Told in the second person
You wait at the ramp for the officer or NCO in charge to arrive and give the mission brief. After the routine of battlespace updates, rules of engagement, escalation of force procedures, and safety drills you load up in the personel carrier and drive off into town.
The road is paved in some places, a pile of dust in others. You shoot the shit with the other guys in the belly of the vehicle, if you aren't up in a hatch watching the surroundings, or you're catching a few minutes of shuteye because there's nothing to see, just the innards of a very expensive and well armored military transport. Not well armored enough to stop all the bombs that are set in your path, though, but you don't usually think about that. Sure, you've heard the stories and you know a few of the guys who have been hit on patrol and lost limbs, but there's nothing you can do except hope it doesn't happen to you, so there's no reason to dwell on it. For every fifty patrols, one might get hit and for every two or three hundred one might produce more than minor casualties. You just have to hope that if it does come your training kicks in. All those days of doing repetative first aid practice and monotonous battle drills will be of value when the real thing hits.
It felt like almost like play then, almost like basketball practice or music lessons, when the sergeant would say "Alright, your vehicle has been hit and you are taking small arms fire from the right." Then you crawled out of the left side of your Humvee and maybe pulled an "incapacitated" member of the crew out of the "burning" vehicle. But there was no explosion, no ambush, no blood, no feeling of panic and fear, just a few fellow soldiers running through a drill you'd done dozens of times in the parking lot of your reserve drill hall. Now you hope the repetition, the rote learning, the muscle memory, goes into gear when the explosion does happen, when your hands are shaking and your heart is racing, when the men you've been living and bonding with for months are screaming in pain. You just know you will need stop the bleeding, to get out of the kill zone, and secure your area while you wait for evacuation, if you are one of the "lucky" ones who isn't hurt too bad in the attack.
But all that is a fleeting thought in the routine of the mission, the details mulled over in quieter times back behind the wire. Now you are just killing time until the ramp drops and you get out of the back of the vehicle and step onto the street. You can see cars up a block or two away, stopped out of fear and respect for your presence. There are some kids watching by the side of the road, curious, waving to the guys in the hatches, who return the gesture. Their parents watch from the yard inside the wall, wary but seemingly indifferent. The fear and danger are as routine for them as it is for you.
You enter the office of a local official who you have business with. He speaks broken English from his time in university, but you need the translator to communicate effectively. You want to provide money and coordination or machinery and expertise to fix a broken water main. He is willing to work with you, but doesn't seem too quick to make anything happen. To you this is a problem that requires immediate attention and here you are offering to pay for everything and provide machinery and men to help fix the problem, but his level of concern is much lower and he seems to be willing to wait a day or two so he can attend to other business. Your sense of urgency would be matched by an American town official, you think. "If this happened in my city, the municipal government would be there in a heartbeat," you say to yourself. "Why is this guy stalling?" The cultural divide has come between the two of you and your commanding officer is not happy with the official's response. The CO's anger threatens to make the situation worse, but you manage to finish the meeting with a tentative agreement and mount up to go back home.
On the ride back you think about the results and nature of your meeting. Your goal was to begin work today, the result was a delay until the next day (unnecessary in your view). But the nature of it is what strikes you. Here you are, essentially a bureaucrat trying to make sure people have a functioning local government that provides running water, police, sewer, power, phones, and other services, but to do your job you have to run a gauntlet of mine strewn roads and government personel who speak your language as well as you speak theirs, not very well. People expect you to do these things, after all you have the power and resources to make them happen (at least they think you do, even if the truth is otherwise), but don't really care if you are killed in the process. You don't know your enemy, can't even say you've seen him, although you're sure you have at some point as he walked down the street, innocently strolling from one side of town to another.
Once you return to base you take off your fifty pounds of gear, eat a meal, and get some paperwork done up at the office. After, as you are relaxing back in your hooch playing XBox, trying to forget about how much longer you have here, you hear something whistling overhead and simultaneously realize it is a rocket as it impacts close enough for you to feel it. Ten seconds later another impact hits further in the distance, out of the danger zone. Fortunately no one was hurt. For the first time, though, that panic, that fear, that racing heart is with you. It leaves in a matter of seconds, but you now know what it feels like when someone is trying to kill you.