War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom

by Oliver North

  Throughout the Task Force Tarawa firefight in An Nasiriyah, Iraqi state television and Al Jazeera have 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 are shots of five American soldiers from the 507th—now prisoners—whom the Iraqis captured last night.

  At a news conference Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed claimed, “Baghdad will respect the Geneva Convention and will not harm captured American soldiers.” Yet, the very Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners that the Iraqis are citing forbids photographing or parading captives before TV cameras. Those watching on our little TV monitor are outraged.

  In the dark, one of the Marines says, “This reminds me of Somalia.” He was no doubt thinking of the notorious 1993 incident in Mogadishu when an Army Delta Force and Ranger unit suffered eighteen killed and more than seventy wounded in an event made famous in the book and movie Black Hawk Down.

  But from what little I have been able to see of the gunfight in An Nasiriyah, it was nothing like what had happened in “Mog.” 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 more than twelve hours later. Last night’s ambush of the thin-skinned army vehicles of disoriented logistics and support troops—including female soldiers—of the 507th has been a disaster, no doubt. But TF Tarawa is anything but a UN QRF. The Marines in TF Tarawa are a well-trained, heavily armed, air-ground combat team that had already seen action by the night of March 23. And though the Marines had already begun referring to the highway through An Nasiriyah as “the gauntlet” or “Ambush Alley,” they responded in less than three hours, in darkness, when the 507th needed help. Unlike the situation in Somalia, TF Tarawa was able to bring to bear enormous coordinated, disciplined firepower against the regular Iraqi army and irregular forces arrayed against them inside the city. And while the aging LVT7s proved vulnerable to RPGs, French-made anti-armor rockets, and 25mm armor-piercing projectiles fired from an errant A-10 Warthog, TF Tarawa’s M-1 Abrams, with their thermal sights made short work of enemy troops holed up in buildings.

  Shortly after the horrific images of dead and captured Americans appeared on American television, President Bush came on TV to say, “Saddam Hussein is losing control of his country.” He also points out that the U.S.-led coalition forces are achieving their objectives, and he warns the Iraqis, “The people who mistreat U.S. prisoners of war will be treated as war criminals.”

  A short while later, in Great Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair expresses his anger and displeasure at the Iraqis for televising the American prisoners of war. He calls it a “flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention.”

  Then, from CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar, Lt. Gen. John Abazid, Gen. Franks’s deputy, offers a more comprehensive explanation of the engagement at a press briefing. He says that a U.S. Army supply convoy has been ambushed by Iraqi troops near An Nasiriyah, that in the encounter, several American soldiers have been hurt, and that a dozen more are missing. The CENTCOM update also notes that “Marines of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force are heavily engaged in An Nasiriyah” and that “there have been casualties.” While no numbers of killed and wounded are provided, the Marines now know that the toll to take the bridges and secure the route through An Nasiriyah has been high. And though Lt. Gen. Abazid hasn’t said so, the Marines also know that one of the missing from the deadly Army convoy is a young female soldier. What we don’t know until later is her name: PFC Jessica Lynch, a twenty-year-old supply clerk from the 507th Maintenance Company.

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #14

  With HMM-268

  Camden Yards FARP, Vic RCT-5 Command Post

  On Route 1, 40 km north of the Euphrates River

  Monday, 24 March 2003

  1800 Hours Local

  We’ve been on the move again since dawn, leaving the cleanup of An Nasiriyah to Task Force Tarawa and RCT-1. Despite continued resistance from bands of Baathists and fedayeen inside the city, Gen. James Mattis, the 1st Marine Division commander, has decided to proceed with his original plan for a two-pronged attack north toward Baghdad. RCT-5, with RCT-7, will continue the attack up Route 1 to Ad Diwaniyah. To our east, TF Tarawa has been given the mission of securing An Nasiriyah and its bridges so that RCT-1 can pass through and attack two hundred kilometers north, up Route 7, to seize 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 dawn this morning, Marine engineers and Seabees, working through the night without lights, 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.

  The “backup” engineer span works as intended to ease the bottleneck at the Euphrates and by 1000 hours, RCT-5 is driving north—followed by RCT-7—up an unfinished four-lane highway designated as Route l. Cobra gunships scouting ahead of the lead tanks in our column report only sporadic contact with Iraqi units deployed in our path as the long column of tanks and armored vehicles races north past desolate marshlands on both sides of the highway.

  As Col. Joe Dunford’s RCT-5 Command Group leapfrogs forward, Lt. Col. Jerry Driscoll’s four HMM-268 CH-46s do so as well—even though it means moving the birds every few hours. Each time we land, Griff and I race out of our respective helicopters to set up our broadcast equipment. By noon we’ve done this three times since dawn. It would seem futile since we have little to report, except that the satellite connection with FOX News Channel in New York is now our best source of information on what’s happening to Brig. Gen. Rick Natonski’s Task Force Tarawa in An Nasiriyah and the latest on the American MIAs and POWs from the 507th Maintenance Company.

  It’s midday in Iraq and we’re parked at the “Pac Bell” FARP on Route 1 when we tune in for the early Monday morning news in the United States. The news is not good.

  Marine casualties in An Nasiriyah have continued to mount, and the RCT-1/TF Tarawa advance toward Al Kut is stalled. And now embedded correspondents are reporting that fedayeen irregulars wearing civilian clothes are approaching coalition forces waving white flags as if to surrender, but just as they are about to be taken into custody, they pull out weapons and begin shooting. There are other reports of foreign fighters using human shields and ambulances full of explosives driven by suicidal terrorists.

  In Baghdad, Saddam is apparently unfazed by continuous precision air strikes—now more than one thousand per day—against his command-and-control nodes, government buildings in Baghdad, and military headquarters facilities throughout the country. Al Jazeera broadcasts continue to parrot Iraqi regime claims of massive civilian casualties inflicted by coalition forces—and the Arabic-language satellite network persists in repeatedly airing images of the Americans captured in the 507th Maintenance Company ambush, along with new shots of two U.S. Army Apache pilots being paraded before the cameras after they were captured when their helicopter was shot down.

  All this is apparently enough to drive most of the chattering class of retired generals and admirals who appear regularly on U.S. television into deep depression. Retired generals Wesley Clark, Barry McCafferey, and others are prognosticating that the war will go on for months and that horrendous U.S. casualties should be expected, because Gen. Franks had made the monumental military blunder of attacking Saddam with too small a force and inadequate “softening up” by air power before the ground offensive began. With the notable exceptions of retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely and retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom MacInerney of FOX News Channel, nearly all of the other TV networks’ “senior military anal
ysts” are predicting a long and very bloody campaign.

  Perhaps encouraged by the blathering from Washington and New York, or by Saddam’s financial enticements for “fellow Arabs” to join the fight against the American and British “invaders,” or simply motivated by the desire to become martyrs in the “Islamic jihad,” a number of Arab foreigners are responding. In any event, the gory gunfight at An Nasiriyah has precipitated a wave of new volunteers for the fedayeen. They are coming by the hundreds in buses, cars, pickup trucks, and even motorcycles from Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. 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 route through “the gauntlet” at An Nasiriyah are now referring to March 23 as “Bloody Sunday.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MOASS

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #15

  With HMM-268 Detachment

  Somewhere on Route 1, north of the Euphrates River

  Wednesday, 26 March 2003

  1030 Hours Local

  “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.”

  —Gunnery Sergeant Erik Benitez, USMC

  We can finally see more than a few meters around our helicopter. The worst sandstorm any of us has ever seen is finally blowing itself out.

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

  When Griff and I arose at 0330 hours to set up our gear for a 0400 “hit” on Hannity & Colmes, the wind was blowing so hard that we had to use a sandbag to anchor our satellite antenna to keep it from blowing over. And when we went on the air, the image, green-tinged by our night lens, sparkled as though sprinkled with pixie dust—an effect caused by ionized particles of sand suspended in the air.

  Unfortunately, the blowing sand has the same effect on the night-vision goggles used by the Marines, considerably reducing the effectiveness of their NVGs. Some of the pilots suspect that this condition was a factor in the terrible crash of one of the squadron’s CH-46s on the first night of the war. Whether or not it was a problem then, it is certainly one tonight. On the roadway fifty meters to our west, the never-ceasing stream of armored vehicles, trucks, artillery pieces, and tanks moving past us to the north has slowed to a crawl because the drivers can’t see the rear of the vehicle in front of them. I’m glad that our birds haven’t been called out for a cas-evac. The idea of flying at night through this pea soup at 120 knots (about 138 mph) only fifty feet above the ground is not appealing.

  Dawn was late this morning—made so by the unearthly haze of wind-whipped sand. Although the sun came up, it didn’t change things much. Only the color of the haze shifted. During the day the powdery dust turns everything—earth, sky, vehicles, even the haze-gray helicopters—the color of rust. It coats our clothing, lines our nostrils, cakes our skin, and stings our eyes if we venture outside the helicopter without dust goggles. Worse yet, it makes it almost impossible for the young Marines looking for the enemy to see anything much beyond a few meters—day or night.

  Because the storm has already slowed the pace of operations, many of those in the RCT command group who have been very busy for five days and nights suddenly find themselves with little to do. Some catch up on much-needed sleep. Others engage in “bull sessions”—a long-standing military tradition, but one seemingly little enjoyed so far in this operation. Over a generously offered cup of hot coffee, prepared on the hood of a Humvee, I eavesdrop on a long discourse by two CIA paramilitary officers who are debating whether the storm that has descended on us is properly described as a sharqi or a shamal. They decide to resolve the issue by consulting the two Kuwaiti officers who are accompanying RCT-5 as interpreters. Unfortunately, the Kuwaitis are brothers and they disagree as well, prompting one of the Americans to observe with a shrug, “And 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.”

  Climbing to the top of a one-story building that had once been a schoolhouse—turned into a small arsenal by Saddam’s Baath Party cadre and now a CP for RCT-5—I find a four-man Marine fire team on lookout. Each member of the team has staked out a corner of the rooftop. They’re wearing their helmets, body armor, and chemical suits, and in addition to their dust goggles, they’ve wrapped their faces Bedouin-style with the dark green slings from their first aid kits. The wind is fierce. It’s actually cold. I ask the fire team leader, a corporal, what he sees.

  The young Marine NCO looks at me somewhat skeptically and replies, “The entire Iraqi army could be out there and we wouldn’t know it until they were knocking on the front door.”

  That may be true for this fire team, and perhaps for every other infantryman on the ground beneath this dust storm. But if the Iraqis thought that the sand blinding us had made them invisible, they were dead wrong.

  Even as we stand on that windswept roof, unable to see anything more than a few yards away, we can hear the sound of the 11th Marines’ 155mm howitzers firing RAP rounds over our heads. They aren’t shooting in the blind. Although the dust storm prevents forward observers from spotting or adjusting fires, the batteries of big guns, multiple-launch rocket systems and the big-payload, high-altitude strike aircraft like the B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s still have plenty of good targets.

  Iraqi artillery, rocket, and mortar men, normally wary of firing for fear of being hit almost immediately by an air strike, have been emboldened by the sandstorm’s concealment. Last night, as the dust cloud enveloped, they started peppering the Marines’ front-line units with 122mm Katyusha rockets, 152mm heavy artillery, and 82mm mortars.

  But even before the Iraqi rounds hit the ground, American counter-battery radars linked to fire-control computers are plotting the location of the enemy launchers. And literally within seconds, whole battalions of American 155mm artillery pieces fire back at those who had just fired at us. These highly sophisticated measures can’t prevent the Iraqis from firing at us through the rust-colored sky. But the quick response almost guarantees that those enemy gunners who do so will never fire again.

  The sandstorm’s restricted visibility means that low-level fixed-wing and rotary-wing close air support are out of action—and the Iraqis know it. But what they don’t know is that high above them—aboard U-2, JSTARS, and EP-3 aircraft—automated target plotters are observing Iraqi troop movements and communications. The sensors aboard these platforms are generally unaffected by the reduced visibility on the ground, and within minutes of the detection of an Iraqi convoy or radio emission, one or more of a wide variety of GPS-guided munitions is very likely to come streaking out of the sky to obliterate the target.

  While standing on the roof of the school–turned Baath ordnance depot–turned U.S. Marine CP, we can hear over the wind the sound of aircraft at high altitude. And minutes later we feel, as much as hear the rumble of a large warhead detonating well off to the north. Whether it was a two-thousand pound AGM-130 or JDAM or the explosion of a five-thousand pound GBU-37, we can’t tell. All we know is that some unsuspecting Iraqi who thought he couldn’t be seen has just been hit—prompting a predictable response from the Marines: “Yeah, man! Get some!”

  A few minutes after this invisible demonstration of American military prowess, Griff appears out of the orange mist at the base of the building and shouts up to me, “We have a cas-evac. Let’s go.”

  As I climb down to the ground and head inside for the mission briefing, my first thought is that the artillery barrage or the high-altitude strikes we’ve just heard might have hit “friendlies.” But when I j
oin Lt. Col. Jerry Driscoll, the air officer is updating him, and I learn that’s not the case. Two RCT-5 Marines have been seriously wounded by an RPG during a skirmish with an Iraqi infantry patrol. Driscoll and his wingman, Capt. Aaron “Fester” Eckerberg, plot the grid of the pickup zone and the en route checkpoints on their charts, jot down the frequency of the unit waiting for them on the ground, and quickly head for the helos. Though the weather is deteriorating by the minute, neither pilot challenges the wisdom of making the run. A company commander under fire has called for an emergency cas-evac. It’s Driscoll’s job to pick up the wounded and save their lives by getting them safely back to a hospital. No questions. No complaints.

  We stumble through the gathering gloom back to the aircraft. Griff and his camera are aboard Fester’s bird, and I strap in with my camera on Driscoll’s #12 while he briefs the crew and our two shock-trauma corpsmen on the mission. As we lift off, the crew chief, Gunnery Sgt. Jesse Wills, observes over the intercom, “Nice day for flying, eh, Colonel?”

  Driscoll responds, “Ah yes. Red Dragons . . . real players.” As I hang out the right side hatch with my camera, I notice that Capt. Eckerberg’s CH-46, though only seventy-five feet away, is nearly invisible in the dusty haze. We’re heading northwest up Highway 1 toward Ad Diwaniyah, but instead of flying at twenty-five to fifty feet at 120 knots, we’re at seventy-five feet—and traveling at less than fifty knots. Ahead of us, through Driscoll’s windscreen, the ground is barely visible. There is no horizon and everyone aboard is now looking outboard or ahead for power lines, radio towers, light poles, and highway overpasses in hopes that we see them before running into them.