2-7 Infantry in Saddam’s Backyard
They called themselves the Cottonbalers. Unit lore held that their regimental ancestors had once taken cover behind cotton bales to fight the British during the Battle of New Orleans. In reality, the soldiers of the 7th United States Infantry Regiment probably fought that battle from behind the cover of earthen embankments, but the nickname stuck nonetheless. Proud owners of more battle streamers than any other regiment in the United States Army, the 7th fought in every American war, from 1812 to the twenty-first century. Even a cursory look at their combat history read like an honor roll of U.S. battles—Chapultepec, Gettysburg, Little Bighorn, El Caney, the Marne, Argonne Forest, Sicily, Anzio, Chosin, Tet ’68, Desert Storm, to name but a few. World War II Cottonbalers had fought from North Africa through Italy, France, and Germany all the way to Berchtesgaden, where they captured Hitler’s mountain complex in May 1945 (contrary to popular myth, the Band of Brothers paratroopers were not the first into Berchtesgaden).
The Cottonbalers of the early twenty-first century were Eleven Mike (11M) mechanized infantrymen. In April 2003, as part of the 3rd Infantry Division, they had led the way into Baghdad. In January 2005, two of the regiment’s battalions, 2-7 Infantry and 3-7 Infantry, returned to Iraq and were assigned responsibility for different sections of the country—Tikrit for 2-7 and western Baghdad for 3-7. Their war this time was radically dissimilar to their April 2003 dash to Baghdad. This time, they were immersed in counterinsurgency.
Located on the Tigris River about eighty miles north of Baghdad, in Salah ad Din province, Tikrit was Saddam Hussein’s hometown and a place dominated by Sunni tribes. This river town of a quarter million people sprouted some of the dictator’s key advisors and many of his elite Republican Guard soldiers. This was especially true of Saddam’s al-Nassiri tribe. In spite of the ties with Saddam’s regime, Tikrit was not a focal point of resistance to the initial American invasion. Only later in 2003 and 2004, partially in response to the occupying 4th Infantry Division’s heavy-handed tactics, did insurgent violence begin to grow. “A budding cooperative environment between the citizens and American forces was quickly snuffed out,” one historian wrote.
By the time the Cottonbalers arrived in 2005, the Americans had begun to reach out to the locals but the insurgency was still going strong. Car bombs, suicide bombings, IEDs, mortar, and rocket attacks were all too common. In Tikrit (and Iraq, for that matter), there was no central resistance group such as the Viet Cong. Instead, there were a dizzying variety of cells, some with only a few members, others numbering in the dozens, with names like Juyash Mohammed, Taykfhrie, Albu Ajeel, and Ad Dwar. Some of the guerrillas were former regime loyalists. Some were Sunni opponents of the Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad. Some simply resented the American presence in their homeland. Others were part of organized crime groups that had operated in the area for many generations. A comparative few were hard-core al-Qaeda operatives and even some jihadi fugitives from the Fallujah fighting. Most, though, were average people just trying to survive in trying times. “We had a few people that were the hard-core old regime members,” Lieutenant Kory Cramer, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, said. “They were cell leaders. But the majority of the people doing the attacks were normal citizens. They were broke, poor and needed to put food on the table for their families. The cell leaders would pay these guys . . . if they would go out and plant something [IEDs].” The company kept finding mines on one road, only to find out later that a mentally handicapped child was planting them. “His brother or father . . . was telling him to go put these [mines] out there.”
COPYRIGHT © 2010 RICK BRITTON
Just before this deployment, known as Operation Iraqi Freedom III to the soldiers, 2-7 Infantry had been reorganized into a combined arms battalion, a typical process for mechanized infantry battalions by this time. Alpha and Bravo Companies were straight mechanized infantry. Charlie and Delta were armor companies. Easy was engineers and Fox consisted of supporting mechanics, trucks, recovery vehicles, and quartermasters. In practice, out of sheer necessity, most of the soldiers, at one time or another, functioned as dismounted infantrymen, even the tank crewmen and engineers. This was the trend all over Iraq by 2005.
Lieutenant Colonel Todd Wood, a gentlemanly Iowan and former college baseball player with nearly twenty years of experience in the infantry, was the commander. He had about eight hundred soldiers under his charge. They were stretched quite thin in their area of operations because they were responsible for more than just Tikrit. The battalion’s area of operations (AO) also encompassed Bayji, an oil town about forty miles to the north along the river, and most of the desert that led west out of Tikrit, many miles to Lake Tharthar. Lieutenant Colonel Wood spread his companies throughout the AO to cover it as best he could. Alpha Company was in the heart of Tikrit. Bravo Company was in Bayji. Charlie Company covered the outskirt towns of Owja and Wynot, plus the desert where weapons traffickers often operated. Delta had Mukasheifa and another slice of desert. Easy Company operated as roving engineers, infrastructure specialists, and additional infantry. Wood also had, at various times, a light infantry company from the 101st Air Assault Division or a Pennsylvania National Guard mechanized infantry company from the 28th Infantry Division to patrol Kadasia, on the northern outskirts of Tikrit.2
The soldiers did not live among the people. That approach was an effective counterinsurgency tenet implemented later, during the surge phase of the war. Instead, in 2005, Wood’s troops were housed in forward operating bases (FOBs) with such names as Remagen, Danger, Summerall, and Omaha. They ate and slept in the FOBs and then ventured “outside the wire” to patrol their areas. The typical FOB was located within preexisting buildings, most of which featured the sturdy beige brick structure so common to Iraq. The buildings ranged from old houses to palaces. Each FOB generally consisted of living quarters, a chow hall, a motor pool, a command center, a gym, perhaps even surrounding walls and guard towers. Meals were nutritious and plentiful, offering a variety of foods that grunts of previous wars could only have dreamed about.
Soldiers typically lived in the buildings, or in trailers, two or three to a room. Officers and senior NCOs sometimes had their own rooms. Almost everyone had air-conditioning and, given Iraq’s brutal heat, that was a big deal. “I had a nice room to myself,” Lieutenant Kramer said. “It was about the size of my bedroom back home but I didn’t have to share it with my wife.” Lieutenant Casey Corcoran’s Delta Company was based in a palace called FOB Omaha, though it was anything but lavish. “It didn’t have walls and . . . there were birds and rats living in it with you and the electricity was on and off. But you could say you lived in a palace.”
Power came from a combination of the local grid and generators but it could be very spotty. “The generator to our buildings broke down and has left us at the mercy of the city’s power,” one Alpha Company soldier at FOB Danger wrote to his family and friends on July 25. “So, we have power for roughly 3-4 hours on and 3-4 hours off. It really isn’t too bad at first, but after an hour or two of no power (hence no air-conditioning) during the middle of the day, the temperature starts to creep its way up.” Just as the FOB got uncomfortably hot, the power would come back on.
Often, multiple units rotated through a FOB, so the Cottonbalers often shared theirs with other outfits. As had always been the case from World War II onward, the American war effort required tremendous logistical and administrative support. This meant that the majority of soldiers, especially females, served in noncombat units. Although the nature of the guerrilla war in Iraq often created great danger for combat and “noncombat” units alike, many of these support soldiers performed jobs that kept them safely in the FOB. Grunts generally look down on anyone who does not face as much danger as they do (and usually that means everyone else). They especially resent when support soldiers have better weapons and equipment. In Tikrit it was not at all uncommon for the Cottonbalers to patrol in unarmored, dilapidated Humvees whil
e soldiers at the FOB had brand-new rifles and up-armored Humvees. The resentful infantry soldiers disparagingly called the FOB-BOUND support troops “pogues” and “fobbits.”
Sometimes this clash of cultures led to tension when the infantrymen came back to the FOB after a hard day of patrolling. “We were in full battle rattle—goggles, knee pads, elbow pads, looking like a shooter,” Sergeant First Class Kenneth Hayes contemptuously said. “Then you’d see a guy laying out in the sun across the street or walking around in PTs [shorts and T-shirts] with no Kevlar [helmet] on.” Another Cottonbaler NCO, Staff Sergeant William Coultrey, was flabbergasted and angered by their lack of understanding for the exhaustion the combat troops felt after a mission. “We’d come back in . . . and you’d take your vest off and you’re all sweaty. They tried to tell us at first that we [couldn’t] come in the chow hall sweaty.” The Cottonbalers simply refused to stand for such nonsense.
For the infantrymen, the FOBs offered a reasonably safe sanctuary from the dangerous unpredictability of Tikrit. Insurgents sometimes lobbed mortar shells and rockets at the various FOBs, but most of the time the fire was ineffective. Even so, the Americans had to expend quite a bit of manpower to protect their bases. “It was a force protection nightmare having folks at all different places [FOBs],” Lieutenant Colonel Wood said. He and his personal security detachment spent a lot of time driving in up-armored Humvees from sector to sector, visiting the various companies. “We had a lot of soldiers that pulled a lot of guard duty.” The security of each FOB came only through such constant vigilance. Every soldier knew that, even as he slept, others were guarding the base. So, at the FOB, a grunt could relax, get a shower, cool off, catch some sleep, eat a good meal, and rejuvenate himself until it was time to strap on his body armor, his weapons, and the rest of his sweaty gear to venture out for yet another mission.
They were almost like aviators—venturing forth from a secure base, facing danger, and then going back home to their base. This reflected the American strategy at this point in the war to protect themselves in big bases and keep as low a profile with the Iraqi people as possible. It was the exact wrong way to fight a counterinsurgent war. “The first rule of deployment in counterinsurgency is to be there,” Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, the Australian guerrilla warfare expert, wrote. “This demands a residential approach—living in your sector, in close proximity to the population, rather than raiding into the area from remote, secure bases. Movement on foot, sleeping in local villages, night patrolling: all these seem more dangerous than they are. They establish links with the locals, who see you as real people they can trust and do business with, not as aliens who descend from an armored box.”3
The fact that the Americans did not live among the people guaranteed that their influence would be limited, mainly to the duration of their patrols. It also meant that they were usually reacting to the insurgents rather than the other way around. When the Americans went back to their FOB, the insurgents filled the void, much the same way the VC had re-infiltrated villages in Vietnam after General Westmoreland’s battalions moved on to different areas. In Iraq, even when company commanders devised schedules that guaranteed that at least one platoon would be out in sector at any given time (as the Cottonbalers often did), their influence could only reach so far. The insurgents always knew that, eventually, at some point each day, the Americans would retreat back to the security of their FOBs. To the average Iraqi, this made the Americans seem aloof, concerned more with their own comfort than the security of the area. Anyone who considered helping the Americans knew that, when the GIs went back to their FOBs, they were at the mercy of insurgent reprisals.
To minimize this problem as much as possible, and because the Americans had such limited ground combat manpower in Salah ad Din province, the operational pace for 2-7 Infantry was frenetic. On average, each soldier participated in at least three patrols, raids, or outpost (OP) operations per day. It was not at all unusual for the men, especially in the infantry and armor companies, to do five or six missions per day. “There were times when you’d go on a six- or eight-hour patrol and then come back in, maybe get an hour’s rest, and then it’s right back out there again for an all-night OP,” Sergeant Kevin Tilley, a sniper, recalled. Every company commander maintained a quick reaction force (QRF) that was ready to scramble out of the FOB at a moment’s notice in case of trouble anywhere in the sector. “If you were on the QRF,” Tilley said, “God help you, because you may roll out of the FOB between ten and fifteen times.”
A typical mounted patrol in Humvees, Bradleys, or tanks consisted of driving around the streets, the alleyways, the back roads, the dirt trails, maintaining a strong presence. At times, they raided the homes of suspected insurgents. There were even rumors that the infamous al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was operating in the area. Several times, the Cottonbalers responded to supposed Zarqawi sightings. The soldiers spent a lot of time dismounted from their vehicles, talking to the locals, mainly through Iraqi interpreters. At any moment during a patrol, an IED could detonate, an RPG could whoosh out of any building or from any corner, or a suicide bomber could strike. OP duty generally meant keeping watch over a section of road to prevent guerrillas from placing IEDs, or it might mean watching a house where they might be hiding. It was tedious, tiring, and often quite boring. “When you’re sitting for hours, it really gets to you,” one grunt said. “You’re just sitting there thinking about how you wanna go home or you’re thinking about how hot it is.”
The dizzying number of missions could be especially hard on the men in the armor companies because, with a strength of only about seventy soldiers, they were roughly half the size of the other companies. Frequently, the tankers patrolled as de facto infantrymen in stripped-down Humvees instead of in their armored behemoths. At full strength, a tank platoon had sixteen soldiers. Usually a few men were gone on R and R or other assignments, so it was not unheard of for a platoon to roll out of the FOB with nine or ten soldiers. “You can only run your guys so much before . . . they break,” a tank platoon sergeant in Charlie Company said. “We didn’t have enough guys to do the mission sets they wanted us to do. Pretty much from the day we stepped on the ground until the day we stepped off to come back, it was a hundred percent balls to the walls.” In and around Tikrit, it took enormous amounts of concentration and work just to maintain the status quo. The tankers of Delta Company, for example, spent much of their time patrolling Highway 1, the main supply route (MSR) through Tikrit, to keep it free of IEDs. “Delta MSR sweeps patrolled over 70 kilometers down and back twice a day,” the company after action report declared. “Delta Company ensured the MSR stayed ‘Green’ [clear] with these painstaking, long, slow IED sweeps.”
No matter which company a soldier came from, almost all of them, at one time or another, functioned as a dismounted infantryman or a gunner on a vehicle. “There were few opportunities for traditional engineer missions,” one Easy Company engineering officer wrote, “but the company had plenty of Infantry type missions.” The regular Eleven Mike riflemen and machine gunners, of course, crewed the vehicles and patrolled as dismounted infantrymen all the time. “We have conducted operations of almost every kind,” Lieutenant Colonel Wood wrote in the summer of 2005. “We have done river raids from boats, Air Assaults . . . from helicopters, and of course traditional operations using our Tanks, Bradleys, and Armored HMMWVs [Humvees].” In all, they conducted over one hundred raids, six thousand patrols, detained 171 suspects, found and destroyed sixty-two weapons caches.
At the height of the summer, temperatures soared to 120 degrees and beyond. The tension inherent in the threat of potential danger, combined with the hellish heat, was exhausting. “You’ve got all that crap [equipment] on,” one rifleman complained, “and it’s a hundred and thirty degrees. You’re . . . mentally exhausted ’cos . . . any window a guy could stick an AK[-47] out. The next vehicle coming down the road could be a VBIED. That pile of trash right there could be an IED.” Since the s
oldiers knew that every vehicle might contain a suicide bomber, any car that came within one hundred meters of the Americans required great scrutiny. The rules of engagement always seemed to be in flux (a source of great agitation for the troops) and were always seemingly handed down by lawyers who rarely went on patrols (a point of even greater perturbation). But, in general, if an Iraqi vehicle was heading straight for an American and did not heed a signal to stop, the soldier would fire one warning shot in the air, then another in front of the car, then another in the engine block. and, finally, if the vehicle kept coming, he would put rounds through the windshield. The privates, specialists, and sergeants had to make life-and-death decisions—with strategic implications—in mere seconds. Did the unheeding vehicle contain a distracted parent with a car full of screaming kids or was it a suicide bomber? The soldiers were well disciplined, but they were only human. They could not be right all the time. Sometimes they prevented bombings. Other times they killed innocent people. The insurgents’ strategy was to create this sort of uncertainty, the kind that led to tragic deaths that would alienate the population from the Americans.
To avoid dehydration, the grunts drank copious amounts of water, often to the point where they felt that their bladders might explode. Soldiers would discreetly duck inside their Bradleys or Humvees, urinate into an empty water bottle, tightly replace the cap, and then resume their duties. In one instance, a Humvee gunner had to defecate so badly that, in the middle of a patrol, he hopped down from his turret and did his business in the middle of a street.4
The Tikrit area could actually be quite calm, so the vast majority of the time the patrols were uneventful. As the days wore on, monotony could set in, especially as the soldiers came to know their AOs like the proverbial backs of their hands. Each day seemed to be a blur of driving or walking down the same streets, talking to the same locals, chasing the same elusive “bad guys.” Firefights and pitched battles of any kind were very rare. Without the give-and-take of conventional combat, the grunts could sometimes lose their edge and settle into a dangerously false sense of security. Commanders expended much time and effort to keep their men from getting complacent. “Tikrit was a place where, if you let your guard down, you might get away with it for one day, you might get away with it for a whole month and then, bang, you’ll get hit by a VBIED,” Lieutenant Lane Melton, a rifle platoon leader in Alpha Company, said. “These guys . . . were trained to go out there and pull the trigger and you had to convince them that this isn’t the fight. You have to convince them that we’re out here to make this place better and it’s not gonna happen by shooting up [the town]. There’s not a lot of terrorists out here. We’re gonna win by building up their schools . . . and things like that.” It was a tough sell, especially when the men faced so much danger from impersonal, but deadly, IEDs. They yearned to hunt down and kill those responsible. That was part of their mission, but not always as important as the peacekeeping job of fostering good relations with Tikritis.
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 52
