April 9th Redux

I can't believe it has been 10 years. It seems like just yesterday I was laughing as Ian was running for cover from the artillery while dragging the satcom radio by the handset all the time yelling " WE ARE EXPERIENCING HEAVY FIRE!!!!" I miss those guys..best time of my life. Please enjoy my post from 2 years ago.

So their I was hugging the ground like a little bitch trying to see how much of my body I could fit into the 2 ft wide 2 foot deep trench I was sitting in. Meanwhile Iraqi artillery shells were hitting less than 5 meters away raining shrapnel, rocks and dirt down on top of my Ballistic Helmet, Personnel, Ground more commonly known as the “Kevlar”. My Special Forces A Team had been calling devastating air strikes on the Iraqi Division dug in along the Kani Domlon ridgeline in Northern Iraq for about two weeks and I guess we pissed them off. The Iraqis had taken a terrible pounding and I had observed some of them even shedding their uniforms and deserting via a tractor earlier in the day. I had also observed about thirty of them turn into little pink smears on the grass as a B2 bomber unloaded its entire payload on their bunker.
We had been operating out of some fighting positions the Iraqis had abandoned as they retreated before the Kurdish Pershmerga and US Special Forces teams that had infiltrated Northern Iraq. The Iraqi military had consolidated their defense in a loose ring around the strategically oil rich city of Kirkuk. Occupying many concrete bunkers that were spread about five hundred meters apart; the Iraqis had also replicated their tactics of the first Gulf War and set some of the oil wells on fire. Apparently this was done in an attempt to obscure their positions from our aircraft. Earlier as I peered at the enemy positions through my binoculars and worked up coordinates for the next strike, I wondered if I would be permanently affected by breathing in all this oil smoke which covered us like a thick but slightly greasy fog.
However as I was getting more intimate with the Iraqi countryside I was worried about the more permanent problem that seemed to be facing me. It was about 2300 and pitch dark. Prior to nightfall we had seen some artillery fire land about 2000 meters away but didn’t pay it much attention other than to note it for our situation report. But now as half the team was preparing to bed down and the other half was on watch, the artillery started to bracket our position. The enemy observers added and dropped in range until they let a full blown fire for effect loose on our position.
My commo guy was yelling into the satcom radio that we were experiencing contact; meanwhile I was rousting the rest of the team trying to get them under cover. “Here it comes again, boys” I said as we heard the muffled report of the Iraqi artillery that was followed not to long after by another series of earth shattering and ear ringing explosions. The Kurdish Major who was my counterpart on this patrol, grabbed my arm and was trying to yell something about the incoming in my ear. However between his broken English and the noise I could only catch the word “Peshmerga” as he shook his head in a negative fashion. Was he trying to tell me we were not the primary target of this barrage? Was he trying to indicate the primary target was the Peshmerga forces that had been probing the Iraqi positions along the ridgeline?
Primary target or not when under stress soldiers always fall back on their training, every school I had went to from Basic Combat Training to Ranger school had drilled into me that when you are on the receiving end of an artillery attack you un-ass the area as quickly as possible. So this is what we did, I instructed my team members to grab the small amount of gear we had around our position and to load up in the white Land Rover Defender four wheel drives we were traveling in. We piled into our vehicles and clipped our night vision goggles to our helmets. Meanwhile the Kurds loaded up in the one rusty suburban they had for transportation. Except for the red tracers flying down the valley toward and around our position and the artillery flashes surrounding us there was no light. We drove in blackout conditions using our night vision goggles to navigate as the Kurds followed behind in their vehicle. My plan was to try and find another location to set up shop, one that had not been compromised by the Iraqi observers. Everyone was at a high state of alertness as we drove across the Iraqi countryside paralleling the bluff that ending abruptly at the steep valley that it seems Peshmerga forces where advancing up towards the Iraqi positions.
We were approaching a linear danger area (road) when suddenly my driver who was our senior weapons sergeant yelled “Ambush!! We have men and weapons on the road!!” He immediately threw our vehicle in reverse and tried to break contact. Unfortunately he forgot we were the lead element in a line of 4 vehicles. The vehicle immediately behind us managed to stop but was hit in the front fender by my vehicle as it backed up. The third vehicle in line was the Kurdish vehicle which continued the accordion effect and slammed into the spare tire on the back of the vehicle in front of it so hard the front of their vehicle was pushed into the radiator cracking it and busting a headlight. I yelled at him “What the fuck dude, you need to fuckin think before you go hauling ass!!” Meanwhile, whoever he saw on the road had disappeared, if they where even there at all.
So there we were in the middle of no mans land with two smashed up vehicles, one which was barely drivable. I had my team members pull security as I tried to assess the damage by red lens flashlight. We were barely 1000 meters from where we had just experienced the artillery attack and I felt like the leader of the ass clown circus as I tried to explain to the Major I was sorry we had destroyed his truck. I determined our best course of action was to return to base and see if we could repair the Kurdish truck. Our patrol base was in the village of Klawkut which was about 10 kilometers east of our current position. We limped back to base with the Kurdish vehicle in tow, driving thru the countryside of Northern Iraq it took us 4 more hours to move those 10 kilometers and we arrived at out patrol base about 0400 exhausted. After waking up my Team Leader and explaining the situation I told the guys to bed down and figured we would sort things out in the morning.
The next morning we reported what had happened to our company headquarters and we were instructed in no uncertain terms to get our asses back out there and establish a new observation post. So I loaded my team back up in our vehicles, taking only 2 Kurds with us we established a new OP a little farther north of our previous position. Shortly after we arrived we received radio traffic that we were to engage no one west of a particular gridline on the map. Shortly after that we received word that the Iraqi forces had deserted the ridgeline and Peshmerga where streaming hell bent for leather towards Kirkuk. I informed my Team Leader that the Kurds where heading towards Kirkuk and agreed to link up with them at a small village that we had used as a reference point before. As we waited at the linkup for the remainder of our team we saw a regular parade of buses, cars, dump trucks, and pickups filled with Peshmerga streaming south west along the main highway to Kirkuk. What happened when they got there is another story.
I found out later that April 9th was a watershed day for the invasion of Iraq. It was the day the famous statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. It was the day that Baghdad was taken and the Iraqi forces collapsed. Although I will never know for sure I believe the fierce direct and indirect fire we experienced on that evening was the last attempt of the Iraqi forces to cover their withdrawal as they melted before the onslaught of American air power and Kurdish foot soldiers. For me the evening of April 9th will always stick in my mind as the night I had a fender bender in the middle of a firefight.

War Dogs

Dogs are man’s best friend so the saying goes. Here in ‘Merica dogs are for a lot of folks part of the family. I have three dogs myself and consider myself a dog person. I am not the only one that feels that way and throughout my military career the different units I was in had an assortment of adopted and befriended canines. We seemed to pick up one of theses furry guys everytime we stopped long enough to make a semi permanent base of operations.

The first dog I can remember adopting as the unit mascot was when I was stationed in the Sinai Peninsula way back in the stone age of the early 1980’s. This mutt was the typical Middle Eastern yellow skinny dog. The same dog I saw all over the Middle East many many times and in many countries. This particular dog was a permanent fixture at the outpost on the top of the mountain on an island in the middle of the straits of Tiran in the Sinai Peninsula. We used to feed this dog our left over C-Rations and it lived high on the hog. When my Special Forces team was running operations out of a house in the Kosovo town of Kamenica we had another dog. Typical yellow mutt and we feed it left over dog food that we grabbed from the Military Police. They had expired dog food that they wouldn’t feed to the military working dogs but it was fine for our mascot.

When my SF team deployed to Iraq in 2003 we set up a patrol base in the village of Klawkut. We were running reconnaissance missions and calling in airstrikes on the Iraqi military that had formed a defensive perimeter around the city of Kirkuk and its strategic oilfields. On one of our area reconnaissance missions we came upon a complex of abandoned Iraqi trenches and fighting positions. We dismounted from the Land Rover Defenders we were using as transportation and methodically cleared each trench and fighting position. As we got towards the ends of the fortified area one of my medics gave a holler and we looked to see what he wanted. We hadn’t found any Iraqis but he had found three black and white puppies that were all huddled up in the bottom of one of the fighting positions.

It was our best guess that these little guys had been abandoned by their mother or she was killed during the bombing that had happened in the area a few days prior. Being the good SF troopers we were we immediately adopted these furballs as our team mascots and loaded them into the back of one of the vehicles. Our interpreter was also sitting in the back of this vehicle and started to complain about the dogs. Muslims believe dogs are unclean animals and do not keep them as pets as a general rule. Being the culturally sensitive guys we were my Senior Weapons Sergeant told him to shut his pie hole or he, not the dogs, would be walking back to the patrol base.

As we made our way back across country to Klawkut we saw a lone vehicle headed in our general direction. As it moved closer and we could not identify it as friend or foe we pulled our vehicles into a defensive posture. The approaching vehicle stopped and two individuals dismounted in traditional Kurdish garb. They were about 200 meters from our vehicles and made signs for us to come forward and talk. We made the decision to put our crew served weapon on the high ground to our left in an overwatch while our Team Leader and the interpreter moved forward to talk to theses individuals. The rest of the team would also provide supporting fire from the cover of the vehicles.

As our Team Leader moved forward I had my sights trained dead center on the chest of the first mystery Kurd waiting for him to make a suspicious move. As I waited for the little drama to unfold I could hear our new found companions whining and scuffling in the back seat of the vehicle. As it turns out these individuals were just some Peshmerga who were trying to rejoin their unit and they gave us a friendly wave as they got in their vehicle and continued heading east.

We continued on west to KlawKut and our patrol base. When we arrived we broke open some Meals Ready to Eat and some bottled water and fed our puppies. We made them a comfortable little home out of a MRE box so they could sleep in the shade. As the days went by the started imprinting themselves on us and usually would follow the first team member that left the building we were sleeping in. Our interpreter continued to complain about the fact that they were hanging around but we ignored him as the rest of the Kurds didn’t seem to mind. He was a city boy any way from down south and the Peshmerga we were working with didn’t have a lot of respect for him.

Eventually we had to pick up and move on as the mission changed. When we had to haul ass to occupy Kirkuk, our little friends got left in Klawkut and we never saw them again. That is the way of the mascot though, they are interchangeable to a certain degree, although I still think about them and wondered if they made it through the war ok.

How Do I Feel?

Ever since our administration announced the end of the war in Iraq I have not been sure how I feel. As I have talked about a few times on this blog I was part of the initial invasion of the country in 2003. It could even be said that Operation Iraqi Freedom was the culmination of my military career, it was the last time I would lead men in combat, it was the last time I would deploy on a real world mission, and it was the last time I felt truly in charge of my own destiny. Many people try to analyze how soldiers in combat feel, trying to get inside their heads and ascribe there own feelings and desires on to the members of our military. Killing is bad right?So those that kill must be screwed up when it is over? We have to think that way or the whole house of cards falls down.

I am going to be brutally honest here folks and realize that this statement applies to me and me alone, others have their own opinions. Ladies and Gentleman COMBAT IS FUN!!! Yes there are many moments where bad things happen and you wish you were far far away, but when you are in the heat of the moment and you are closing with and destroying the enemy as you have been trained to do all your adult life that is fun. By fun I don't mean ha ha funny I mean satisfying. The adrenaline and the intense feeling of being part of a hardass team of proven professionals cannot be replicated.

So how do I feel? Somehow I feel like a part of me has gone missing. During my career in the Infantry and Special Forces I went many places that the public never heard about or barely remembers. The Sinai Peninsula,Bosnia, and Kosovo where all real world missions where we braved the threat of hostile fire but these did not have the gravity of Operation Iraqi Freedom. So somehow the ending of the war in Iraq has officially closed my connection with the military 7 years after my retirement. As the years go by the phrase " I was in Iraq" will be said less and less as other conflicts supercede the one that once dominated the headlines. Eventually when I am an old old man  they will start doing countdowns of how many of us still survive.

I guess I just miss my teammates. De Oppresso Liber

No Man's Land

We had established our patrol base in the Iraqi village of Klaw Kut. After dusk myself and my A team had moved out in our Land Rover Defenders accompanied by some Kurdish Peshmerga in a rusty Suburban. We had recently moved from the larger village of Taq Taq through the former Iraqi lines and into our current place of residence. Some of the ODA remained at the patrol base while we conducted a leader’s recon, attempting to pinpoint the Iraqi lines and identify a good observation post from which to call for fire and report back intelligence on the Iraqis.

The Peshmerga took the lead driving along the rutted dirt road by the light of the moon, utilizing no headlights or markers for fear of an Iraqi ambush. We drove with night vision goggles mounted to our helmets and I wondered how the Kurds could see at all without the aid of technology as the moon was half full at best and often covered with clouds. Great night for concealment, poor night for driving, we were spaced out in tactical convoy formation the Pershmerga followed by our two vehicles.

Eventually we left the road and started driving straight across the Iraqi countryside generally heading southeast through terrain littered with large rocks and short stubby grass. The terrain was gently rolling hills whose shadows hid many small villages that lay in ruins. These were the product of Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish eradication policy and had been abandoned for some time. Knowing this did not keep me from peering through and around every tumbled down wall with my night vision goggles as if they would grant me x-ray vision to see the ambush that I felt was lurking in every corner.

At the start of the war the Iraqi’s had pulled back from their original defensive line and consolidated just north of the oilfields surrounding Kirkuk. My unit the 10^th Special Forces Group along with elements of 3rd Special Forces Group, A Marine Expeditionary Unit, the 173^rd Airborne Brigade, and the Kurds had filled this gap and were pressing south trying to keep the Iraqis engaged in the north of the country so they could not reinforce Baghdad and cause trouble for the main Allied thrust which was coming from the south. Our main mission was to pinpoint where the Iraqi’s had their defensive perimeter so we could reengage them.

As we crept forward at approximately 15-20 kilometers per hour we were constantly stopping to dismount and check the terrain ahead for any signs of the enemy. Our dismounts would clear the area to our front and then we would move ahead, in a modified bounding overwatch technique.  This area we were driving through belonged to no one, it had become a buffer, a no man’s land between the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq and the readjusted Iraqi lines. It was inhabited by wandering Iraqi units, Pershmerga, American Special Forces, and bandits. It was what I imagined the Wild West must have been like, no boundaries no definite good guy/bad guy; just a lot of guys with guns and everyone had an agenda.

Suddenly my vehicle came to a silent halt and my driver motioned that the Kurds up ahead had stopped their vehicle and dismounted. They were moving slowly forward in the Kurdish version of a patrol formation, what I might have called a gaggle, towards where the valley we had been following intersected with a small ridgeline. After we dismounted we could hear some faint noises ahead and see the barely present glow of what looked like tail lights about 200 meters ahead. We all trained our weapons on those glowing lights in anticipation of a night about to go badly.

Our Team Leader took a few of our guys and moved off in the darkness towards the Kurdish gaggle in an attempt to identify what lay ahead. After what seemed like forever the word was passed back “Peshmerga!! Bring the vehicles forward.” Believe it our not we had run across another vehicle full of Peshmerga that was roaming the battlefield and they had managed to run themselves axle deep into a small pond. After a security perimeter was established, as quietly as we could and using our night vision equipment we towed their vehicle out of the pond using the winch on the front of one of our Defenders.

These Pesh were so happy we had helped them out they decided to become our personal body guards and followed along behind our vehicles like baby ducks following their Mom. As we inched closer towards Kirkuk the skies overhead were being lit up by flashes of flares and chaff being dropped from U.S. fighter aircraft towards the Iraqi lines as the Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery shot red and green tracers into the sky in random patterns. We could hear the muffled thuds of explosions, and the budda-budda like sounds of the DSHK machine guns, however our immediate surroundings were so quiet you could hear a pin drop and it all seemed very surreal. The thought kept crossing my mind that I had seen the same sort of scene on the news during the first Gulf War but know here I was living it.

We continued to skirt the Iraqi positions with our little convoy stopping, watching, listening, and reconnoitering possible observation post positions. As the night wore on and turned into morning we headed back to the northeast meandering our way to our patrol base by another route. Arriving just as dawn was breaking, we enjoyed a breakfast of flat bread, chai, chicken-rice. We laid out the map and prepared our patrol order for the upcoming evening’s activities. Based on our recon we would be establishing an observation post along the edge of a fairly deep and wide ravine with a good view of the Iraqi positions. The ravine was about a mile wide and cut through the countryside like a mini Grand Canyon right up to the huge ridgeline the Iraqis had set up shop on. We conducted the patrol order, rehearsals and gear preparation, and then the majority of us took an afternoon siesta after our long night and day in no man’s land.

Infil

My Special Forces A team was sitting on the tarmac waiting to infiltrate Northern Iraq on a MC130 which is the Special Ops version of the C130 cargo plane. This was the third day of the war in Iraq and we had caught a break. We had been told our sortie would be able to over fly Turkey on our planned flight route to Al Sulmeniyah Iraq. The previous two days the teams infiltrating into the north had to fly a route that came to be known as “the Ugly Baby” because it hugged the Syrian and Iraqi border. The anti aircraft fire along this route was so intense that I had seen one of the MC130’s arrive back at our departure airfield with two windows shot out.
As dusk started to settle in our MC130 taxied up and turned to face its tail towards our location. The hot wash of the propellers burned my face as I struggled to get my massive rucksack up on a shoulder. We had packed every square inch of our gear with the tools of war. Along with my rucksack which weighed upwards of 130 pounds I had my load bearing vest crammed with ammunition and fragmentation grenades that caused it to weigh about 60 pounds. I was also carrying an M4 rifle as my primary weapon and an M9 pistol as a secondary weapon. I was the Team Sergeant so I had the privilege of carrying a lot of the extra batteries for our communications gear. All and all though my load was about average, others had heavier stuff than I did. Along with my team there was some kind of hospital triage unit on board, their equipment, and a whole lot of ammunition pallets.
Once we started to load the aircraft I brought up the rear making sure no one had left any gear behind on the small grassy strip we had been sitting on for the last few hours. I got into the aircraft and noticed the majority of the customary red web seating had been removed to allow for max payload. I actually made the whole flight sitting on a box of hand grenades due to the lack of seating. As a seat belt I had a piece of one inch tubular webbing attached to my belt by a snap link with the other end snap linked to a cargo tie down on the aircraft floor. More like a leash really.
We took off and were totally blacked out. Once my eyes got adjusted I stood up to look out the window and could see the lights of towns below. Being a Military Freefall Jumpmaster I was used to identifying things on the map from high altitude but soon I ran out of known area and sat back down to wait out the flight, and as is customary for me on a military aircraft I fell asleep. After an undetermined amount of time the Air Force crew chief woke me up and said we were ten minutes out from Iraqi airspace, I relayed the message to my Team Leader and from then on every one on the aircraft was at a high state of alertness. Not really scared but just generally nervous and jumpy. I for one didn’t know what to expect having never infiltrated an enemy country in the dead of night by Air Force aircraft it was all new to me. I had been told our route would have less Anti-Aircraft fire but it only takes one ya know?
I also hate feeling out of control. Sitting in the back of a dark aircraft waiting for a surface to air missile to come through the ass end can make you feel like that. To try and get oriented I stood up again and looked out the small porthole type window in the side of the plane. We had lost plenty of altitude and we were flying 200-300 feet off the deck, so low I could actually judge our speed and see the lights in the villages as we flew over. In the distance I could see tracer bullets arcing into the sky but could not see what they were being fired at. Maybe the Iraqis were trying to set up some kind of wall of steel in the hopes one of our aircraft would fly though it. I could not see what was in front of us, which was probably a good thing, however our pilot could.
The pilot was doing things with that plane I had never seen a C130 do before, twisting and diving like it was a much smaller plane. I have thousands of flight hours in a C130 but this ride was unlike anything I had ever been on before. Time and time again as he banked and turned I was pulled off my feet and slammed to the deck by the web tether I had attached to the deck. Finally after I had enough I realized the absurdity of wearing a seat belt when we where being shot at. I took the safety line off and wrapped it around my waist. I kept struggling to look out the window catching red and green flashes as they flew in and out of my peripheral vision.
Suddenly we went into an even steeper dive and for a second I thought we had been hit. But when I heard the whine of hydraulics lowering the wheels I realized we were landing, time to put your tray table in the upright and locked position. The landing was surprisingly smooth and was followed immediately by a violent reversal of thrust as the pilot attempted to stop the aircraft and I once again lost my balance and fell down. I was about as ready to get out of this plane as any I had ever been in. At that point I didn’t care who was outside. I gave instructions to my team and told them to pull security in a semi circle as we unloaded the aircraft.
The ramp was lowered and we hauled ass out of the aircraft. Half of us pulled security while the rest started pulling rucksacks and equipment off the tailgate. Once our personal gear was out of the way a small forklift materialized and started pulling pallets of ammunition and the CONEX containing the field hospitals equipment off the plane. As my eyes adjusted to the outside I realized our small internal perimeter was within a much larger perimeter manned by Kurdish Peshmerga. They were ringing the entire airfield about every twenty feet. Our company SGM came up and yelled in my ear to grab our stuff and follow him. As we trudged down the airfield the plane we had come in on took off. It had taken about 5 minutes to unload and they were gone. I didn’t envy them the return trip back along the route we had just come. I gained a lot of respect for the Air Force during that little flight.
In a surreal turn of events we loaded all our gear onto a collection of civilian buses complete with little fuzzy dingle balls in the windows. We had stuff piled everywhere and were standing in the aisles as we took off. After about a fifteen minute drive we pulled into a driveway manned by some Kurdish guards, as they raised the bar that was blocking the road I noticed a sign in Kurdish and English declaring the compound the Headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). We pulled up to a large building and off loaded our gear. The SGM had me follow him inside where he showed me around. Our Company Commander was inside, he looked at me and said “Welcome to Iraq, find a place for your guys to rack out we will be leaving in the morning.” After determining we had no defensive duties for the night we each found a little place to call our own. After consuming an MRE and a bottle of water I ended up crashing out on the tile floor of a hall way.
I wasn’t sure what the morning would bring. I knew we would be getting vehicles and moving farther south into Iraqi controlled territory. At that point I was just happy to be in relative safety and fell asleep wondering where the hell we were at on the map. Welcome to Combat