetent/apathetic US soldiers that set those wheels in motion. I'd only been in country for about 3-4 months when that happened and quickly found out I could trust the Iraqis on my team more than my fellow Americans unfortunately.

The main guy who initially provided the intel on the attack was almost executed by insurgents who'd setup an impromptu checkpoint at the ambush point on MSR Tampa (the main highway running north to south through the middle of Iraq) when they found spare parts for US military vehicles in the trunk of his car after he'd brought them to Baghdad to be repaired.

When he saw the checkpoint, he put his credentials in a hollowed out portion of the soles in his sneakers and when they interrogated him at gunpoint on the side of the highway about the parts, he said that he'd come upon a US convoy that had been attacked and he looted the parts off the convoy to sell at the market in Najaf to feed his family. When he returned to base, I could immediately tell something was wrong and after he detailed his experience, I immediately took him to the TOC to report the details to the LTC. He gave them all the detailed, showed them exactly on the map where he saw them setting up the ambush and digging in the IEDs and the colonel assured us they'd send out a QRF to deal with it.

A few days later, he was riding in a convoy with me and as we were a few miles out from that intersection, he asked me if the Army had taken action on the intel he reported and I told him that I'm pretty sure they did, but then he asked me if I was sure enough to bet my life on it.

I immediately got on the radio to try to get the convoy commander to pull off to the side of the highway so we could radio base and check on that, but everybody knows stopping on the side of a busy highway in Iraq is just asking to be attacked. After pleading with him to stop, we finally began to pull off to the side of the highway about half a mile out from the intersection and were immediately ambushed with small arms fire.

That was the first time I'd been shot at and as soon as glass started breaking, all that "Rambo" shit went right out the window and I completely locked up and all I could do was grab my Iraqi friend and get flat on the floorboard in the back seat of our unarmored Ford F350. Thankfully the rest of the guys on that convoy were seasoned operators and they managed to lay down enough fire in the direction of the insurgents to where they retreated from the area.

After halting all traffic on the highway and setting up a degree of security around our stopped convoy, the commander ran back to our truck, pulled my buddy out my his hair, dropped the mag in his pistol and severely beat him to the point where he was unconscious, had a shattered eye socket, and the eye was actually hanging out of the socket. He dumped him on the side of the highway and turned his attention to me and that's when I ended up grabbing the rifle I'd previously dropped and told him there was no way I was getting back in that convoy.

Half the guys wanted to wait for EOD to arrive and the other half were with the convoy commander and wanted to jam, so it turned into a bit of a blue on blue situation on the shoulder of MSR Tampa which in itself is a disaster. The convoy commander eventually relented and waited for EOD to show up and whaddya know? They found 24 clusters of 155mm artillery shells connected to an old school wireless phone receiver with the "paging" button being wired to detonate the IEDs remotely. If we would have continued, it would have been certain death.

After the EOD team relayed what they'd found, the convoy commander started crying like a bitch and my buddy ended up getting a medevac to the Ibn Sina CASH in Baghdad. The convoy commander who was PMC like the rest of us, was ultimately ejected from country and when I finally made it to the hospital to check on my guy, I offered up $20K of my personal money (that's all I had at the time) for saving my life and the lives of everyone on the convoy, but he wouldn't accept it. He kept saying that it would be shameful and that I was his brother, etc. I was getting a bit annoyed by all this, so I finally asked, "WHAT DO YOU WANT? THERE MUST BE SOMETHING YOU WANT?!" And he told me that when I was finally finished with my work there, he wanted to take his family and go back to the US with me.

That dude and the rest of my team of 22 went everywhere with me for the next 5 years and saved my ass on a couple other occasions, but those are long stories too and believe it or not, this is the very abbreviated IED story. I hadn't planned on typing all of this out, but I did so to say, there are some good ones out there. I'm no proponent of opening the doors to our great nation to mass Muslim migration, but these guys were thoroughly vetted and proved themselves time and time again over the course of 5 years. Their contribution to our missions were invaluable and we couldn't have accomplished what we accomplished without them.