American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  That day, Jim and his team, together with about 190 Iraqi police commandos in twenty-three vehicles, were leaving Balad to return to Baghdad. News of their departure had been broadcast the day before on national television, giving Sunni insurgents in the area plenty of time to plan their attack. Jim had no doubt they would strike.

  “Hey, bro.” Mack, his interpreter walked over and greeted Jim. Mack looked like a biker with his goatee and his wavy black hair tied back in a desert camouflage do-rag. He paused to light a cigarette. “You ready for this?” Mack asked, a discerning look in his large brown eyes.

  “Are you kidding me? Fuck yeah,” Jim said. He rinsed his face and wiped it dry with his dirty uniform top. “Let’s go get Colonel Taher.”

  They strapped on their pistols, went out the gate, and headed down a grimy street lined with two demolished hulks of Iraqi army vehicles. A mangy stray dog ran out growling at them, and Mack scared it away. After about four hundred yards they turned into the abandoned firehouse where Taher had his headquarters. Outside, a few police huddled around a fire that was heating water in a big blackened kettle. Jim and Mack walked into Taher’s office.

  “Salaam aleikum, good morning. Sit down,” Col. Taher said, his voice calm but his large face creased with worry.

  A policeman brought in a tray bearing several small glasses, each containing a heaping spoonful of sugar, along with a pot of Ceylon black tea. He poured the glasses full of steaming tea flavored with cardamom, and served one to each of the three men.

  Jim stirred his tea, looked over at Taher, and spoke what was on both their minds.

  “Sir, we know there are not many tactical options,” he said. “There is only one road, and the entire area is crawling with Sunni insurgents.”

  Taher nodded.

  “I have briefed my officers,” Taher said. “If we get into a firefight, every man will move to the sound of the guns and shoot. I will keep communications, and accountability,” he said.

  “I will support you with everything I have,” Jim said. He sensed Taher’s concern, but also an underlying confidence. After some final preparations, he and Mack turned to leave. “Make no mistake, sir,” Jim said. “We will be fighting today.”

  The sun was straight overhead a few hours later as Jim and his team pulled out the gate at the head of the long patrol of vehicles. Jim initially turned north in a tactical feint, then headed back south toward Baghdad. His commanders had promised him that two F-16 fighter jets would be overhead, but just as the patrol left he got word the fighters had been diverted.

  At around noon, the patrol entered a stretch of road that ran between two palm groves. The stands of tall, graceful trees started about twenty feet back from the road on either side. Just as the entire patrol—which was spread out over about 800 yards—entered the groves, the crackle of AK-47 semiautomatic rifles burst out from the west side of the road. Iraqi police pickups at the rear of the convoy had come under fire.

  “Peel off!” Jim, in the lead vehicle, yelled to his big, bespectacled driver, Sgt. Minor. Without a word, Doc swung the Humvee around and gunned it to the rear of the convoy. Eight to ten insurgents with rifles were lighting up the police vehicles from the palm groves.

  “Fuck them up, Kimee!” Jim shouted. Kim laid into the attackers with his M240 machine gun. Short and stocky, the chain-smoking artillery officer had the one thing Jim needed in a gunner—a lead trigger finger.

  Just then, insurgents unleashed a heavy barrage of machine-gun fire from either side of a long stretch of the road. Bullets were pinging off Jim’s Humvee.

  This was no harassment attack. It was intense, well planned, and coordinated. They had men, weapons, and equipment positioned close by. They were committed and dug in. Jim was getting his toe-to-toe throw-down fight—a complex ambush with machine guns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and roadside bombs that would spread over five miles and three kill zones.

  A radio call alerted Jim that two of the Iraqi commandos had been badly wounded. Col. Taher took charge, ordering his men to move the casualties to Jim for protection and treatment. One commando was shot through the leg, and another, a good-natured man named Ha’nee, had a life-threatening bullet wound to the face.

  “Call a medevac,” Jim radioed to Capt. Paulo Shakarian, the team intelligence officer, in vehicle two.

  “Roger—got it,” Shakarian said.

  As the gunfire steadily increased, a vehicle carrying the wounded Iraqis pulled up near Jim’s Humvee. Wearing a baseball cap because his helmet had been burned in the November 24 IED attack, Jim jumped out under fire. He pulled Han’ee over next to his Humvee, which offered some cover from the incoming rounds. Mack got out and started laying down suppressing fire.

  Blood was pouring from Han’ee’s face from a bullet that had hit just under his cheekbone, shattering his jaw and teeth and going out the other side. Jim knew Han’ee would die if he didn’t stanch the bleeding. He was clearing the teeth from Han’ee’s airway when bullets started kicking up dirt on the ground just behind and in front of them. It was too close to ignore.

  Stopping treatment temporarily, Jim grabbed his radio. “Kimee, hold here and keep firing. I’m headed into the palm grove to the east.”

  As he and Mack moved in between the trees, Jim saw fighters darting back and forth. Mack threw a hand grenade from behind a small dirt berm, blowing two insurgents off their feet. Jim spotted a machine-gun position and saw a man take off running. He fired at the insurgent and clipped him.

  A medevac chopper was inbound, so they ran back to the wounded. Jim managed to control Han’ee’s bleeding and insert into his arm an IV with blood volumizer. Then Jim called on his husky teammate Sgt. 1st Class Jean-Paul “J.P.” LeBrocq and Iraqi interpreter Joseph to set up the landing zone just down the road.

  Jim noticed the insurgents start to shift their fire as about fifteen or twenty fighters maneuvered toward the likely landing zone. Shit, here we go. They are going to target the medevac.

  LeBrocq threw a red smoke grenade to mark the landing zone. The chopper landed, and Jim and Mack carried the wounded police through a cloud of dust to the flight medic.

  “Hey, man, you have about thirty seconds before this place starts getting hit with mortars!” Jim shouted to him.

  “Oh, shit,” the medic said, scrambling back onto the chopper. It took off, and indeed, about half a minute later a mortar landed in the road fifty yards from where the chopper had been.

  At that point, the insurgents who had converged around the landing zone turned their fire toward Jim and the police commandos, now surrounded. Firing machine guns and AK-47 rifles and throwing grenades, the attackers closed within 75 yards of the convoy and opened up with everything they had.

  The volume of fire made the ground shake; Jim could feel it inside his body. In his seventeen-year military career, he’d never experienced anything like it. He looked back down the road toward the police vehicles and saw tree limbs falling, shredded by bullets.

  With rounds snapping beside their heads, Jim knew he had to do something to push them back. He grabbed Mack and put several commandos in overwatch positions behind a low dirt berm that lined the road, and again went after the insurgents in the palm groves. The members of his team covered one another as they moved deeper into the trees. Mack was Jim’s closest comrade. They trained constantly together. On raids, Jim was often the first one to kick in the door, and Mack followed right after him. Mack was Jim’s spotter during sniper operations; they dismantled roadside bombs as a team. Now they were fighting for their lives. They pushed forty yards into the palm grove, firing as they went, then lay prone, still shooting.

  “Hey, Jim, I’m out of ammo!” Mack yelled with bullets flying overhead.

  “Bro, what the fuck? Do you want me to give you mine?” Jim called back. He grinned and tossed Mack a magazine.

  With the help of the commandos, who were laying down large volumes of rifle and machine-gun fire, they pushed the insurgents back. Then the
y returned to the road to try to move the stalled convoy—then spread out over about four hundred yards—out of the kill zone.

  “Yalla!” Jim called in Arabic to one group of police after another. “Come on! Go, go, go!”

  Just then Jim looked back and saw LeBrocq on a knee in the middle of the road shooting like mad. As the convoy prepared to move, LeBrocq disappeared on the other side of the road. Jim thought he had been shot, but a minute later LeBrocq’s hefty figure reemerged carrying Joseph on his shoulder. Joseph had broken his ankle and LeBrocq was not going to leave him. LeBrocq carried Joseph about fifty yards back to his vehicle.

  Still taking gunfire and RPGs from both sides of the road, the convoy started creeping forward. Suddenly Jim got a radio call from Shakarian in the lead vehicle.

  “Hey, Jim, this is Shak. We have a possible IED in the road. What do you want me to do?”

  “Hold on, brother. I’ll be right there,” Jim said. Then he told Doc, “Punch it! We have an IED up there.” Doc sped forward while Jim told Col. Taher to instruct the rest of the convoy to hold.

  Jim got to the front, and immediately saw the roadside bomb. It was a “drop and pop”—a 155 mm artillery shell lying in the road and command-wired to explode.

  In a split second he calculated his options. The convoy was in the middle of a small marketplace. There was no way to get off the road to go around the IED. They could stop and fight, or they could try to turn around—but either way they would be trapped under enemy fire and likely all killed.

  They had to push forward. But if the IED blew up on one of the Iraqi trucks, it would also be catastrophic—it could easily destroy two or three of their soft-skinned vehicles and cause a dozen casualties. That would leave them pinned down, too.

  This has to go off on my up-armor.

  “We have an IED here, and I am going to hit it,” Jim said over the radio. To Mack he said, “Tell Colonel Taher to push his guys to the far left.” Then he grabbed the gunner, Kim, by the legs and shouted to him to get down. Finally, he switched off the jammer on his Humvee that blocked certain frequencies of electronic signals used to set off IEDs.

  “Doc, go straight at it!”

  “Roger, sir,” said Doc, not missing a beat. He spit a mouthful of tobacco juice into a Gatorade bottle and stepped on the gas, driving straight ahead.

  “Push left!” Jim said, “I want it to go off on my side of the vehicle.”

  They inched forward. Nothing. Closer. Nothing. Then about ten yards away, the IED detonated in a massive explosion. Shrapnel tore into the door and windshield as the blast rocked the Humvee. The road disappeared in a cloud of dirt, rocks, and asphalt. But no one was hurt.

  “We’re good!” Jim radioed back.

  When the dust cleared, he started pushing forward again.

  They had advanced only a few hundred yards, when Jim spotted another bomb.

  “Fuck me, there’s another IED!” he said.

  It was the same drill.

  “Kimee, drop!”

  Doc drove the Humvee closer. Jim turned the jammer off again.

  Boom! Another 155 mm round blew up only five yards away. It knocked the Humvee sideways and pierced the engine block and radiator, which spewed out steam. Jim and his crew were dazed and their ears rang, but they kept moving.

  Jim looked ahead.

  Shit!

  A third IED intended to halt the convoy lay in the road. This one was in a box. Same drill. They got right up next to it. Nothing. Jim cracked opened his up-armor door and looked down into the box. It was empty.

  “It’s a hoax!” he radioed.

  Watching the convoy move on undeterred, the insurgents unleashed a barrage of PKC machine-gun fire, mortar rounds, and RPGs from buildings on either side of the road. They had concentrated their heavy firepower in this last portion of the kill zone.

  “Everybody open up to the front!” Jim ordered.

  For two or three minutes, it was full-up machine guns on machine guns. They punched through.

  “Sir, we have a female seriously injured in a civilian vehicle,” Mack said. A silver BMW had pulled into the convoy behind Jim’s Humvee and been hit by shrapnel from the second IED.

  Jim, Mack, and Col. Taher had the police pull security while they jumped out and ran back under sporadic fire to the BMW.

  Jim opened the door and saw a man and a woman inside each holding a small child, all of them terrified and screaming. Blood pooled on the car floor. Jim moved to examine the woman’s wounds, but she recoiled, horrified that an infidel man was reaching toward her.

  “I’ve got to touch her,” Jim told Col. Taher.

  “He is my brother,” Col. Taher told the woman in Arabic. “Let him touch you. He will help you.”

  The woman stared at him in fear, then nodded silently.

  In less than a minute, Jim pushed her socks down, raised her dress to the knee and put two tourniquets on her bleeding legs. He bandaged the bottoms of her feet, deeply gashed by shrapnel.

  Jim glanced over at the one-year-old baby girl on the woman’s lap. In her face, he saw a younger version of his own daughter, Scout.

  We might all die today. But she’s not going to.

  Jim picked up the little girl and told Mack to tell the family he would keep her with him until they reached safety.

  Cradling the toddler, who wore a red sweater and tiny jeans, Jim climbed back into his Humvee. Kim was firing his machine gun off and on as they moved down the road. The little girl didn’t cry or scream. Instead, in a moment that struck Jim as surreal, she started doing what kids her age do, pulling on Jim’s nose and chewing on his radio antenna.

  The insurgent fire petered out, the back of the ambush broken. After three miles, the patrol arrived at the U.S. military logistics base at Taji. Jim had the police set up a perimeter just outside the gate. An ambulance pulled out of the base, and soldiers picked up the wounded Iraqi woman, whose husband had driven along in their car with the patrol.

  “Your wife is going to be okay,” Jim told her husband as the ambulance drove off. Then Jim placed the little girl into her father’s arms.

  FROM TAJI, THE CONVOY made its way to the Iraqi police compound in downtown Baghdad. As they rolled in, all the commandos stationed there were yelling and singing. They had heard about the battle, and they mobbed Jim and their Iraqi comrades as they got out of the vehicles.

  “Ai yi yi yi yi!” they cried. Jim joined in. It was their version of a war cry.

  The commandos slit the throat of a goat, dipped their hands in its blood, and started plastering crimson handprints on Jim and his team and their vehicles. Jim felt at once strange and honored by the celebration. He knew from reading the Koran that the ritual came from the Islamic version of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice—whenever someone risks his life for you, you slaughter a goat to celebrate. Everyone was hugging and kissing in the revelry, while the commandos danced around chanting and hoisting their rifles in the air. Jim was elated and proud of all his men, both Americans and Iraqis. They had fought well that day. They had won.

  About that day, Jim said later: “I remember Mack lying in the palm grove by this tree with bullets flying over, a few feet away from me. The look on his face was one of excitement and calm. I remember thinking, this second, this moment in time is what I’ve trained for my whole life. It was exhilaration. It was an opportunity for my men to show bravery and courage. In order to fight you have to expose your throat. You have to be willing to die. . . .

  “There’s not much to say after you’ve been through something like that. Neither one of us had any right to be alive, and there we were. . . .

  “That feeling never left me.”

  THE BALAD MISSION AND December 11 battle solidified trust between the Spartans and the QRF battalion and gave them new stature in the eyes of senior commanders. They had helped quell the killing in Balad and turned the city back over to local forces.

  The day after the firefight, Col. Lewis, Jim’s commander, cal
led him into his office on Forward Operating Base Prosperity, next door to Site One.

  “Do you and your team need a couple of down days?” Lewis asked him.

  “Fuck no, sir,” Jim replied. “We need another Balad.”

  For Lewis, the battle had much broader meaning.

  “If the whole idea was to create a functioning security force, so the United States military could leave Iraq, here was the first brilliant effort in proving that capability,” Col. Lewis recalled. It bolstered his argument to the four-star commander Gen. Casey that the National Police should be re-formed, not dismantled—a position that ultimately prevailed.

  The big firefight south of Balad also exacted a heavy cost on the Sunni insurgents and led to a sharp drop in the number of roadside bombs on that stretch of the road to Baghdad. Commanders rewarded the Iraqi police and their American mentors with public praise and several awards for valor. Jim was given the Iraqi National Police Medal of Honor, and later would receive the third-highest U.S. military combat decoration, the Silver Star, for “gallantry in action.” Minor, Shakarian, and LeBrocq all received Army Commendation Medals with V for valor.

  Commanders began to entrust the police with more sensitive missions. In December, National Police commander Gen. Hussein ordered the battalion to stay in Baghdad to carry out raids on a growing target list that now included some Shiite militia leaders. Shiite militias backed by Iran were growing more deadly, using a trademark weapon known as an explosively formed projectile (EFP) that could punch through the armor on an American tank. The National Police as a whole were under high scrutiny for sectarian abuses. Under pressure from the U.S. military, several of the police commanders were being fired. But Jim’s relationship with Col. Taher had empowered the Iraqi commander to kill or capture fellow Shias and to refuse to execute targets for which intelligence was questionable. Iraqis joked that the QRF battalion had become the strongest Shiite militia of all—able to keep others in check. With Jim as an advisor it could call for backup from U.S. military troops and helicopters. With Col. Taher’s Shiite connections, it could also roll through Sadr City unchallenged.