There are two things my platoon never did unless we absolutely had to: talk on the radio and perform after-action reviews. But this time when we all got back to our base, our lieutenant had everyone gather around and we discussed what had just happened. We talked about the driver who was killed. We talked about the incredibly tough female soldier and what she had done. The lieutenant assured us that if anything ever happened to any of us we would never be left behind the way she was by her convoy. We talked about what we did well and what we could have done better. But mostly we just talked and listened to one another.
September 8, 2004
THREE DAYS OF COMBAT
Day Three: Baby Chickens
When we first got to Iraq, we assumed and hoped we’d be fighting an enemy the way we’d always trained: they shoot at us and we shoot at them. Those who took part in the initial invasion of Iraq got to do this, as did those who were in certain areas such as Samarra and Fallujah. Our area of operations is mostly rural, a little north of Baghdad. After the midway point of our deployment, we started coming to terms with the fact that direct contact with the enemy wasn’t going to happen that often, if ever. There have been a few incidents where soldiers in our AO have been shot at, but in most cases it was either farmers firing warning shots at patrols of soldiers, thinking them to be thieves in the night, or other units. There have been a handful of such friendly-fire incidents, which resulted in some really close calls, but thank god no injuries. The farmers aren’t always so lucky.
Something that there has never been a lack of in our area, however, are IEDs. Almost every day there is an IED, either discovered by us and then destroyed, or exploded by insurgents. There have been lulls in enemy activity in our area at times, but they rarely last for more than two weeks. The EOD guys have been earning every cent of their paychecks.
In most cases the IEDs are placed somewhere on the main highway, and the attacks usually take place at night. After the first few months we got a feel for the areas along the highway the insurgents liked to use. Our AO has an abundance of vineyards and orchard, and there is an extensive system of irrigation canals. The techniques used to employ IEDs are almost always the same. A wire is run from the IED to a remote location several hundred meters away, usually over at least one major canal. The systems used by the Army to jam IEDs that use radio and cell phone trigger mechanisms must be working pretty well because almost every IED we’ve encountered is wire-detonated.
With a decent set of data on the locations and times of the attacks, our company has been able to plan feasible counter-IED operations. Our area of operations is huge, and choosing a spot to sit on all night in hopes of running into the enemy is usually a total crapshoot, but it feels better to be proactive about these attacks than endlessly reactive. Plus, even if we never see a single bad guy on these operations, the time spent becoming familiar with these areas is invaluable. One of the major advantages the enemy has over us with the IED attacks is their intimate familiarity with the areas they are attacking us from. We know the highway as well as the streets in our own neighborhoods—we drive up and down it almost every day—but we don’t know a lot of the back roads worth a damn. So given the event where we have to react to a future attack, we are only helping ourselves by becoming more familiar with the areas where these have a tendency to take place.
In the U.S. Army, there is a very specific set of doctrine on how to perform an ambush. These procedures are in many ways unlike any of the other battle drills performed by the infantry. For example, an ambush is one of the few times where you are encouraged to not aim. (Apparently this is because it is less psychologically traumatic for the soldier doing the shooting.) Generally speaking, an ambush position is set up along a road or a known avenue of enemy travel, preferably at a bend or turn where a machine gun can be aimed in such a way that it has access to the entire length of the road without the gun’s having to traverse much. Positions for individual soldiers are established with very specific fields of fire. Left and right limits are established, usually by putting sticks or stakes into the ground, which physically limits how far to the left and the right the soldier’s rifle is capable of shooting. Upper and lower limits are established as well, sometimes by attaching a string between the two stakes, which acts as a guide for the upper limit. These limits are set up in such a way that the field of fire is focused tightly on the specific area of the road established as the “kill zone.” Once all the positions are prepared, the soldiers lie in wait for the enemy to come down the road. When the enemy enters the kill zone, the soldier who has been chosen to initiate the ambush will wait for the optimal moment and then will throw a hand grenade, detonate a Claymore mine, or fire the first shot. Once that signal has been given, everyone lets loose with everything they have, firing blindly but thoroughly across their sector of fire. Some guys will fire their weapons on full auto, some will fire on semi-auto, more hand grenades, more Claymores—the idea being to maintain a constant volume of fire without any breaks, even while magazines are changed and fresh belts loaded. This is called “the mad minute.” After the order to cease fire is given, the ambush team sweeps across the kill zone. All enemy weapons and equipment are consolidated and destroyed, then the ambush site is left hastily.
We call the counter-IED missions we run “ambushes,” but they are nowhere near being textbook ambushes. An area is chosen where there have been attacks in the past, and we look at spots that give us access to nearby roads and intersections. We further study maps of the area, make an educated guess as to which roads a bad guy may use to get to and from a likely firing point, then determine a good place to camp for a while. Jeff says this is called an “area ambush,” but what we look to do isn’t even that. We will usually perform a movement to and from the place where we want to sit, and would be happy if we made enemy contact during the movement. It’s more a matter of looking for a fight than anything. Part typical patrolling, part ambush. I don’t know if there’s a name for it.
For the first ambush I went on, I was part of a five-man team. Since the areas these missions were in had a lot of vegetation, we always wore green uniforms and green face paint for ambushes. A team of Humvees dropped several ambush teams off at different locations, then the Humvees were staged at a location several kilometers away. On this particular night we had a short movement to our chosen location that involved crossing a canal. The canal was a typical cement one, about fifteen feet wide with a forty-five-degree slope on each side and a flat bottom. The canal was less than half full of water, but what we didn’t plan on was how slippery the sloped sides would be. Once in the water, getting out was nearly impossible. We could have crossed the canal at one of the small bridges, but Jeff, the leader of this ambush team, wouldn’t hear of it. If there is water or mud to be crossed, Jeff will find a reason to cross it. He claims it is unsafe and against all principles of the infantry to cross at bridges. He’s right, but getting stuck in canals also goes against all the principles I know. Jeff was the first to go in the water, and once he realized how difficult it was to get to the other side, he removed all his gear and body armor and put it on the ground on the other side along with his weapon. He was then able to climb the slope and help the other guys up. While the others were getting help from Jeff, I tried to do this on my own. If someone were waiting to attack us from anywhere along the canal in either direction, now would have been the time and we would have been fucked. I thought of this as I tried to climb the slope. After a few attempts, I finally made it up unassisted and with all my gear on, but I had to use the reserves of energy you only normally tap into when you know your life is in danger. By the time we had all made it over the canal and began the short movement to our ambush location, I was already completely exhausted. I noted to myself that I would never do that again unless I absolutely had to. There had to be a better way.
Our most recent ambush was in the same vicinity as the last, and we’d have to cross the same canal again, but this time we came better prepared. R
ubin, one of our platoon’s squad leaders, is a master at building things from scrap wood and he made for us a sort of ladder-bridge we could place across the canal. On the night of the ambush, we rode in the back of a cargo Humvee with the “assault bridge,” and once the Humvees had dropped us off, we carried the ladder with us to the canal. On one end of the ladder we tied a rope for the purpose of lowering the ladder across the canal. We practiced this a few times before we left, but when it came time to do it for real, we couldn’t keep the ladder balanced while lowering it without it falling into the water. I was pissed that we were still having trouble with the whole canal-crossing thing, so I got into the water and set up the ladder-bridge by hand. The team crossed, and I climbed out. At least only one of us had to get wet this time. I wasn’t too excited about being covered in slime again, but I refused to let anyone think about using the bridge we had noticed about fifty meters away from us. If Jeff says we’re not using bridges, we’re not using bridges! If we’re going to go through all the trouble of building and carrying a stupid assault bridge—which was pretty damned heavy by the way—we were going to use it, dammit! Once on the other side of the canal, we hid the ladder in the weeds and continued on.
The movement for our last ambush was fairly short, so for this one Jeff had chosen an ambush location well over a kilometer away from where we were dropped off. A movement of a little more than a kilometer is not much of a distance by any standards, but given the terrain we were in and the weight of all our gear, particularly the ceramic body armor we were all wearing, this short walk quickly became excruciating. (I asked Jeff a few days earlier if we could ditch the body armor for ambushes, but he just laughed at me.) The area we were in was a patchwork of vineyards and orchards. All the growth made it easy to conceal our movement but made walking a slow and arduous process.
The vineyards weren’t that bad for guys who were really short, but if you were taller than five eight, it was a serious pain in the neck, literally. Taut wires were horizontally strung between the rows of vines, usually at least five and a half feet from the ground, but never more than six feet. In the summer, the vines would grow and create a lush, shady canopy across the wires. But at night, with the diagonal support wires hidden from lack of moonlight and the ground uneven with irrigation furrows, walking through the vineyards was no easy task, especially since night-vision goggles ruin your depth perception. The most comfortable way for me to walk was standing mostly upright with my head bowed, but I couldn’t see anything other than my feet when I walked this way. The only way to move through tactically was in a crouch, but given the weight of all I was wearing, I couldn’t keep this posture up for more than a few minutes before my thighs started to burn.
We moved at a snail’s pace. Jeff was on point, and finding a route that was both concealed, navigable, and not directly on any actual trails or roads wasn’t easy. Sometimes we’d go a short distance, realize it was not possible to continue due to fences or foliage, backtrack a bit, then try a different route. We had maps of the area, but they weren’t as detailed or as up-to-date as the maps we were accustomed to using in the training areas of U.S. military installations. Also, the scale of most the maps we had were intended more for pilots than grunts. So when routes were planned for missions such as this one, we knew there would be a lot of improvising when it came to actual execution.
We were only a little more than halfway to our destination before a couple of the guys started to complain that they needed to take a breather. I was carrying ammunition for two weapons, being the grenadier of the team, but I had one of the lightest loads. Sean and Jimmy were both carrying SAWs, and Rich was carrying the radio, but we were all just trying our best to keep up with Jeff.
Jeff is a staff sergeant in his late thirties, a heavy smoker, and I don’t think he’s exercised once since we’ve been in Iraq. But there is no end to his energy. He’s one of those guys who’s so ugly he’s handsome, like Willem Dafoe or Christopher Walken. He’s tall, skinny, and incredibly hairy. His teeth are darkened from his unending consumption of coffee and cigarettes. He always wears black-rimmed Ranger glasses strapped to his face with green parachute cord, the ends of which have been melted to prevent fraying and are knotted in ways that sailors would consider unholy. He’s just plain salty. His field craft and technical expertise as a soldier are second to none, something that came from his having spent several years in a Ranger battalion. But what makes me truly love Jeff is the fact that he’s just a little bit nuts. In my opinion the best soldiers are the ones who are slightly crazy, guys who can embrace the chaotic nature of soldiering and revel in it. And on this night he was completely in his element.
I ran up to Jeff and asked him if we could stop for a few minutes. He seemed a little disappointed but agreed to take a quick break. I took the radio from Rich, who seemed to be struggling with it. Then, after about three minutes, we started moving again. We had finally made it out of the vineyards and orchards, but then found ourselves wading through dense brush and deadfall. The terrain was at its most ridiculous when we wandered into a grove of tall bushes that seemed to naturally grow in the shape of giant mushrooms. I had to remind myself that this was Iraq, though I half expected to see a talking caterpillar smoking a hookah on the top of one.
We backtracked a short distance and looked for a better way around. Jeff told us to hold our position as he walked over a small hill. As I watched his silhouette disappear over the crest of the hill, Jimmy fell backward and lay on the ground unmoving. I walked up to him and bent down close to his ear. I whispered, “You okay, man?” He looked at me and said, “That’s it. I’m done. I can’t move. Can we just stop here?” Then I heard Jeff call me on the radio, telling me to bring the rest of the guys over the hill. I called back, “Roger. Be advised code-name Jimmy is, um, stuck at this time. We’ll be right over. Over.” After a little consoling and coddling, I convinced Jimmy to get up, telling him it was only a little bit farther and that I knew he could do it, that he was a big boy and I was really proud of him, that he was doing such a good job and as soon as we shot some stuff and blew some stuff up we’d go back to our bunker and I’d give him a bubble bath. Jeff yelled over the radio, “Get the fuck over the hill now!”
At the top of the hill was the road we were interested in watching. There were a number of depressions that made for decent positions to occupy. It had taken us an hour and a half to move to a location only a little more than one kilometer from our drop point. We were all exhausted. Except of course for Jeff.
In theory, ambushes sound like they could be a lot of fun. But in practice, having to lie in the same spot for hours as quiet and unmoving as possible sucks. And if you haven’t gotten enough sleep beforehand, it can be incredibly difficult to stay awake through it. Falling asleep in an ambush position is very bad. So anytime there’s been an ambush planned, I’ve always made sure to get as much sleep as possible the afternoon before the mission.
As we lay in our positions, I felt tired but alert. My job was to keep an eye to the rear of our positions, while the other four guys watched the road. I knew it was highly unlikely someone would sneak up on us through the field I was watching, but I scanned the area actively. From our slightly elevated position, I had a decent view of the area and wished someone with an RPG or an AK-47 would be unlucky enough to happen upon us. It’s virtually impossible not to daydream in situations like this, and I did what I could to keep my mind occupied without completely zoning out, so I spent most of my time imagining all the different things I would do in response to different attacks. We lay there in our positions for several hours.
It was nearing time to leave. Our plan was to be picked up by the Humvees at the same place where we had been dropped off. The contingency plan, in the event of an emergency or the need to be extracted immediately, was to run down the dirt road we were watching, out toward the main road, and be picked up where the two roads met. It’s standard infantry doctrine to never use established roads or trails as routes for m
ovement, so this plan wasn’t going to be executed unless it was truly necessary. But I knew the guys weren’t going to want to go back the way we’d come, and, frankly, I wasn’t sure it was really worth it.
I was trying to think of a way to persuade Jeff to go with Plan B when we heard shooting in the near distance. More than a dozen shots were quickly fired, all the distinct report of 5.56mm rounds. It was clear one of the other ambush teams was shooting at something, but we didn’t know at what. I had given the radio back to Rich earlier, so I was unable to listen to the radio traffic about what was happening. Jeff then told us there was a van that had stopped at the side of the road, directly in front of one of the other teams, that a man had gotten out and appeared to be dropping what looked like artillery rounds on the ground next to the road. Something we’ve suspected about IEDs is that different people will perform different parts of the task rather than a single person or group doing the entire thing themselves. We guessed that one person dropped the explosives at the side of the road, another ran the wire through the field, then another would explode the IED by connecting the ends of the wire to a battery. Shots fired by the other team were intended to disable the vehicle.
Moments after the series of shots was fired, there was another burst of shots, this time about twice as many and twice as rapid. After listening to the radio for a moment, Jeff yelled out, “They’re trying to drive away! Let’s go! We’re going to intercept them on the road!” We all jumped to our feet and started jogging down the dirt road in the direction of the main highway. After running for only a few minutes, we came to the cement canal, this time several hundred meters from where we’d first crossed it. I could see roughly where we’d been dropped off, and it was depressing to think that we’d just run in three minutes most of the distance that it had taken us an hour and a half to walk. A dirt road ran parallel to the canal, and not far from us was a bridge running over it. The highway was about fifty meters from us. I was in the lead and wanted to get over the bridge, but Jeff yelled for me to wait. We had gotten pretty spread out, and Jeff wanted us to tighten the group up a little before we went any farther.
Just Another Soldier Page 20