Hey, here it is in February 2022 and in the past five months I’ve finished … three comics. A long way from the times when I was bored and single and did two a week, but then, this never will be my full-time job.
Anyway, the first part of this story, “Stress Dog,” which sets up the rest of it, deals with a slight fictionalization of a real RKG-3 attack that happened to, if memory serves, 3-8 CAV in mid-2009, jn West Mosul. I don’t think it was actually on MSR Tampa. The RKG-3 was a real threat around this time, and our battalion had a man wounded by one. It’s not as well known as the more common RPG series of weapons, not least because it’s much more likely to kill the person employing it, being a roughly wine bottle-sized thrown antitank round with a little streamer on the back to make sure it hits with the dangerous end towards the enemy. We had a whole list of things to look out for that supposedly marked a potential thrower, which I won’t get into because OPSEC, but a lot of the time they were teenagers, and not 19 1/2 year-olds either. The original script for this one read “kid” instead of “fucker.” The gunner really did shoot him over his shoulder after seeing him in the rear-view mirror. Fantastic presence of mind plus utter dumb luck. As depicted here, it was the talk of the brigade for at least 24 hours.