 You all taught me more in the last year I've been with CEV about uncommon valor than I have ever read or learned in my entire life. You're professionals, you know exactly what you're doing, and you're going to go out here tomorrow and you're going to do it. And that's exactly what they did. Marines from Second Combat Engineer Battalion embarked on Operation Black Sand. An operation that would see Second CEV clear the Ladar Bazaar in Shikabani, Afghanistan. Basically the first stage was the movement to Shikabani. Once we were prepped here we pushed to the Ladar Bazaar. However the entrance to the staging area was a tight squeeze. Luckily assault breaching vehicles or ABVs were able to make a usable path into the Bazaar. We had to build a farp, obviously to stage everything and hasty LZ, in case of a meta-back. From there we commenced to destroying the Bazaar via explosives. The explosives, M58 mine clearing line charges for Miklix give CEV more than enough firepower to accomplish the mission. Basically a Miklix is 1750 pounds of C4 that's fired out with a rocket. It clears quite an area explosively. Through five days of Bazaar clearing CEV launched off 35 Miklix totaling in more than 61,000 pounds of C4 while destroying numerous IEDs and weapon caches in the process. As far as the local people go, obviously we took out the bad and we're going to put in the good so it'll give them a better way of living in the area. Bazaar free of IEDs that people at Shikbani have a clear path to building a better future.