“One night the movie was about a Kurdish battle that portrayed the Kurds as defeating incompetent, bungling Iraqi soldiers. You can imagine how that went over! The Iraqi soldiers went ballistic. Verbal expletives were flying through the air. Our MPRI guys had to jump into the middle of this to keep the two sides from slicing each other’s throats. I remember saying over and over again, ‘Hey calm down, it’s just a movie. It’s only a movie!’ After that night, we never left the Kurds and Iraqis in the movie room alone. Every night, among us contractors, we would say, ‘OK, who’s got movie duty tonight?’
“Close to graduation from our training program, the Iraqi soldiers received information that they would be deployed to the Iranian border. This went over like a lead balloon. They had joined the military to protect their hometowns, to ferret out the insurgents, to keep their communities and families safe. Now, not only were they not going to be doing what it is they had joined the army to do, but they also discovered that their pay was far less than the compensation of Iraqi police and National Guard.
“That evening after the training day had come to an end, we returned to our quarters and were startled by the loud din of chanting soldiers. We stepped out of our buildings and saw over six hundred armed Iraqi soldiers shouting angry slogans about Americans. The mob was moving toward us. As the group approached our building, several of the demonstrators peeled off to talk with us and our Iraqi translators. Evidently they were not coming to confront us. They made clear that their ‘teachers’ were not the object of their anger. The unruly mob made a sharp left turn and headed toward the coalition headquarters that housed the American soldiers.
“Our camp had about a hundred unarmed civilian contract instructors and around ninety U.S.Army military police. The base had over one thousand three hundred Iraqi army recruits. The odds were definitely not in our favor. The U.S. soldiers scrambled to get their weapons. This had all the earmarks of a showdown at the O.K. Corral. It was small comfort that the mob wasn’t specifically after us. All of us contractors knew that if the Iraqis began attacking Americans, we couldn’t be casual observers. Quietly, among ourselves, we began sorting out how we would respond if this protest turned violent. Like it or not, this was our problem too.
“The mob circled around the Coalition Force headquarters building. A U.S. Army major stepped out of the building and met the protesters. Shouts, chants, and Arabic slurs continued for quite some time. Some chants were in English, ‘Bad Bush, bad Americans, bad pay.’ We watched as the major over and over again tried to quell the crowd. Several times they moved closer toward him. They were shaking rifles and clenched fists in the air. It sure looked like it was going to go ugly. I thought for certain the major was a dead man. He deserved a medal for his composure through it all. After several tense hours, the hostility level was diffused. The major made some promises and convinced everyone to go to bed. I suspect, afterward, that he went back into his building, had a shot of Jack Daniel’s from some secret stash, and collapsed.
“More than ever, that night, I realized that we had a very special relationship with our students. They revered us as teachers and friends. We were invested in each other. We woke up every day with these Iraqi recruits. We ate with them, trained with them, ran with them, sang with them, and even danced with them. We had crossed some barrier that had stood between our cultures for centuries. Although the angry Iraqis had differentiated us from the U.S. soldiers, bridges are crossed one at a time. I think, just the fact that the bridges can be crossed at all gives me some hope. Our behavior had changed their attitude. I was proud of that. I felt I had made a difference in the world.”
IV. Team Viper
In the middle of the desert, an hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest highway, and just a few miles south of the Kuwait-Iraq border, is Camp Yankee. Surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers, and a classic zigzag entry checkpoint known as “dragon’s teeth,” this isolated facility could easily be mistaken for an army base. But it isn’t. Camp Yankee is operated by civilian training contractors from MPRI. They are known as Team Viper. Skeet Charlton turns to Paul Collins and asks, “You got the coffee?” Paul holds up a thermos. Charlton glances at Collins. “We’ve got less than an hour to clear the camels out,” he says. “We go live at five. Let’s hit it.” It’s four in the morning. The sun hasn’t yet broken over the surface of the desert floor. For the last hour, the two men have been loading their humvee with water, radios, MREs, ammunition, smoke grenades, and artillery simulators. Now dressed in their desert cammies and full battle rattle, they climb into their vehicle and make a final radio check with Curtis Acton back in the ops shack. A retired master sergeant and old army cavalry soldier, Acton is the MPRI operations center manager. He makes some quip over the radio like, “Oh, good morning sleeping beauties, I thought I wouldn’t hear from you guys until noon!”
Paul and Skeet smirk at one another. Paul chides back, “Hey, Curtis did you sleep with your radio again last night? Your wife’s going to be jealous!” The humvee begins to roll toward the gate. Tariq, the Pakistani guard, steps out of the guard shack and raises the gate. As always, he smiles from ear to ear and renders a salute. Watching Tariq, one can quickly conclude that he likes Americans and he does his job well. His family is back home in the eastern Pakistani town of Punjab. From his meager paycheck, he covers some minimal living expenses, and pays the Kuwaiti royal family $5,000 a year for the right to work in Kuwait. After doling out that cash, he has just a couple of hundred dollars a year left over to send home. He works long hours in sweltering heat, in the middle of nowhere. For Tariq, this is still better than any job opportunity he could find in Pakistan.
A Wisconsin Army National Guard heavy equipment transport unit is en route to the ranges northwest of Camp Yankee. This unit has already been in Iraq several months, and now their commander has requested some refresher training from MPRI. Skeet Charlton is MPRI’s chief of convoy training operations. Today, Skeet, Paul, and several other contractors will be conducting live-fire convoy training. Their contract requires them to further prepare coalition force units for their deployment into Iraq. They have trained U.S. Army soldiers, marines, Navy Seals, Australians, Japanese, Koreans, British, and police contractors. In fact, nearly all army units stop here for a week or so of training before crossing the Berm. The area around Camp Yankee is surrounded with dirt roads and ranges designed to simulate the Iraqi war zone. Most of the training on the ranges and road networks will be live fire. In the wee hours of the morning, Viper OCs scour the area looking for stray camels or sheep that might have wandered into the area overnight. They talk with the Bedouins, living in tents scattered miles apart in the desert. The Bedouins are usually Egyptians tending to the camel herds of wealthy Kuwaitis. The Viper OCs have made friends with them and sometimes bring them a snack or soda and spend a few minutes. This is a valuable friendship. The Bedouins are very observant and frequently inform the Viper team about strange sightings of men or vehicles in this desolate area along the Iraqi border.
Living conditions for Team Viper are harsh. They have one hot meal in the evening, otherwise it’s cold cereal and fruit for breakfast, and MREs or whatever they can scrounge together for lunch. The thermometer outside their operations building seems stuck at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. That is as high as it can register. The actual temperatures at Camp Yankee have been known to exceed 140 degrees on occasion. The OCs start their day well before dawn and are often at the ranges late into the night. Their quarters have improved recently from tents to small prefab buildings. Between the rows of buildings are concrete and sandbag-covered bunkers. Although they are in Kuwait, being this close to the Iraqi border is still a dangerous area. There have been several instances of insurgent attacks against Kuwaiti police checkpoints in the area.
Many military units deploying into Iraq perform combat-related duties that were not originally part of their unit’s primary mission. The conflict in Iraq doesn’t require large field artillery units or chemical decontaminat
ion units. It does require lots of convoy escorts, military checkpoints, and soldiers to conduct house-to-house searches. Every unit has to understand the basics of urban combat. There are no “relatively safe” areas. Everyone is at high risk of being caught up in street fighting. There are not enough of the appropriate types of military units to accomplish these missions. Thousands of soldiers, airmen, and marines require refresher training.
The training is realistic and incorporates the most current lessons from combat actions in Iraq. MPRI instructors on Team Viper are good at what they do. Skeet Charlton, Bill Bratten, Paul Collins, Curtis Acton, Dave Judah, Jack Strickland, Larry Word, Ron Jones, Toby Tobias, and a half dozen other full-timers at Camp Yankee may be graying at the temples, but woe to the person who would underestimate the skills they bring to the table. They are all retired soldiers and marines who are totally committed to providing outstanding military training for the units deploying into Iraq. The team’s convoy trainers are tank and Bradley crewmen and have a career’s worth of experience with battlefield maneuver, crew-served machine guns, and tactical communications. The checkpoint trainers are infantry and cavalry NCOs who have extensive experience with roadblocks and screening operations. MPRI’s urban-combat trainers are all former Rangers or special forces NCOs. On top of these skills and added to this “learning environment” is the “location.” Somehow, the whole idea of being in the desert along the Kuwait-Iraq border, knowing you’ll be in Iraq in a day or so, has a way of getting your attention.
Team Viper is led by Larry Word, a sixty-seven-year-old retired army colonel, whose physical condition would be wishful thinking for many a thirty-year-old man. Technically, Larry is the program manager. He also acts as base commander and director of training. Aside from a few wrinkles and gray hairs, he and his staff are fit and trim and could easily be mistaken for active-duty military personnel as they wear standard military-issue desert-camouflage uniforms (DCU), and all their gear is standard army equipment. They drive military humvees equipped with military radios and military weapons systems. Only the letters M-P-R-I spelled out in black-and-gold tape above their shirt pockets give away their status as civilian contractors.
Nearly every aspect of Larry Word’s military career and subsequent civilian positions prepared him for this job. During his nearly thirty years in the army, he commanded the army’s Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and was a senior observer controller at the army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. After retirement, he worked as a military trainer for several defense contractors and was the senior trainer in Bosnia at the Federation Army Combat Training Center. It is not a stretch to say that few men or women walking the face of the earth could match Word’s background for leading the type of mission that Team Viper performs.
Larry is a no-nonsense professional—not one to openly discuss his accomplishments nor one to accept any special privileges of position. Although not a big man, he still manages to cut an imposing figure. His short, closely cropped (high and tight) haircut, square-jawed, tanned, weather-beaten face, and military bearing give the appearance of a rock-hard soldier. Through heat, cold, sandstorms, and rain, in the middle of the day, or at two o’clock in the morning, he is personally involved in every aspect of training. Each morning at about 4 a.m., Larry goes for a three-mile run in the middle of the desert. His team of a dozen permanent contractors and fifty to seventy temporary contractors holds him in the highest regard. He is somewhat of a legend among them. Quietly, among themselves, the team likes to joke that someday they will find a mummified Larry sitting in his humvee, peering through his binoculars in one hand, a radio mike in the other. They plan on burying him undisturbed in his humvee, although he’ll likely outlive them all.
The sun is beginning to rise. Skeet and Paul have cleared the area of stray animals and Bedouins. The operations center thermometer has already passed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In the distance, a huge cloud of sand is being churned up as the line of twenty or so eighty-six 1,000-pound heavy equipment transports (HETs) from the Wisconsin National Guard cut a swath across the desert. As the convoy draws near, several humvee gun trucks can be seen interspersed like baby calves among a herd of elephants. The convoy comes to a halt and young soldiers, most in their teens, climb down from the gargantuan up-armored trucks. HETs are designed to haul tanks and aircraft engines. The sight of a five-foot-tall blonde female soldier jumping off the running board with an M16 rifle in hand is incongruous to your senses.
The soldiers gather around in a semicircle. Ronald Jones, another MPRI OC, is teaching a class on convoy ambush reaction. All the soldiers are listening intensely. Remembering that these soldiers have already experienced attacks in Iraq, the casual observer might have expected cynicism from the soldiers such as “What can these old guys possibly teach us?” There is not a hint of that attitude. To the contrary, they seem to really appreciate the opportunity to refine their skills in a less-threatening environment. They ask good questions. They relate stories from recent experiences. The OCs pick their brains about each event. They solicit input and consider every piece of new information. There are no wrong answers. There are no perfect solutions. The OCs take the attitude: “If it works, do it!”
Ron briefs the soldiers: “The first couple of runs we’ll make this morning will be dry fire. You will have to respond to enemy fire, treat and evacuate casualties, call for and coordinate aerial medical evacuations, and recover downed vehicles under fire. When we have perfected the application of those tactics, techniques, and procedures, we’ll go hot [use live fire].” He continues: “You’ll be exposed to simulated IEDs and different levels of simulated enemy fire that closely resemble the most current information from Iraq. Some of these attack methods you may have already experienced, many, you may not have seen yet. Keep your eyes open.” The OCs review safety procedures and direct the soldiers to load up.
The convoy begins lumbering along a sandy road. They drive through an artificial city, pass under overpasses, buildings, and berms, and cross over bridges. Suddenly, a vehicle on a rail system comes charging toward the convoy on a 90-degree angle. The gun trucks fire warning shots followed by direct engagement. The convoy picks up speed. The trucks are smothered in a cloud of sand. Then, several silhouettes pop up from behind a berm. Through the dust cloud, flashes and sounds of gunfire emanate from the berm. The OCs signal that a vehicle has been hit and has casualties. The designated truck manages to drive past the kill zone and comes to a halt. Several gun trucks and one of the HETs begin a hasty recovery of the wounded and the downed vehicle.
Both men inside the truck are casualties. The cab of an HET is way too high in the air to simply pull the wounded men out. Another HET pulls up alongside the downed vehicle. A stretcher team stations itself between and below the two trucks. Soldiers then straddle the narrow space between the two trucks and begin removing and lowering the casualties to the stretcher team. The trucks have formed a box and the casualties are placed on the ground in the center of the box. Medics immediately begin diagnosing and treating the wounded. The convoy commander calls for a medical evacuation helicopter. The gun trucks traverse the area to secure a hasty helipad. Another team sets out marker panels for the helicopter.
The soldier on the ground radios the evacuation helicopter. “I’ve thrown smoke,” he says. “Identify—over.”
“Roger,” the pilot responds. “I see purple smoke—over.”
“That’s affirmative.”
This method of requiring the helicopter crew to identify the color of the smoke helps prevent deceptions by the enemy. The enemy wouldn’t know what color smoke grenade to throw. If the chopper pilot had said that he sees some other color, the deception would be exposed. After the correct identification is rendered, the chopper pilot can be reasonably certain that he is coming into the right location.
The soldiers take up positions surrounding the landing zone. Time is critical and each soldier must perform instinctively. It’s li
ke watching a professional football team pull off a complex play; only this play has life-and-death consequences. As the chopper approaches, dust billows up everywhere. A soldier uses arm and hand signals to guide the chopper into the hasty helipad. A litter team dashes across the open space with the wounded. As the chopper touches down, there is a quick exchange of medical information between the onboard medics and the transportation unit personnel. This is another dangerous moment for everyone. The helicopter on the ground is a huge and prized enemy target. This transfer of the casualties must be accomplished quickly and flawlessly. This phase of the training exercise wraps up and the Viper OCs have a lot of observations. The soldiers are listening intently. They want to learn. They want to survive. They want to come home someday in one piece. In this environment, there is no one taking training casually.
Paul Collins points out that the wounded soldiers were evacuated with their body armor, rifles, and ammo magazines. “Why would you do this?” he asks. “What do you suppose these casualties are going to do with their rifles and body armor. You are still in the fight. You may need an extra rifle, ammunition, or body armor. The casualties have no need for this equipment anymore. You have to take it. The hospital doesn’t want it and the wounded don’t need it.”
During battle, equipment changes hands between soldiers on an as-needed basis. This is hardly second nature. In fact, soldiers in training are punished for losing any part of their gear and may have to pay to replace it. It is a lesson so deeply ingrained, paratroopers conducting combat jumps have been known to risk their lives to roll up and store their parachutes for later use, despite a hail of bullets all around them.
A Bloody Business Page 14