Marines and soldiers began to arrive. Chairs quickly disappeared in the thousand-square-foot room that was Rage Company’s HQ on Camp Ramadi. The room was built out of two-by-fours and plywood, while the walls were lined with huge maps of the city. Small pockets of dust added to the spartan atmosphere. The platoon commanders were among the last of the two dozen soldiers and Marines to arrive. Everyone was unusually quiet and serious.
The room was shaped like a giant rectangle, and the central third of the floor held a graphic representation of the objective area. Colored string marked roads; houses were wooden blocks, their corresponding building numbers written on top in black Sharpie. I grabbed my metal folding chair and moved to a spot with the rest of the headquarters platoon on the right side of the map. Lieutenant Thomas sat with the other platoon commanders on the opposite side.
Captain Smith began the brief. “Bandits, to start I want to make sure we have everyone and that each of you understands who you are working for.” He pointed to some of the tankers to my left: “Task Force Cordon North, one section of Bradley fighting vehicles [BFVs] and a psychological operations team.” The men nodded as their respective unit was mentioned. Captain Smith looked to his right, finding the next group. “Task Force Cordon South, one section of BFVs.” He looked around again, finding the only “cool guy” in the room. “There will be one sniper team of SEALs in over-watch of objective Bravo. They will be a battalion asset. Finally, Pathfinder, you have EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] and a section of tanks attached.” He then turned to each platoon and went down the list of its attachments: engineers, Iraqi army personnel, military working dogs. Two platoons had interpreters, and there was one human exploitation team (HET). Headquarters had an interpreter and Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company (ANGLICO), which consisted of forward observers.
I was surprised by the ANGLICO observers’ presence. I was Rage Company’s forward observer; I had the sole responsibility for coordinating the use of combined arms assets. ANGLICO observers had only one purpose, and it was the same as mine. It finally dawned on me that they had taken my place. This was the reason I was stuck at the combat outpost. Without them, Captain Smith would have no choice but to take me on the raid. More important, I felt personally wronged. I had been replaced for our first varsity match.
Captain Smith pulled a laser pointer out of his right trouser pocket and said, “Orientation.” I had heard that word so many times before during monotonous training exercises in which every Marine is taught through repetition. “This direction is north,” he said, moving the laser in a north-south direction and emphasizing north with a much longer stroke. He pointed out COP Grant and each of the three company objectives: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie.
The captain then moved on to the enemy situation. “Anti-Iraqi Forces [AIF] have established a safe haven in the southern portion of the Second Officer’s District. The AIF use local mosques and schools as meeting places and cache sites and have established multiple safe houses. They have also established defensive IED belts as early warning and blocking obstacles. The AIF’s most likely course of action would be to flee the area temporarily after the IEDs alert them and slow us down. Pathfinder’s route clearance missions also provide a key indicator of an impending operation, so AIF may attempt to emplace hasty surface-laid IEDs to target our dismounted elements.”
The brief dragged on. During training, the company officers (myself included) had hated the thoroughness of Captain Smith’s briefs. It wasn’t what he was saying; it was how slowly he said it. In agonizing detail, he went through the enemy’s most likely course of action and most dangerous course of action, which were followed by the task force’s mission, key tasks, end state, and the location of friendly forces. He briefly explained our mission statement: “No later than 2200 on 29 November 2006, Rage Company reinforced conducts near simultaneous raids on company objectives Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie in order to capture or kill high-value individuals.”
Stopping to spit out some tobacco, Captain Smith moved on to his commander’s intent and end state. Neither one produced anything unusual, but the concept of operations described the mission as succinctly as possible. “Pathfinder, along with its tank and Bradley escorts (the cordon force), will clear a casualty evacuation route through the objective area, setting the outer cordon as they clear. Once Pathfinder crosses the intersection of Corona and Muj Crossing, the platoons will depart COP Grant for their assault positions. Once in position, Rage 1 and Rage 2 conduct raids on objectives Alpha and Bravo, respectively, while Rage 4 provides over-watch and acts as a reserve. Once objective Bravo is cleared, Rage 2 moves to provide the internal cordon for Rage 4’s raid of objective Charlie. Once all objectives’ actions are complete, platoons will egress via separate routes back to COP Grant, where the detainee processing will begin.”
He quickly moved into the tasks section of his brief, and the meticulous and detailed nature of Captain Smith shone center stage. “The mission is broken into five phases.” He announced, “Phase One,” and the representative from Pathfinder and the vehicle commanders of the cordon force stood up and moved to the map for the walk-through of Phase I.
The walk-through literally entailed the leaders of each element standing on the terrain model. They would then move whatever toy soldier or car represented their unit through the different parts of the mission. This forced each leader to show everyone else what he was going to do and where he would be located. The technique served as confirmation for Captain Smith regarding the actions of his subordinates. After all, it was our first mission with the army, and according to Marine Corps lore, soldiers are only good for one thing: retreating.
I struggled to pay attention mostly because I knew the mission from our own internal briefing but also because I was focused on my observer rivals. Yes, they had more training, had been in country a lot longer, and had better equipment than I did. I didn’t care. Rage Company was my company, and I looked at my fellow artillerymen with disgust. Bored with the brief and jealous of the ANGLICO observers, I lost focus.
It would be another two hours before I left. The platoons were still rehearsing on the terrain model when I walked out of the 1-37 Armor headquarters. The battalion logo, a black diamond with a white skull emblazoned over it, stared straight at me. Bandits. Insurgents were the real bandits. Our missions were complex and required hours of rehearsal and coordination to execute. I always considered banditry much more opportunistic than that.
As I walked back to my tent with Albin and Eakin, I thought about how many hours insurgents spent planning operations. How did they communicate—or coordinate a response to our presence? They’d had no more than half an hour to actually set up the Heidbreder ambush, and they pulled it off in dramatic fashion. I began to think that the insurgent just might be more effective than I was in the urban environment.
The next evening we left for COP Grant under the cover of darkness. The two structures that made up the COP were quickly overrun with Marines. The floors in every open area were covered with weapons, gear, machine guns, ammo, and snoring bodies. Heads rested against radios or Kevlar helmets. Movement through a room required twenty seconds of route planning. Our army hosts couldn’t wait for the mission to start.
The arrival of twenty or so Iraqi army soldiers didn’t help the situation. The Marines didn’t exactly care to provide them with any space, and the army had none left to give. So the Iraqi soldiers literally stood shoulder to shoulder in the corner of the command building’s staging room. I was disgusted by our lack of hospitality. We were in an Iraqi’s home, and every Marine was drinking Gatorade or stuffing his face with chow while the Iraqis were standing in the corner watching us. I walked back to the kitchen and grabbed a box of twenty-ounce Gatorades. I carried them into the room and made the Marines who were sitting on the floor move to create space. They grunted and jeered but within moments went back to resting uncomfortably on their gear.
I dropped the Gatorades at an Iraqi’s feet and motioned them e
ach to take one. They were surprised. One of them called over the interpreter and spoke to me through him. After they had introduced each other, the soldier said something to the interpreter that made the Arab American laugh. The interpreter looked at me, shaking his head. “Sir, I cannot tell you what he said.”
I was confused. “Why not?” What could the Iraqi have possibly said? I had just brought him Gatorade and given them all space to sit down and relax. I was getting angry. “Tell me what he said.” Everyone was listening now, most intently the Marines I had just evicted.
“Sir, he says you are cute,” said the interpreter, who was laughing before he finished translating. The Marines around me erupted. Then the Iraqis, seeing the embarrassment on my face, all started saying no over and over.
The damage was done. I had been swallowed by the culture gap. I shook my head and pushed the box of Gatorades closer to the Iraqis with my foot. Then I turned around to face my hecklers. I had nothing. To their pleasure, I shrugged my shoulders and walked off. Everyone now had something to talk about before the mission.
An hour later, Pathfinder moved out on the clear portion of the raid. The cordon elements moved in trace. Once the areas surrounding objectives Alpha and Bravo were cleared for IEDs, the platoons were granted permission to move. One by one, they left. Everything was going smoothly. The company executive officer (XO) and I both sat in the command building’s COC, listening to the radio. The duties of the XO, Lieutenant Craig Trotter, were about as mundane as my own. He was responsible for managing the raid and providing overall cognizance to the battalion, as well as to Captain Smith. With the CO out making decisions, the XO usually stayed behind and provided everyone else with information. His fear of never getting to leave the wire was even greater than mine.
At the moment, Lieutenant Trotter was struggling to get positive communications with each platoon. The farther away the platoons went from COP Grant, the more garbled their transmissions became. The intervening buildings obstructed the antennas of the platoon’s man-packed radios. The lack of communications became the evening’s first point of friction. As the clarity of transmissions decreased, voices grew exponentially louder. Radio handsets and antennas became weapons to beat a solution into the radio operators, who in turn smacked and pounded on the Vietnam-era radios. Such was the way of the XO, and somehow communications improved.
The night progressed. Rage 1 and Rage 2 reached their assault positions. Rage 4 set up in over-watch. One of the North Task Force tanks drove over the wall surrounding the school compound that was objective Bravo. Rage 2 flowed in through the gap, meeting no resistance. Rage 1 cleared objective Alpha faster than anyone had anticipated. Their orders were to detain any military-age male (MAM) located in their target buildings. The homes were apparently all occupied, as the XO and I were having a hard time keeping track of all the detainees. We had more than twenty.
Rage 2 began a detailed search of the compound and found a few caches that contained RPG rounds and some small-arms ammo. Corporal Davila’s squad moved to hit objective Bravo’s southernmost target building. It was about a 100-meter movement across open ground, by far the most dangerous part of the raid, because the squad would be exposed on both flanks. Seconds after they moved, machine gun fire echoed in the night. The XO informed battalion of the incident on the battalion net, while Captain Smith tried to get in contact with Corporal Davila on the company net. Davila wasn’t answering; he was busy.
As quickly as the firefight began, it ended. Davila got on the radio and began to speak, but as he did, our communications went down again. It would be another fifteen minutes before we figured out there were no casualties. The COC was full of frustrated guys, and I walked outside to get some fresh air. The concept of a “raid” had nearly ended, as the platoons strongpointed around objective Bravo and continued the school compound’s site exploitation. Battalion forced us to wait for EOD to show up and handle the small amounts of explosives in the caches before we could continue. The darkness quickly wasted away, and at 0330 Captain Smith aborted the raid on objective Charlie. All dismounted elements began moving back to COP Grant.
Unfortunately for the SEALs, they were the first ones to move back to the COP. No one bothered to inform the soldiers on the roof of COP Grant that the SEALs were even out there, let alone moving back. A short burst of machine gun fire from the roof began what would later be a heated argument. No one was injured. With confusion from the blue-on-blue incident still occupying the army command, Rage 1 reentered friendly lines, dragging their trail of detainees with them.
Albin and Eakin had set up the COP’s gym to stage the detainees for processing. It wasn’t an elaborate process; they simply moved free weights and benches to make room for the detained men to sit on the dusty floor. In the adjacent living room, the two dozen packets of paperwork were staged and waiting for the detainees’ captors to fill out. One at a time, the blindfolded men made their way into the gym. It was somewhat comical. The blindfolds were a mix of sandbags, random pieces of cloth, or swimming goggles with the eyes blacked out. One Iraqi had his shirt pulled over his head because the cloth strip covering his eyes wasn’t thick enough. About half of them were barefoot.
We searched each detainee as he came into the gym. Small pieces of evidence had been placed in a plastic bag draped around each detainee’s neck. Written on the plastic in black marker were the patrol sector and the building number where the individual had been detained. Large pieces of evidence were carried back by the Marines and separated into black trash bags. We were rather surprised when the first few detainees still had all sorts of items in their pockets.
The first guy had white hair and was about fifty years old. We quickly named him Moneybags. Ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills (U.S. currency) lined his pockets. He also had smaller denominations of Russian, Bulgarian, Syrian, Saudi Arabian, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, and Yemeni money. The Marines eyeballed the thousand dollars, and I wondered how much had really been on his person when he was detained. Following Moneybags was his son, who was probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He kept telling the interpreter that he was a propane salesman and not an insurgent. We named him Propane. The two large and tired men sat next to each other.
Detainees slowly filled the room, and the process continued for hours. Each detainee was photographed holding a piece of paper with his name on it and was thoroughly searched. There were twenty-two in all. A group of five twenty-something family members had the most evidence gathered against them. In their home, Rage 1 had found an AK-47, which by itself is legal, but there were also a 9mm pistol, an unusual amount of copper and miscellaneous wires, electrical cords, two European Union license plates from Sweden, two Motorola radios, premade IED initiation devices, and a small amount of propaganda. The next twelve hours would be spent trying to figure out what belonged to whom.
Albin, Eakin, and an intel soldier from 1-37 Armor began the paperwork. One of our corpsman and an army medic started the medical screening. I grabbed the tactical human-intelligence team (THT). We separated the Iraqis, based on the amount of intelligence and evidence gathered against each one. The first fourteen were guilty of nothing more than living in a target building. One guy had bullet holes all over the trunk of his black BMW, which was similar to the vehicle at the Heidbreder ambush. Then the group of suspected insurgents got better. Intel had multiple reports stating that Moneybags and Propane were the leaders of an IED cell responsible for the deaths of three American soldiers. Later we were told that two out of the family of five with all of the evidence had single-source reporting that stated they were members of a direct action cell.
This reporting was based on the names these detainees provided us. We typed the names into a Multi-National Corps Iraq computer network that pulled up all of the documents produced that contained those names. I was surprised that the Iraqis would give us their real names. In my mind, they were either foolish or simply used to the Americans not being able to overcome the language barrier.
Since I was not officially an intelligence officer (but was an artilleryman by trade), it was against the ROE for me to question any of the detainees. So I approached the THT leader, Sergeant Champion, who allowed me to sit in on each detainee’s session of tactical questioning. We started with Beemer, the guy with the shot-up BMW. We used the bathroom for questioning. Sergeant Champion started easy on him: “What is your name?” The man answered between sobs. The sergeant asked, “Who is your local sheikh?”
The guy went hysterical, speaking faster than I could think. The interpreter relayed. “The Americans don’t protect us. The Iraqi government doesn’t help us. The criminals and terrorists will kill me because they will know I was arrested. Blah, blah.”
The interpreter stopped translating and yelled at the man, who instantly went quiet. Sergeant Champion continued the questioning for another ten minutes, catching the guy in nothing more than a few small lies.
One of the Marines brought the detainee back into the gym. Champion turned to me and said, “We’ re going to let him go, sir.” I nodded in agreement. There was no evidence against Beemer, and he wisely claimed that his car had been hit by stray gunfire. No matter how we might try, we could not prove otherwise. We decided to question the group of brothers and cousins next.
“Sir, I am only going to hold on to the two guys who have reporting on them. The other three will be released,” said Sergeant Champion.
I was perplexed and asked, “Sergeant, we haven’t even questioned them yet. What makes you so sure they are not insurgents?” I felt it was a valid question.
“We can say they are insurgents all we want, sir, but without evidence they will get released. It is better to save the time and effort and just release them here. If they get transferred to the ARDF [Ar Ramadi Regional Detention Facility] and are released, they will be reimbursed fourteen dollars for every day held. I wouldn’t even bother with doing the paperwork on any of them except Moneybags, Propane, and these two brothers,” said Champion.
Rage Company Page 5
