American Heroes

by Oliver North

  Marines evacuate a wounded comrade during the initial push toward Baghdad in April of 2003

  SUNDAY, 23 MARCH 2003

  Shortly after we finished our 0100 broadcast—6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time—a messenger from the RCT-5 command post raced up to our helicopter with information that a U.S. Army convoy had been ambushed inside the city of An Nasiriyah. Our four pilots hustled inside the command post, where they were told to prepare an emergency cas-evac. Gesturing to a large map with a grease pencil, one of the RCT-5 air officers pointed out locations of friendly and enemy units as radio operators logged fresh information coming in over the radio nets.

  The Shiite city of An Nasiriyah is bounded on the north by the Saddam Canal and on the south by the Euphrates River. In 1991 Saddam had brutally repressed an uprising there. This led our military intelligence to presume that most of the city's 400,000 residents were less-than-loyal to the regime. Marine engineers and U.S. Naval Construction Battalion "Seabee" specialists judged that the city's four bridges—two to the south over the river and the pair to the north over the canal—were capable of holding the seventy-two-ton weight of an M-1 Abrams tank if the spans could be captured before Saddam's troops seriously damaged or destroyed them. The coalition battle plan called for the rapid capture of all four bridges.

  Task Force Tarawa and RCT-1 were given the mission of seizing the four bridges just after first light on 23 March. The plan called for Task Force Tarawa to seize the southern spans and open the route through An Nasiriyah so that RCT-1 could race through the city and grab the northern bridges before the Iraqis knew what hit them.

  But now, just hours before the attack to seize the bridges was scheduled to begin, an Army convoy of the 507th Maintenance Company, trying to close up on the 3rd ID, had taken a wrong turn and been ambushed near one of An Nasiriyah's southern bridges. Though the 507th wasn't supposed to be a frontline combat unit, these soldiers suddenly found that in this war, everywhere is the front line. Concerned that the small group of clerks and technicians would be wiped out, Task Force Tarawa was given the mission of rescuing the surrounded survivors.

  At 0300, Task Force Tarawa moved out with a company of tanks leading a battalion of Marines in seven-ton trucks and AAVs. But shortly after dawn, Iraqis along the railway bridge south of An Nasiriyah ambushed the lead elements of this heavily armed column. The combat-hardened Marines responded with overwhelming firepower that not only repelled the ambush but destroyed ten Iraqi tanks.

  By noon, most of 2nd Marine Regiment was engaged in and around An Nasiriyah. Hoping to get some footage of the action, I jumped on a HMLA-267 armed Huey and flew to the recently captured Tallil Air Base, where an Army shock-trauma hospital had been set up to process casualties. When I got there, wounded soldiers and Marines were arriving at the hospital in a steady stream, and the doctors, nurses, and medics were hard-pressed to keep up.

  A destroyed bridge over a canal north of An Nasiriyah

  Cobra pilots returning to rearm and refuel describe Marines fighting from their vehicles as regular Iraqi army units and civilian-clad fedayeen pummeled them with small-arms fire and RPGs from one- and two-story buildings lining "the gauntlet"—the main highway through An Nasiriyah. The foreign fighters are said to be from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iran. One of the pilots says that these so-called fedayeen are entering the city from the north, riding in buses, private autos, even motorcycles—all spoiling for a fight.

  Despite the mounting Marine casualties, there is some good news: 1st Bn, 2nd Marines, has rescued a half dozen or more wounded soldiers of the 507th who had been hiding out in the outskirts of An Nasiriyah since the ambush of their ill-fated convoy.

  Mid-afternoon, I jump on a CH-46 cas-evac helicopter. As we approach the pickup zone north of An Nasiriyah, it is obvious that this has been the scene of a terrible fight. Blasted and smoldering American vehicles are intermingled with wrecked Iraqi tanks and civilian vehicles. Just north of the bridge, a Marine LVT, apparently torn apart by an RPG or an anti-tank rocket, still has the bodies of dead Marines inside.

  As the wounded are loaded, I can see RPGs and gunfire raining down from the buildings a few hundred meters away. Cobra gunships are raking the rooftops and alleys of nearby buildings with rockets, TOW missiles, Hellfire missiles, and bursts of fire from their 20-mm Gatling guns. Farther to the south, 155-mm artillery rounds are obliterating structures and city streets. The din of rifle and machine-gun fire from the Marines on the LVTs deployed around the zone—and from dismounted infantry in ditches beside the road—can be heard over the helicopter engines and rotors. Every time an Iraqi or fedayeen fighter shows himself, the Marines respond with a fusillade of fire from their G-240 machine guns, rifles, and grenade launchers. As the up-guns of the LVTs lob rounds with good effect into second-story windows, litter bearers, hunched down to reduce their target profile, race for the helicopters, carrying their wounded comrades.

  The driver of this car was killed before he could detonate his vehicle in the midst of a U.S. convoy

  The helicopter returned immediately to the field hospital where Army doctors, nurses, and medics stabilized the wounded before sending them back to Kuwait for more advanced care. There, the most grievously injured are loaded aboard Air Force C-17 "Nightingale" transports and evacuated to the big U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany—a facility offering treatment as good or better than any stateside hospital.

  In order to get back north to RCT-5, where I had left Griff and my gear, I hitched a ride on a Marine resupply convoy that was forming up at the FARP. Unlike the ill-fated 507th Maintenance convoy the night before, this one had tanks, LAVs, and hardened Humvees interspersed among the supply vehicles, all bristling with weapons and grim-faced Marines.

  This convoy, more than a hundred men and tens of millions in military hardware, was being commanded by a young Marine Reserve lieutenant. The mission, as he explained it, was to safely deliver critically needed ammo, food, water, and fuel to RCT-5, approximately twenty-five kilometers up Highway 1. Speed was of the essence, and he assigned missions to every vehicle team on what to do in every contingency, including how to handle casualties and what to do if a vehicle became disabled. He finished his orders with a terse command: "Nobody gets left behind."

  We drove through the night completely blacked out, every driver using NVGs. With foreign fedayeen fighters known to be in the area, the tension was heavy, but we arrived at RCT-5 without incident.

  Col. Dunford's mobile command post was just off the hard-surface road. Fifty meters behind it I could see four CH-46 helicopters, parked in a field. That's where I found Griff, surrounded by the four air crews—Lt. Col. Jerry Driscoll, the squadron commanding officer—among them. They were clustered around our little satellite transceiver watching FOX News—and to a man, they were fighting mad.

  Iraqi state television and Al Jazeera had been broadcasting gory videotape and pictures of dead American soldiers killed in the 507th Maintenance Company ambush. Even worse than the gruesome sight of American dead were shots of five American soldiers from the 507th—now prisoners.

  As they appeared on Iraqi television, soldiers of the 507th Maintenance Bn who were captured after taking a wrong turn in Nasiriyah during the initial push

  In the dark, one of the Marines said, "This reminds me of Somalia." He was referring to the notorious 1993 incident in Mogadishu when a U.S. Army Delta Force and Ranger Task Force suffered eighteen killed and more than seventy wounded in an event made famous in the book and movie, Black Hawk Down.

  The similarities in how dead Americans are defiled by radical Islamic extremists is certainly valid, but that's about the only parallel between the gunfight in An Nasiriyah and what had happened in "The Mog" (Mogadishu). Back in 1993, the Rangers and Delta Force operators had no armor, artillery, or fixed-wing air support. A Pakistani general under UN control commanded the quick reaction force (QRF) that came
to their "rescue" eighteen hours later.

  In An Nasiriyah, the ambush of thin-skinned vehicles manned by inexperienced support troops of the 507th was a disaster, no doubt. But unlike the situation in Somalia, Task Force Tarawa was able to quickly bring to bear enormous coordinated, disciplined firepower in their rescue of the beleaguered logistics convoy. For the soldiers in Mogadishu there was no such back-up.

  The mood among the men brightened consider-ably when President Bush came on TV to say, "Saddam Hussein is losing control of his country." He also pointed out that the U.S.-led coalition forces were achieving their objectives, and he warned the Iraqis, "The people who mistreat U.S. prisoners of war will be treated as war criminals." One of those prisoners we knew to be a female. Only later did we learn her name: PFC Jessica Lynch, a twenty-year-old supply clerk from the 507th Maintenance Company.

  PFC Jessica Lynch

  WITH HMM-268 & RCT-5

  1800 HOURS, LOCAL; MONDAY, 24 MARCH 2003

  We've been on the move since dawn. Despite continued resistance from bands of Baathists and fedayeen inside An Nasiriyah, Gen. James Mattis, the 1st Marine Division commander, has decided to proceed with his original plan for a two-pronged attack north toward Baghdad. He's sending two RCTs north, continuing the attack up Route 1 to Ad Diwaniyah. To our east, Task Force Tarawa has been given the mission of securing An Nasiriyah and its bridges so that RCT-1 can pass through and attack the city of Al Kut and its airfield on the north bank of the Tigris—scene of the great British defeat at the hands of the Turks in 1916.

  By sunrise, Marine engineers and Seabees, working through the night without lights, had put down a pontoon span over the Euphrates next to the Route 1 highway bridge in an effort to ease the congestion for units crossing the river and heading north toward Ad Diwaniyah. Even though the 5th Marines seized the concrete-and-steel highway bridge intact before the Iraqis could destroy it, only one M-1 tank at a time is being allowed to cross over the Euphrates.

  As Col. Joe Dunford's RCT-5 continued to press the attack north, Griff and I accompanied them, sometimes moving in a Humvee but more often via the HMM-268 helicopters. Each time we landed, Griff and I would race out of our respective birds to set up our broadcast equipment—usually three times before noon. By then, our satellite connection with FOX News in New York had become the best source of information about what was happening in An Nasiriyah and elsewhere in the campaign. Unfortunately, the news wasn't good.

  Marine casualties in An Nasiriyah continued to mount, and the RCT-1 Task Force Tarawa advance toward Al Kut had stalled. We heard reports of fedayeen irregulars in civilian clothes waving white flags as if to surrender, only to fire on our troops when they approached. Others described foreign fighters using human shields and ambulances full of explosives to kill coalition troops. In Baghdad, Saddam was said to be unfazed by a round-the-clock rain of precision air strikes—more than one thousand per day. Al Jazeera continued to parrot Iraqi regime claims of massive civilian casualties inflicted by coalition forces—something that left the Marines around us shaking their heads in disgust. All this was apparently sufficient to drive most of the chattering class of retired generals and admirals on U.S. television into deep depression—a sentiment they passed on to the American people.

  Meanwhile, there were intelligence reports that hundreds, if not thousands, of Muslim males were flooding into Iraq in buses, cars, pick-up trucks, even motorcycles. To some, it seemed as though the invasion of Iraq was sucking every angry, disillusioned Arab male in the Middle East to join the Jihad against the coalition.

  A 3rd ID soldier gives water to an Iraqi detainee

  Whatever the motivation for these foreign fighters, American forces now have another enemy to face here in Iraq. And because U.S. casualties from the engagement are so high—twenty killed in action and more than ninety wounded in action—many of the troops who fought to open "the gauntlet" through An Nasiriyah are now referring to 23 March as "Bloody Sunday."

  Interestingly, despite the negative news from home—and increasing evidence of foreign fighters that the soldiers and Marines could see for themselves—most of the warriors around us were undismayed. The common sentiment became a refrain: "It's better to fight them here than at home."

  After four days of furious movement, grinding fatigue, and heavy combat, the morale of the troops remained remarkably high. Little did we know that yet another adversary was about to join the fight—the weather.

  6

  MOTHER OF ALL SANDSTORMS

  "It was MOASS—the Mother of All Sand Storms! If you were a tank commander, you couldn't see your front slope. If you were a driver, you couldn't see your ground guide."

  —GySgt Erik Benitez, USMC, battalion master gunner, 1st Tank Bn, I MEF

  FOX's Greg Kelly talks via satellite phone as a sandstorm moves in

  24–26 MARCH, NORTH OF NASIRIYAH

  It began shortly after dark on Monday, 24 March, with a low-pitched moaning wind that lashed into the helicopter, whipping dirt around inside the bird. The temperature dropped as the wind rose. Though we were all wearing our chemical protective suits, we had to wrap up in poncho liners to stay warm enough to sleep.

  Griff and I stayed with the air crews, shivering inside the helicopters, listening to the wind howl outside. Fine particles of grit swirled around inside the cabin, finding their way into every crevice—weapons, engines, instruments—even our broadcast gear.

  By 0400, when we dragged ourselves outside to prepare for a "hit" on Hannity & Colmes, the satellite antenna we carried would have been blown away by the force of the wind had we not anchored it with a sandbag. The blowing sand had the appearance of fine driven snow through the green night lens of the camera.

  These tiny airborne particles were a nuisance during our broadcast. But their effect on the pilots and drivers was far more profound. Even on the hard surface roadway, the never-ceasing stream of armored vehicles, trucks, and tanks moving north slowed to a crawl because the drivers couldn't see the vehicle in front of them. And the helicopter air crews didn't relish the idea of flying in weather like this. Nobody wants the stress of flying blind at fifty feet above the ground.

  Iraqi sandstorms can take on biblical proportions . . .

  . . . and reduce visibililty to zero in only minutes . . .

  Dawn came late—made so by the unearthly haze of wind-whipped sand. When the sun did rise, only the colors shifted. The powdery "moon dust" turned everything—earth, sky, vehicles, even the haze-gray helicopters—the color of rust. It lined our nostrils, caked on our skin, and stung the eyes. But these were mere distractions compared to the real danger posed by the fact that the Marines couldn't see the enemy—or anything else beyond a few meters.

  But on the plus side, everything moved slower inside the storm, so many Marines took advantage of the lull to catch up on sleep and fine-tune their planning inside the command post. Someone handed me a cup of hot coffee, and I listened in as two CIA paramilitary officers debated about whether the storm could be properly described as a sharqi or a shamal. They finally asked two Kuwaiti officers accompanying RCT-5 as interpreters. Unfortunately, the Kuwaitis couldn't resolve the issue either, prompting one of the Americans to observe with a shrug, "It's been that way over here for thousands of years—the people in this part of the world can't even agree about the weather. Let's just say that this is a sandstorm of biblical proportions." They got no disagreement from me.

  The command post for RCT-5 had once been a school, then later an arsenal for Saddam's Baath Party. I trudged up the stairs of the one-story building to get a look around, but the blowing sand made the effort futile. On the roof, four Marines were pulling security, one on each corner. In addition to their helmets, body armor, and chemical suits and dust goggles, their faces were wrapped Bedouin-style with the dark green slings from their first-aid kits. The frigid wind was downright fierce. I asked the fire team leader, a cor
poral, if they'd seen anything.

  The look I got from the Marine NCO had "stupid question" written all over it. "The entire Iraqi army could be out there, and we wouldn't know it until they were knocking on the front door."

  Fortunately, though the troops on the ground couldn't see any farther than we could spit, they had friends in high places with a much better view. Well above the storm, JSTARS aircraft were still identifying targets and passing them along to the artillery, as evidenced by the "crump, crump, crump" of the 11th Marines' 155-mm howitzers firing over our heads.

  The Iraqi artillery was firing too. Emboldened by the concealment offered by the blowing sand, they started hammering our front lines with mortar and rocket fire. American counter-battery radar could still see in the gloom. So even before the enemy rounds landed, entire battalions of American artillery zeroed in on the enemy positions and returned the fire.

  The sandstorm grounded the Marines' close air support (CAS) fixed-wing aircraft—the F-18s and AV-8 Harriers. This became immediately obvious to the Iraqis who took the opportunity to try to move troops and equipment under cover of the dust. What they didn't know was that the sensors and automated target-plotting systems aboard U-2, JSTARS, and EP-3 aircraft flying above the red clouds were still able to track them and send GPS-guided munitions in for the kill. Within minutes of detecting an Iraqi convoy or radio emission, one or more of a wide variety of missiles, rockets, or artillery would come streaking out of the sky to ruin the enemy's day.