Five minutes later an entourage of Iraqi Humvees came flying through the town. In true Iraqi fashion, Abass has decided to bring his entire personal security detachment to this man’s house in the middle of our searching operation. He wanted to have tea, talk about the local area, and get an assessment of the situation in Kaffijiyah.
Colonel Abass and the police colonel conversed in Arabic for fifteen minutes before I lost interest and noticed a cute Iraqi boy, no older than five. He sprinted to me and spoke in perfect English, “Give me.” I responded in English, “You sure are direct, aren’t you?” He snapped, “Mister, give me.” I ruminated. On the one hand, I did have some toys, but this kid was rude. On the other hand, if we could get in with this kid’s police colonel father, we would have access to a lot of intelligence. I made my decision and threw the kid one of the toys I had in my drop pouch.
The little boy dived on the toy, ran into his house, and came dashing at light speed toward me to shout again, “Give me!” I played the kid’s little game for a few more rounds, not able to resist the idea I could win his heart and mind. I snapped back to reality and realized I was being used. This kid had ratholed a pile of the things I had given him and was coming back for more. As long as the gravy train was in town, he was going to get more than his fair share.
I focused my attention back on Colonel Abass, who had finished speaking with his old friend. The police colonel’s parting words were that the insurgents in the Triad were in their last throes of survival and were depending on thievery and burglary to support their attacks on the Iraqi army and Marines. According to him they would be out of the area within months because the people were fed up. I knew one thing. I wasn’t holding my breath for this guy’s prediction to come true. Insha’allah (God willing) this guy is right!
Despite all the minor setbacks with Najib, the day clearing homes in Kaffijiyah was successful. No insurgents attacked, we received some solid intelligence from the local residents, and we found no caches or evidence of insurgents working in the area. It was time to get some chow. We helped Najib round up his men and headed to the battalion mobile command post (CP), which overlooked Kaffijiyah from a hill eight hundred meters away. Captain Chin and I started our walk to the CP when the Iraqi ambulance came screaming in our direction. I thought to myself, what is wrong now?
The ambulance stopped right alongside us as the dust cloud following engulfed us, proving that being invisible is possible in Iraq. It was my medic buddies Hussein and Muhammad. Excited, they yelled at us to hop in the back. We obliged after a short calculation: we could either hitch a ride in the back of an Iraqi ambulance with no armor and no turret gunner and be driven by a couple of crazy Iraqis or we could walk a mile wearing over eighty pounds of gear, suffering in 125-degree heat. Sometimes comfort-based decisions are the way to go. We hopped in the back of the medical vehicle and grabbed onto whatever we could find as Hussein put the pedal to the metal.
Making Friends with Najib
After returning from the mission in one piece, I was ready to hit the rack. Sadly, Colonel Abass made a request to speak with the advisers who were embedded with Najib. He had correctly sensed problems during the Kaffijiyah mission between the embedded advisers and Najib and wanted to smooth over the situation. Abass had unique insights to share. He gave me, Horvath, and Chin a lesson on how to deal with Arab men. His lecture was directed mostly at Horvath, but we all gained insight from his wisdom.
“Gunny Horvath,” he began, “you are as stubborn as Captain Najib. I respect this quality in men and I believe it contributes to your success and pride as a military man, however—” Colonel Abass interrupted himself. “Captain Najib will be punished for not cooperating with you today on the battlefield. I am sorry for his actions. However, I want to lend you some advice. In our culture, you must give a little if you want to get anything. If two stubborn people meet, it always creates problems. For example, Arab people are similar to a taut string. At one end you have the reasonable people; on the other end you have the maniacs. They are both connected by this taut line. If the maniacs want something, the reasonable people must soften and give him some line and vice versa. Unfortunately this line is not strong. If one group pulls against the other, the line breaks and everything is broken.”
Abass continued his lecture. “Here’s a more personal example. The U.S. Army Special Forces team that previously worked here were bossy. They were smart men, had excellent tactics, and trained my scouts well. But they were stern, demanding, and stubborn. On one mission they asked me if they could take my scouts. I agreed with them that the mission was valuable, however, I would have none of it.” Abass got louder. “Why should I allow them to order my scouts around without consulting my advice and without respecting my stature as commander? We were not friends. I was merely their pawn. The Special Forces team was terrible with relations and I made them pay!”
At this point Colonel Abass was excited, but he began to calm down. “The next Special Forces team to come in was different,” he said. “Their tactics were terrible and their advice incompetent. However, they were my friends, drank tea with me, and consulted me on the best employment of my scouts. I would try to please them and I allowed them to employ my scouts in any matter they chose, even if I felt it was unwise. This is something Iraqis do. We take the extra step to please a friend. It is important to compromise and keep the string I spoke of from breaking.” Abass was wise. We decided to build our personal friendship and military relationship with Captain Najib and the other jundi.
Chapter 6
Vacationing with the Iraqi Army
August 2006
Improvised explosive devices, better known as IEDs, are the biggest threat in Iraq. The number of devices and tactics insurgents use to build and employ IEDs could fill a book. Breaking it down “Barney-style” (Marine term for synthesizing things so even the dumb purple dinosaur can understand it), these devices can be separated into three categories: pressure-plate IEDs (PPIEDs), command-wire IEDs (CWIEDs), and radio-controlled IEDs (RCIEDs) (see photo 6).
PPIEDs are any IED initiated by the victim. The classic example is the homemade land mine. Imagine you are walking through a rice paddy in Vietnam and step on a metal or plastic object stuffed with C-4 explosives by the local villager. The next thing you know your leg is flying through the sky and you are collapsing to the ground. This is a type of PPIED. A more complicated example of the type found in Iraq might be a couple strips of thin metal separated by Styrofoam wafers on each end. These metal strips connect to four 155-mm artillery shells buried on the side of the road. The idea is to have a vehicle roll over the metal strips. The pressure from the weight of the tires then causes the metal strips to touch, completing the electric circuit and setting off the artillery shells. This makes a bad day for the Marines or Iraqi army.
Insurgents love PPIEDs because they are “fire and forget”—drop it, leave, and hope Allah will find the right victim. Tactically, though, insurgents have two drawbacks they must consider: accidentally killing the local populace and emplacement. The PPIED is not discriminating. Because whoever happens to drive over the top of a triggering device ignites a PPIED, an insurgent may end up blowing up his uncle, his sister, or his neighbor who is cruising down the street. Insurgents place these IEDs on military-only roads or place them on the civilian roads after curfew hours, when no civilian traffic should be traveling.
But this placement presents a conundrum to the insurgent: How can he emplace the IED on a military-only road if he will be searched if he is seen on this road? Also, if he instead decides to place the IED after curfew hours on a civilian road, he will be searched because he is driving after curfew. All of this makes emplacement appear impossible. It is not, as evidenced by the countless dead Marines and jundi who have died from PPIEDs.
The simplest of IEDs are the CWIEDs. If you think back to the Wile E. Coyote cartoons, you already know about CWIEDs. Remember how Wile E. Coyote would set up a bunch of TNT on the road and trace h
is wire back to a hidden spot where it would be connected to a large ignition switch that said “ACME” on it? When the roadrunner, his target, was in his kill zone, Wile E. Coyote would push down on the igniter box. Unfortunately for the coyote, something would invariably be screwed up with his CWIED; he would get fried and the roadrunner would run off.
Insurgents do the exact same thing as Wile E. Coyote, but their CWIEDs work. First, they place a large amount of explosives: 155-mm artillery shells, four-hundred-pound propane tanks filled with PE-4, satchel charges, metal barrels stuffed with rusty nails and shrapnel, and so on. Second, they trace a copper wire back to their hidden ignition point. This hidden area could be an old sheepherder’s tent, a civilian’s house, or a stack of rocks. The third step in the CWIED phase is to wait for an unlucky convoy to enter the kill zone and then count, wahid, ithnien, thlathe (one, two, three)—boom!
Owing to their simplicity and ultralow technology (which limits our ability to defeat them with expensive technology), command wires are an insurgent favorite. The added bonus of CWIEDs for insurgents is that they eliminate the issue of accidentally blowing up their neighbors. Yet there are drawbacks to CWIEDs. Insurgents have to sit and wait for a target, which takes time and manpower, not to mention that sitting in the searing heat for hours on end is no fun. Also, CWIEDs are difficult to hide—concealing two thousand meters of copper wire is not easy!
The final category of IED is the RCIED, also an insurgent favorite, consisting of explosives connected to a modified electronic receiving device. Examples of RCIEDs receiving devices include Sanyo base stations, cell phones, and Motorola radios. These devices can be programmed to detonate explosives at the insurgent’s desired time. The RCIED is the lazy man’s IED. Imagine an insurgent sitting on his patio smoking his hookah pipe. When he sees a convoy passing a few miles away, he dials a special code on his cell phone and detonates the IED, goes back into his house, collects a five hundred dollar check from Al Qaeda, and takes a nap as if nothing ever happened. The chances of the Marines finding this guy? Zero.
What the insurgents can achieve with IEDs is amazing. Roughly 20 percent of every American’s tax bill goes to the defense budget. And yet a bunch of relatively uneducated sheepherders with twenty bucks can kick our asses all over Iraq. Luckily a new electronic countermeasure device called the Chameleon is now employed on every Humvee in Al Anbar. At one hundred thousand dollars per Chameleon, these devices are worth every penny. The Chameleon blocks every radio-controlled device. What this means in Al Anbar is that the RCIED threat is gone. The insurgents are left with the PPIED or the CWIED, both of which are difficult to emplace and are easily seen. Because of the Chameleon the challenge of emplacing IEDs has become more difficult for the insurgents.
The Leave Run Process
After checking that our Chameleons were fully functional, we left for our first IED-dodging convoy to Al Asad Airbase, the “Club Med” of Al Anbar Province, located thirty-five miles south of Haditha Dam. The mission was to conduct a leave run (“leave” is the military term for vacation). I am still trying to figure out the peculiarities of how the leave run process works. Apparently everyone in the IA works twenty days and then takes ten days of leave to see their families. This is the standard set by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. The Iraqi army makes the French work schedule look like a Chinese sweatshop.
Every ten days a leave run was required. All jundi going on leave from 2nd Brigade, 7th Division Iraqi army, which included our battalion in the Haditha Triad as well as battalions in Hit (an insurgent hotbed forty miles southeast of Haditha) and Rawah (a small town located thirty miles west of the Triad), converged at the 2nd Iraqi Brigade headquarters camp on Al Asad Airbase. From there the jundi were jammed onto civilian buses, integrated into a U.S. military convoy, and moved southeast from Al Asad, where the convoy picked up other IA soldiers going on leave from various divisions in Al Anbar.
The buses moved through some of the more treacherous areas in Al Anbar Province. Their first “scenic” city along the drive was Ramadi, which was followed by another “tourist attraction,” Fallujah. If the buses survived they skirted south of Baghdad and moved south toward Najaf, the final destination. Najaf is a large city in southern Iraq and is midpoint between Baghdad and Basrah. It is a reasonable destination for our brigade, as more than 90 percent of the soldiers in 2nd Brigade are Shia Muslims from the southern areas of Iraq.
Under the current method of operations this generous leave schedule means every ten days the MiTTs are risking their lives so the jundi can see their families every twenty days. Remarkably, Iraqis were angry at their twenty-days-on, ten-days-off schedule and threatened to quit if they did not get their leave. This was ridiculous to us, considering all MiTT members were on tours ranging from seven to fifteen months.
The leave process did not lend itself to minimizing risk for MiTT members or the IA. Leave operations were especially convoluted for our battalion, which was spread between five locations in the Triad. A MiTT joke was that the primary objective of the MiTT is not to train, support, and advise the IA on how to conduct counterinsurgency operations so we can leave Iraq but to gather jundi throughout the Triad so they can go home to see their families every twenty days.
The easiest way to understand the leave process is to think of it as a school bus. The school bus gets the kids from school and drops them off at their bus stops. Similarly, the first stage of a leave convoy involved convoying to Al Asad to pick up Iraqi soldiers coming back from leave. We typically went one day prior to the jundi arriving and spent the night in Al Asad so we could take care of any business we needed to conduct there. The following day the jundi arrived, at about 0400 to 0500. After the Iraqis inventoried who was returning from leave, the convoy headed north, back toward Camp Ali (see map 2).
Our first two stops on the route back to Camp Ali were Baghdadi, home of 3rd Iraqi Company, and Haqliniyah, 1st Iraqi Company’s base. In the respective locations we dropped off the jundi coming off leave and picked up jundi who were ready to go on leave. Essentially we were making a one-for-one jundi swap.
Once we reached Camp Ali we offloaded everyone except for the jundi who were from 4th Iraqi Company, which was located on the Marine FOB (forward operating base, pronounced “faub”) in central Haditha. The convoy to Haditha was dangerous. By reforming a smaller convoy at Camp Ali that only consisted of the jundi that belonged to 4th Iraqi Company, our adviser team could minimize the number of vehicles and personnel in the convoy, thus lessening the exposure to the inevitable IED attacks on the route to Haditha.
Map 2. Iraqi Army convoy operations during a leave period.
Once the MiTT arrived at the Haditha FOB, we swapped the jundi and returned to Camp Ali. If the process already sounds complicated, stand by, it is not over. Once we returned to Camp Ali we had to do yet another convoy to Barwana, home to 2nd Iraqi Company. Barwana is on the eastern side of the Euphrates River about thirty miles from the dam. Because of the PPIED threat on the route to Barwana (which required a convoy to move slowly in order to spot pressure-plate switches), a convoy took two to three hours. Once we arrived at the Barwana FOB we again swapped jundi and brought them back to Camp Ali.
In the end we dropped off all jundi coming off leave at their respective firm bases (dropped the kids off at their bus stops) and managed to collect all jundi going on leave at Camp Ali. Keeping track of the number of convoys thus far? We’re on eight, and we’re not done yet.
The final stage in the leave process was to screen all the jundi going on leave for contraband and theft while at Camp Ali. Once they were screened we loaded them like cattle into the back of flatbed Leylands and conducted yet another convoy to Al Asad to drop them off at brigade headquarters so they could get on buses there and begin their fourteen-hour journey to Najaf. Once they were delivered to brigade headquarters, the MiTT returned to Camp Ali that same night (see photo 7).
Leave runs were exhausting and exposed MiTT members to extreme danger. In the
end, on a single leave run, an MiTT conducted ten combat convoys, drove 250 miles on some of the highest IED threat routes in Iraq, and traveled over twelve hours in a Humvee in less than a thirty-six hour period. I hoped the IA appreciated what we were doing for them.
Leave Run Execution
Route Bronze is the path we chose for our first leave run, given the PPIED threat along Route Uranium, which is a military-only road leading to Al Asad. Route Bronze is a two-lane paved highway that weaves along the Euphrates River and gives a wonderful tour of the area. But Route Bronze was also infested with CWIEDs. Grim reminders of IED death and destruction were evident everywhere along the road. There were massive IED craters spattered along the road, making it look like a piece of asphalt-colored Swiss cheese. Combat engineers filled and marked the holes as fast as possible, but they could not repair the damage as fast as the insurgents could plant IEDs (see photo 8).
Aside from the massive IED potholes along the road, the route was well maintained and at times scenic. Part of the route moves on the outskirts of the major towns and villages. To the east are various villages in the region, which snuggle up next to the Euphrates River. The view to the west is treacherous desert. All we saw there was the occasional blank stare from a random sheepherder who was providing reconnaissance for the insurgents. I never saw any grass to the west of Route Bronze: why did sheepherders graze their flocks there?
Along Route Bronze we were kings. The Iraqis led the convoy and their lead turret gunner waved a large orange flag as a reminder to the locals to move it or lose it. Locals knew the drill: if they did not move, a hail of 7.62-mm metal slugs from jundi AK-47s and RPK machine guns would come flying toward their craniums.
Crowds parted like the Red Sea when our convoy moved through. The locals veered into the desert a hundred meters off the road, got out of their cars, and faced away from the road. Some adhered to the rules better than others. Thankfully for the civilians, Iraqi turret gunners knew how to distinguish between a credible threat and a lazy Iraqi who wasn’t following the rules. It was unfortunate to disrupt civilians’ lives in this way, but the threat of vehicle-borne IEDs was constant in the Triad.
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