Welcome to the smoke pit.

In the military, a smoke pit is typically where troops go to feed their nicotine addictions,

but also it's a place to swap stories, funny, tragic, and most certainly bizarre.

The kinds of stories that aren't usually mentioned in a

professional setting, because they are inevitably the kinds of stories that could result in the

soldier being sent for a psychological evaluation by his commander. So the telling of such

unbelievable stories is thus relegated to places like the smoke pit.

But make no mistake, whether we believe them or not, the men who shared these stories did so with all sincerity.

They have insisted that these events happened exactly as they are described.

This episode contains three stories from three separate men,

all soldiers who were serving in the U.S. Army at the time these events took place.

In this case, these three men have chosen to remain entirely anonymous.

These three stories were first shared with Nick Orton, a soldier,

and the author who has compiled many more stories like this in his book, Tales from the Grid Square, Volume 1.

I'm Luke Lamanah, and this is wartime stories.

Contact.

It is December of 2016. This takes place in Afghanistan. Our platoon had been on patrol all day.

After a few hours waiting on a wrecker truck to bail out our lead truck with the mine roller,

we had finally arrived to observation post-Manos on the Helman River. This was on the southern border of where American

troops could pass. We had already been to observation postmonos and linked up with the Afghan

army several times during this deployment. After an evening of being in contact with a supposedly

red Taliban unit, everything had come to a quiet end and it began to get dark.

...