While my team and I patrolled Tikrit that evening, my radio crackled with a report from Brad Boyd and C Company. At about 9:30 p.m., Brad’s troops reported stopping a speeding car containing 25 million Iraqi dinar (about $15,000). Because it was an unusual sum and he did not understand the explanation the men in the car offered, Boyd called to ask for assistance. His men set up a checkpoint as we took my translator, Joe Filmore, to the scene to decipher the situation. There, Brad and I learned the Iraqis in the car were brothers who had made a legitimate business transaction on the sale of some property. Since everything in Iraq is on a cash basis, they were afraid of being robbed and hurried back to their house.
We went to the house they claimed to have sold and, after verifying the documents, released them. I loaded my command troops in our Hummers and proceeded south in the city. Boyd’s patrol withdrew their checkpoint and prepared to leave.
Simultaneously, but quite unknown to us, Ali Maher Abdul Rashid had been waiting for such an opportunity. Working with a number of men, former Special Security Office and Fedayeen leader Rashid was determined to avenge the death of Saddam’s sons. He had already organized attacks in our area and would personally lead another on that night. After all, his sister, May, was married to Saddam’s son, Qusay, and he was set on revenge.
With a group of willing followers composed of loyal Saddam families and a few students recruited from the University of Baghdad, Rashid was confident that he could continue to infiltrate after curfew, using ambulances to mask his cells’ movements. Having had one such encounter with an ambulance already, we were expecting a recurrence of confiscated ambulances for aiding and transporting insurgents.
Spotting the activity of some American soldiers who had stopped a car near a residential area, Rashid himself found a good location to ambush the unsuspecting Americans at the checkpoint. With Salmon Khalid Faris, Leith Adnan Azawi, and Khalid Adai Aweed, he hastily organized an attack. Heavily armed with RPGs, grenades and automatic weapons, Rashid staged their pickup truck for a quick escape and took two men with him up a back alley.
Meanwhile, Rashid’s other men operating in the city center camouflaged their movement in an ambulance on the main highway route for further opportunity. After making his way up the alley, Rashid noticed the soldiers leaving the area. If he was going to hit the unsuspecting Americans, the time had to be now.
As Captain Boyd’s soldiers, now nicknamed “Cobras,” left the T-intersection, a crash of RPG rounds thundered around them, accompanied by small arms fire. Though they were surprised and shaken, no harm came to the men inside the Bradleys or to the vehicles themselves. The attackers fled to points south as rapidly as they had fired.
The shock wave of explosions mixed with the rattle of rifle fire behind us jolted all my senses into high alert. We were heading south in complete blackout conditions when we heard explosions near the location we had just left. The first thing that flashed through my mind was the possibility that the enemy would attempt to escape along the narrow parallel streets to avoid contact with reacting forces. I had studied insurgent tactics such as those used effectively in places like Northern Ireland and Algeria. Since an open field to the north rimmed Boyd’s checkpoint, I was certain that the enemy would not go there and would likely be on my side of the city block. I wanted to turn back toward the place we suspected the attack may have originated, but I needed to get some more distance for a “buttonhook” up the back alleys to intercept them.
“Hoefer, go down a couple of blocks and ‘buttonhook’ back up on the parallel street one block over,” I shouted as we raced south. “We might be able to cut them off.”
“Roger, sir,” replied the calm and focused Crow Indian.
Ali Rashid and his men leapt into the small, white Nissan pickup. His driver was already moving, with the truck’s tailgate open. Their faces were covered with headdresses as they hopped into the back with their RPG, grenades, and rifles. They raced south from their ambush, darting through the small residential side streets to safety.
“Regular six, Cobra six,” crackled the radio.
“Regular six,” I answered.
“Sir, our soldiers and Brads are OK. They attacked with RPGs. We’re moving troops to that location,” Captain Boyd radioed. He deployed his forces toward the ambush and called out another one of his platoons from the nearby Saddam Birthday Palace.
With wind racing, hearts pounding and fingers gingerly touching our weapons, we dashed at full throttle a couple of blocks south. “Turn left and cut back up the next street!” I yelled at Hoefer.
“Go one more street down!” shouted Major Bryan Luke, now fully on board as my operations officer. Cody Hoefer obliged. My guys had been instructed to act on their gut instincts while on patrol so this did not concern me. It was just one of those things we all could feel. Bryan’s gut would have major consequences tonight. As we button-hooked back north, I could see we were well ahead of the other two vehicles in my command convoy. As we skidded around the second corner to head back north, my eyes locked in on a white Nissan pickup fishtailing around a corner, heading toward us, about 100 yards ahead. My mind raced as I processed the visible weapons and covered faces of the enemy poised for action in the back of the truck. The game was on. No time. No time to think.
I instinctively flipped the safety on my M-4 carbine to fire. I saw the shape of an RPG in the back. There were four men in the truck.
“Cut ’em off!” I yelled.
Cody Hoefer veered to the left to block the pickup. Looks of surprise flashed from beneath the Arab headdresses. Hoefer did not just cut them off. He rammed the Nissan head-on. Just before he did, I leapt from the Hummer. The enemy was startled by the impact. I was already on my feet charging the vehicle, aiming for the driver behind the windshield. He raised his hands as if to protect his face as I fired. I was not going to let them drive away. Spiderwebbed circles appeared on the glass. The back window shattered. Did I hit him enough times? The driver was slumped in his seat after my opening burst, so I shifted my attention to the two men in the back.
The second vehicle in my convoy rounded the corner, seeing enemy fire sail through the air from the insurgents in the back of the truck. Neither Hoefer nor I noticed it through our tunneled view, heightened senses, and pumped-up adrenaline. Bryan Luke, with radio hand mic stuck inside his helmet, ripped out the cord to make a quick exit as he moved up beside Hoefer on the sidewalk next to the vehicle.
I saw a blur of clothing and flashes from AK-47s and heard earsplitting sound from my rifle and theirs. I rounded the Nissan driver’s door, crouching low to work my way under the guys in the back. I squeezed the pad for the tactical flashlight on the foregrip of my weapon and fired heavily into the pool of light it threw, point-blank on the torso of a man standing in the back of the pickup near the cab, firing his AK-47. He fell straight down as my rounds walked up, stitching him in the gut, chest, face, and head.
Specialist Hoefer cut down the big man riding shotgun as he attempted to fire an American M-79 grenade launcher while exiting the passenger side of the Nissan. The big man fell to the ground with bullets in the torso and face as his weapon fell with a thud and metallic clunk. With Hoefer on one side and me on the other, we had them trapped in an ‘L’ with no place to go.
I shifted fire to the other man in the back who was wearing a red and white checkered headdress. He seemed to hesitate. He could have raised his hands and lived. He could have fired to survive, but instead he tried to flee. I could see my rounds hitting him in the hip and torso as he and his AK-47 tumbled to the other side of the vehicle.
Working his M-16 with Major Luke firing beside him, Specialist Hoefer fired at the same man, now struggling on the other side of the pickup. He became a wadded-up heap beside the right rear wheel as we finished him off with our rifle fire.
Our other soldiers in the trail vehicles had come alongside to support, but the enemy lay scattered where he fell. A Fedayeen cell was destroyed. Time photographer Yuri Koz
yrev captured the fight on film.
With the enemy appearing subdued, I instinctively let out a guttural yell at the top of my lungs. I don’t know where it came from or why. It was an instinctive response as when one has suddenly won a contest. Catching myself, I glanced toward Hoefer and saw Bryan and him standing on the sidewalk with weapons up. I could hear boots thudding down the street and the rattle of flapping equipment as the men in the trail vehicles came running up.
Insanely, one of the trail men fired a shot at the last man killed who was obviously already dead. “Cease fire, CEASE FIRE!” I shouted. “We will show quarter.” It was clear we had subdued them. In the heat of battle, when the blood lust is up, men will react in different ways. It is vital that leaders keep the men in check. The circumstances may be understandable, but it is imperative for leaders to exhibit total control to prevent immoral acts.
The worst danger had momentarily passed. I looked around to confirm that there were no other enemies nearby. We could still be in great danger. Magazine, I thought. Check your ammo. I pushed the magazine release with my trigger finger. One round left. Flipping my rifle safety with my thumb, I reached down and pulled the Velcro flap on a magazine pouch on my kit and slapped in a new magazine. I checked my rifle; it was still loaded with a round in the chamber.
“Search ’em.” I ordered. “Let’s get some security out as well.”
Bryan Luke found a working hand mic on the radio and made the report to battalion. Soldiers throughout the city heard the explosions and gunfire of these two fights within minutes of one another. Soon, Captain Brad Boyd and First Sergeant Mike Evans rolled up with a patrol of their men. We conferred briefly. I wanted Captain Boyd to continue to scour the area south of the mosque. There were likely more bad guys waiting there to play their dirty games.
Suddenly, one of the insurgents made a horrible groan. Bullet-ridden and lying in a pool of his own blood, he also had a bullet in his forehead. How could he possibly still be alive?
“Shut up!” a soldier screamed, followed by a string of curses.
“Knock it off!” I demanded. “We will show quarter. Medic! Get up here, and see if there is anything you can do.” There wasn’t. The enemy was badly riddled with gunshot wounds. In moments, he gurgled his last breath.
As we were wrapping up this scene and searching the dead, a blue car and an ambulance crept cautiously along Highway 1, the main city thoroughfare. One of our OPs reported the ambulance as it pulled out of the dispatcher’s station. As the next OP picked it up, they spotted two men with AK-47s exiting the ambulance and getting into the car. We had waited a long time for this one.
Staff Sergeant Brad Owens’ snipers had been situated at one of several “Salt Lick” outposts on the roof of a large building on the main highway. The blue car tried to race away as glass shards flew from its rear windshield as Owens, Specialist Juan Cantu, and Specialist Danny Harris opened fire with the Russian SVD sniper, an American M-24 sniper rifle and an M-16A2 rifle. The ambulance driver could not maneuver at all. Spiderwebbed circles the size of half-dollars sequentially dotted the driver’s side of the windshield. The ambulance stopped. A badly wounded man struggled out of the vehicle and collapsed on the street.
Suddenly, explosions struck our snipers. A confused “friendly” force of Military Police attached to the division’s Air Defense battalion mistook our men for the enemy and fired a Mark-19 grenade launcher at the rooftop. They had no business being there. Having heard the gun battles we were engaged in, they left the division compound assuming that our men were the bad guys. Our snipers kept their heads and attempted to gain the MPs’ attention by shouting down to them that they were American forces. It was to no avail. Our three men remained disciplined, despite the American automatic grenades that impacted their location, wounding one in the leg, one in the side, and one in the head.
Chris Morris was furious. He had heard Staff Sergeant Owens’ report that an unknown friendly force was shooting at them. Chris rocketed toward the location. He swore at the MP soldiers and forcefully disengaged the confused element with oaths and fists. Specialist Cantu at the rooftop sniper position, in a final act of desperation, was about to throw a grenade at the friendly soldiers to interrupt their stupid attack. When Captain Morris got the MPs to stop, Cantu was left holding a grenade with a handle but no pin. He radioed Morris of his intent to toss it over the side of the building in a vacant field. One more explosion was added to the night, echoing throughout the city.
The entire team was wounded, including Owens, but thankfully, their injuries were fragmentation wounds of the flesh only. Two would return to duty right away, and the other in a few weeks.
I was pumped with adrenaline as we searched the four insurgents from the pickup, and I took this latest development hard as I heard it over the radio. Our ambushes had been extremely successful. Now, they were clouded by the careless actions of well-meaning but idiotic non-infantry soldiers. I couldn’t think about it yet. There was too much activity in the city.
Lieutenant Casey Lusk, recently rotated back from Mosul, moved his QRF to our location. Mark Stouffer had dispatched him on hearing the activity on the radio. He had been given instructions to find me. Typical Mark. Head in the game. Always anticipating. I ordered Casey to secure the area, informing him that Captain Boyd and C Company had their own forces out in the area. Casey secured the corner areas with his two Bradleys and an infantry squad.
We continued to search the dead. They were now soaked in their own fluids, lying in pools created from blood, urine, and a constant stream of fuel leaking from the bullet-ridden Nissan. We dragged the bodies up on the sidewalk, a greasy path leading back to where they fell. I called the battalion, requesting that they phone the Iraqi police and someone to retrieve the bodies. This mess had to be cleaned up by morning.
“Sir, look at this.” Sergeant First Class Gil Nail motioned. He was holding Indian currency and French cigarettes taken from one of the bodies. What did it mean? We collected three AK-47s, two RPG launchers with rounds prepped and ready, two hand grenades, an M-79 40mm grenade launcher with six rounds, and several magazines of small arms ammunition from the truck and the dead bodies. Armed to the teeth, these men clearly intended to kill more Americans that night.
The radio crackled with the news that the Iraqis would not retrieve the bodies. The morgue had no one to dispatch and the medical emergency vehicles would not respond given the shooting of one of their insurgent-friendly ambulances. I turned to the police who had arrived. They didn’t want to deal with the bodies either. I asked if they could get a police pickup truck to the location. They did do that.
There had to be no evidence of this fight by morning. The last thing needed was a bloody diorama to fuel more hatred toward Americans. Insurgents or not, they were still Iraqis, and the people might be sympathetic toward them. I asked Joe Filmore to tell the police that we needed a fire truck to wash off the street. In the meantime, we would have to remove the bodies ourselves. Not willing to order my men to do anything I would not, I walked over to one of the corpses and reached down to pick him up. “Hold on, sir,” called Gil Nail, my operations sergeant. “I think I’ve got some rubber gloves.”
Several of us strapped them on and proceeded to pick up the bloody cadavers and stacked them like cordwood into the back of the police pickup. Their blood smeared on my sleeves, but when it dried, the brownish red color blended with the desert camouflage of my tunic. Uniforms being in short supply, I continued to wear the tunic in the future, but each time I did, it would remind me of that terrible fight.
The gruesome work done, we pushed the perforated, leaking Nissan to the side of the street in a textbook parallel park. As I walked to the police truck loaded with the insurgent remains, I noticed the Iraqi policeman staring at them. He began to nod his head. Then he turned to me, gazed, and then looked back at the bodies, nodding some more.
“These men, no good,” he asserted in broken English while wagging his finger side to s
ide. I couldn’t agree with him more. He and his partner got in the pickup and drove off to the city morgue. I now had three points of the city secured. The enemy’s attack was defeated at every point with a heavy price exacted from him each time. A dozen insurgents had been killed and wounded by our actions that night. While three of our men were wounded, they would recover. I was enraged at the stupidity of the rogue MP platoon and incensed that it was Americans who injured my men.
Even so, I was pleased with the first concentrated effort to secure the city using the new tactics. We had taken a toll on the enemy, and word of it would spread widely by sunrise. We learned later that the four men in the truck were sons of Saddam Hussein’s bodyguards or sons of his relatives. One, Ali Maher Abdul Rashid, joined his brother-in-law, Qusay Hussein, as well as Uday, in death. The sins of the fathers are visited on the next generation. Now, if we could only get the fathers.
I returned to battalion headquarters about 3:30 that morning, physically and emotionally exhausted. In a fight, thoughts and actions are reflexive. After the fight, additional stress is experienced as the mind attempts to process the reality. Even so, I slept soundly for the few hours I had until it would be time to start another day. The sleepless nights would come much later.
CONTINUED SUCCESS, DISCONTINUED SUPPORT
The next day, another insurgent cell attempted a daylight attack on C Company’s Birthday Palace compound, in an open field abutting to the east. The engagement began with sporadic rifle fire from a residential area and a multi-story dwelling under construction in the field. Perhaps the enemy was attempting to draw out Brad’s soldiers. Captain Boyd’s “Cobras” obliged the enemy, but not in the manner he expected.
Boyd sent out Staff Sergeant James Parker with two Bradley Fighting Vehicles and an infantry squad to check it out, as gunfire in the city was a daily occurrence. Taking his section of vehicles to the southeast corner of the field, he began to receive fire from the unfinished house to the north. Parker opened with machine gun fire from his Bradley and moved in echelon toward the gunfire. Now the exchange picked up intensity.
We Got Him! Page 12