Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces sic-3

by Tom Clancy

  Obviously, the Iraqis had seen the same thing; and one morning they came up in an armored vehicle — the first time we had seen any type of armored vehicle out there. He came right out into No-Man's-Land up on a knoll just north of Khafji.

  My team commander ordered me to get out there and see what they were doing.

  I didn't feel comfortable about it, but he's my boss, so okay. We jumped in a humvee, and the Saudis lifted the gate to let me cross the Saudi berm. As soon as I got to the other side, I hung right and hugged the berm, just kind of looking. Meanwhile, the captain was standing on top of the border station directing me through the radio. "No, no, turn left, turn left, get out there."

  Well, about that time the Iraqis had hooked a chain to the abandoned vehicle and were dragging it off. They must have thought we were using it, because they dragged it off the knoll. The captain kept insisting, "Get out there, get out there. I figured, well, it's safe to go out there now; they're gone. So I topped the knoll.

  But it turned out the Iraqis were there. They swung their guns around on us, and I thought, Man, I'm dead. It was real tense for a brief moment. And then they just continued doing what they were doing, and we drove off.

  I had a discussion with my counterpart, the Saudi commander.

  "They came into Saudi Arabia," I told him.

  "Oh, no, they didn't," he said. He was telling me he wasn't going to go out there to check.

  I said, "Yes, they did. I can see the tire marks on the border territory. They have been inside just a hundred meters, but they were in Saudi." And we had a discussion. I said, "Look, I'll tell you what we'll do. The tracks are still there in the sand. We'll go out there. We'll turn on the GPS, take a reading, come back, and we'll plot it on the map. And if it plots on the Saudi side, then that proves that I'm correct. If it doesn't, then I'm wrong."

  So he agreed to that, and we did. We drove back out there, did the GPS, came back, and plotted it; and sure enough, it plotted out about a hundred meters into Saudi Arabia. We thought that was significant, because up to that time, there had been no Iraqi incursions into Saudi Arabia.

  A little later, all of a sudden, a heat round came back down from battalion, saying, "Hey, what are you doing crossing that berm? You've got standing orders not to cross the berm." It kind of got to be a case of who said what, me or my captain. It wasn't good for anybody.

  Later, the battalion commander came up and sat down and talked to me and I didn't know what to expect. I thought I might be in deep shit. But he surprised me. "Well," he said, "I'm going to tell you what. I have a team that's sitting back in the rear down at the Bat Cave" — that was our nickname for the SF base at King Fahd Airport, where the SOC had a team, ODA525.

  You have to understand that every team in 5th Group was deployed into the war effort except this one team. Before they'd flown out of the States, their captain had just left for special mission tryouts, so the team had deployed to Saudi without an officer. The company sergeant major had stayed back to run the rear area, and their team sergeant had been picked to move up to the company sergeant major, which left the team without its leadership. As a result, they were basically being choggie boys.[31] The battalion used them to run errands. They're very proud individuals, and they wanted to get involved in the war effort, but they were left out of it. They called them the Catholic girls: They were saving it for the big one.

  So the battalion commander offered that up to me when he came up to the border. "I've got this team back there that's sitting in the Bat Cave; and they're really not involved in the war effort, and they need a strong leader. I'd like to offer that to you. I want you to think about it."

  Of course, I wanted to kiss the guy. I got in touch with him and with my company commander and said, "Look, I would like to have that team, but if I'm going to have any credibility as a leader, I've got to get them involved in the war effort immediately. I can't go back there and then have things not change. If they stay being choggie boys for the battalion, there's no value to me being there, so I need your assistance in getting these guys involved. We'll gear up, and I think we should get some of the first missions that come down."

  So that's what set the groundwork.

  When I got to the Bat Cave, what I found was really something else.

  The guys in 525 had been back there for several months. They'd been there so long they'd built furniture. They had a putting green. They had cable TV. I don't know where they'd gotten it, but they had it. And — like many other units at King Fahd and elsewhere — they'd set up stills for moon-shining. I'm not saying that these guys were bad soldiers; anytime good soldiers have time on their hands and are idle and are not challenged — well, let's just say they're very resourceful.

  When 1 got there, they really had a bad attitude. They were underused.

  Not that they didn't benefit the war effort: They taught all the teams in the fifth group how to conduct close air support (which came in handy later), and the guys were also really physically fit, because they spent a lot of time in the gym.

  So when I took over, the first thing I did was get them out and involved. We went clear out almost to the Jordanian border, way up in the northwest part of Saudi Arabia, and conducted operations in support of teams that were preparing for some activities. We were doing long-range cross-country movement using humvees and the GPS system.

  GPS is a great system, one of the best things we had in DESERT STORM, because navigating in the bare desert can be close to impossible. With the GPS, you just set it up in the windshield and it told you which way to go. It was important to be able to use GPS across hazardous or rough terrain at night, or driving under blackout conditions with NVGs.

  After we came back, about mid-January, we got the special reconnaissance mission.

  About the same time, they called me in and said, "We want you to look into hide sites." At that time, we had no hide site kit, no standard equipment. There was also no SOP on how you developed and did a hide site, so we had to conduct some research and development on our own.

  We went out and actually dug hide sites, to determine the best way to go about it. What's the ideal size for four guys to live in there? How are you going to sleep? How are you going to eat? Because once you go into the ground, you stay in there, for a week, ten days. You're sleeping in there. You're shitting and pissing in there. We had to figure out how to do all that….

  The hide kits we developed weighed about a hundred pounds apiece with all the poles and the tarps. You have to keep in mind that all this was carried on our backs.

  But then we got the mission, and we went into isolation; we prepped, we studied, we got all the current intel, and we brought in the SOAR guys that were going to fly the mission for us, to do route planning.

  The mission was actually for us to get into a hide site and place eyes for real-time intelligence up on Highway 7, a major north-south highway that came out of Baghdad, went south down to An Nasiriyah, and then south-cast over to Basrah. It was a major line of communications. We'd be in direct support of the XVIII Airborne Corps commander. Our reports would go directly back to the SFLO, or the liaison officer — the SOCOR they called it, the Special Operations Coordinator that worked at the Corps headquarters. And he was in direct contact with the Corps commander.

  The Corps commander wanted to know what the enemy was doing. Were they reinforcing the front? If they were reinforcing, what type of equipment and what type of troops? What sort of tanks?

  The mission statement also said that we had to be able to identify signature items of equipment — equipment that is organic to certain units, and which will identify them. The T-72 tanks, for example, were used only by the Republican Guards. If you saw a T-72, you knew that you were dealing with them.

  We got our plan together, and were sitting there, waiting and wondering, when the Battle of Khafji broke out — the Iraqis came across the border, and so we got called up there. The main Iraqi units had already pulled out, but our commanders felt there
were still some isolated people left who may have been gathering intel, so we went building to building and door to door, kicking doors, clearing buildings. We really got boned up on our urban warfare, if you will. We never did find anybody, but every door you kicked down, you didn't know.

  We were in Khafji when we got the call: "We're going to execute." So we came back down to the Bat Cave, got all our gear together, and went up to King Khalid Military City, KKMC, where our task force was located. We spent a couple of days there, waiting.

  One of the things we were waiting for was some special boots we'd ordered. American jungle boots leave a telltale print in the soft loam soil through which we were going to be walking, and we didn't want to leave any tracks like that. Finally, the evening before we were supposed to go in, the brand-new boots arrived. Some of the guys said, "I'm not going to wear them. They're not broke in." So I took plastic MRE boxes, cut them to the shape of the boots, and taped them to the bottom of our old boots, so they wouldn't leave a print.

  We were scheduled to go to a place about two hundred meters off Highway 7 and near a small river, the Shatt al Gharraf. There were also agricultural fields and canals and ditches. The ditches were dug by hand, so the dirt was piled up on the sides. Our intention was to use them for moving around, so if people were out there, we'd be able to get down the ditches and walk if we had to.

  We were going to put in two hide sites. One of them would watch north-bound traffic, the other southbound. Periodically, about every four or six hours, we had to report back to headquarters, but if we saw something significant — Scud launchers or a company of armor or such — we reported it immediately.

  It's now February 23, 1991.

  From KKMC, we loaded onto two Blackhawk helicopters, four guys on each one.

  We had some really great SOAR pilots, the greatest pilots in the world. The SOAR guys had proven themselves time and time again. We knew they would get us in there. More important, I knew they would come and get me.

  A guy named Kenny Collier, a chief warrant officer, flew the mission lead on my helicopter. I went up to him and kind of pulled him close. "Kenny, I have no doubt that you'll get me in there," I told him. "But if I need you, I need you to come and get me. Don't leave me in there." He got a big smile on his face. "I told you, Dawg, you call, we haul."

  We took off out of KKMC and flew to Rafhah, an air base up on the border, for refueling. We were going about 150 miles across the border into Iraq — a long way for a Blackhawk. The SOAR guys determined that by the time they flew us in, dropped us off, and returned, they'd have about ten minutes of fuel remaining.

  We wanted to be actually crossing the border at about eight that evening. We were all hyped up, camouflaged: We're ready, we're going to war, we're going in there. The guys are excited. We had trained our entire career for this, to support our country and do these types of missions. We had rehearsed. We had gathered all the intel. We had done very thorough mission planning.

  We crossed the border at about eight — and then for some reason, we got recalled. They said, "Abort the mission. Return to station." So we turned around.

  To this day, I don't know the reason for that recall, but whatever it was, we hadn't even gotten back yet, when they said, "No, no, execute, execute."

  We couldn't just turn around, because of the fuel, so we had to get off and refuel the helicopters, all of which put us behind our planning curve. The timing was very tight. If we took too much time on this end, that put us in a potential white-knuckle situation at the other end.

  Kenny Collier had been a Special Forces soldier, so he knew the importance of time. They tried to make up some for us. They flew very low and they flew very fast. They may have been twenty feet off the desert floor and just streaming 160 knots or so, going across that desert floor.

  I was on the headset with the pilot when I felt the helicopter jump up, and a big thump. I felt her shudder and I didn't know what it was. It scared me half to death.

  "What is that, Kenny? What is it?" I asked over the headset. And he was calm as could be, which really impressed me. We'd hit a sand dune and ripped the rear wheel off the back landing gear. "Oh, don't worry about it," he said. "We just hit a sand dune. We're all right." Which calmed me right down.

  Because of the delay, the helicopters lost their GPS satellite coverage for a time.[32] They had to use some sort of backup navigational system.

  "I can't guarantee you that I'll put you on the exact spot where you wanted to go," the pilot told me.

  I said, "Well, Kenny, you get me as close as you possibly can, and we're going to go on with the mission."

  As we approached the target area, he made a few "false insertions" — that is, he would lift, come up high, and intentionally get picked up on radar, then he would touch down and sit there for ten seconds or so, so if the enemy came out to find out what was going on, they'd find nobody there. We did a couple of those, and then finally, he stayed low and swooped in, and we rolled out. And then they were up and gone.

  It was an eerie feeling as they were going away, because you could hear the blades propping quieter and quieter, and you realized that you were one hundred and fifty miles in the enemy's backyard.

  One of the questions we'd asked intel was, "Are there dogs in that area?" They'd told us there weren't. The Arabs don't like dogs. They consider them filthy animals and they don't own them.

  However, while this is true for Arabs who live in the city, the country Arabs — the Bedouins and the farmers — have dogs for the same reason our farmers do. They use them for security. So there were dogs out there. As we rolled off the helicopter and they flew out of sight, I thought we'd landed in a pound. You could hear dogs howling all over the place.

  Once the helicopters were out of earshot, though, the barking faded, and we realized they were reacting to the sound of the helicopters and not necessarily to our presence.

  The first thing we did was to move off maybe a hundred meters and set up a little defensive perimeter and just listen. It's a tactic to take in the night sounds, to let your eyes and ears adjust to your environment. There was nothing but silence, which is what I wanted to hear.

  I turned to my weapons sergeant: "Bring out your GPS. Let's see if we have some coverage now." We did. We were actually north of the area in which we wanted to be, but not far, maybe a mile or two. However, each individual on my team had a rucksack that weighed in excess of 175 pounds, which is extremely heavy. That included our two hide-site kits, twenty-five pounds for each guy. Every team member had five gallons of water — that's forty pounds. Each guy was carrying radio equipment.

  I went on a leader's recon with my weapons sergeant. We found the area we wanted, determined where we would put our hide sites, went back, picked up the team, and brought them into the area. We pulled out our dehandled shovels and started to dig, and the first thing we realized was that though we had rehearsed in Saudi Arabian sandy loam, this soil up here was agriculture soil. It was hard. There was no way we were going to dig a hide site before dawn with just a dehandled shovel.

  The other team, under team sergeant Charles Hopkins, moved back a little bit, found some softer soil, and dug down, but when we tried to do it, too, it became apparent we were going to run out of time. Since we had to get under cover, we decided to put our hide site in one of the ditches that crossed the area. We laid our supports and used that ditch as our hole; we camouflaged it with sandbags up the front as best we could; got some vegetation to put on top of it, and brush, too; and did what else we could in the time we had.

  We knew traffic going up and down the highway would never be able to see anything out of the ordinary. It blended in.

  Now, we thought that the farmers in Iraq operated the way they do in the States. A farmer plants his fields, then goes out once in a while to check his crops to make sure things are going on. But he's not out there every day looking. However, in this part of Iraq we failed to take into consideration the fact that their technology is very fa
r behind ours. The kids don't sit in the house and watch TV and play video games. They don't have TVs and computers. They play out in the fields. We didn't realize that.

  So we were inside the hide sites at first light, four of us in each hide. One guy was on watch at a peephole (Sergeant James Weatherford); one guy recorded what was going on; and the other two guys basically rested. I was one of the guys resting. I had my eyes closed; but I was aware of what was going on, and heard Weatherford say, "Man, there's a lot of activity out there. There's people along the road."

  There was a lot more going on than we had anticipated.

  About nine o'clock in the morning, we started hearing children's voices. And Weatherford said, "There's kids out there. They're out there playing."

  They got closer and closer, and as they started getting louder, I got concerned. And then all of a sudden, the sounds stopped. It got quiet. The children came up; and they actually looked into the peephole where Weatherford was on watch. They looked inside and they saw this guy all camouflaged up, looking back at them, and they gave a little scream and jumped back.

  At the same time, two of my soldiers came out of the back side of the canal, carrying silenced MP-5 submachine guns and silenced pistols. The kids saw them and took off.

  "Chief, what do we do?" my guys asked. "What do we do?"

  Now, there's no doubt in my mind that if I had told them, "Don't let those kids get away. Shoot them," they would have done it. And we'd been cleared to do that, if any civilian came in and compromised the mission.

  Two of them were girls, maybe seven or eight years old, and one was a boy, younger. It was an instant decision. "No, don't shoot them," I said.

  I was not going to shoot children.

  Several things probably went into that. I have a Christian background. I had children of my own about that age. It just wasn't in me to shoot children. Whatever happened to us, I was willing to accept that. If they were going to bring in forces, I could defend myself. We had weapons, and I knew we could bring in close air support and that we could get out of there. But I wasn't going to shoot children.