by Piers Platt
By now, all of the troop had noted the absence of a response. As O’Brien continued to try to establish radio contact, we turned up the volume to hear how this latest comedy would pan out.
O’Brien was getting frustrated: “… Any crewmember on Bulldawg 6, this is Bulldawg 5, over!”
I decided to fan the flames a bit, and whispered into my hand-mike: “Shhh … somebody’s sleeping!”
Captain Hoffman had taken a nap, and whichever crewmember he had left on watch had also fallen asleep, which would earn him a scathing reprimand when they all awoke. It took O’Brien driving up to Hoffman’s tank to wake them up. It was an embarrassing moment for Hoffman, to say the least – his entire crew had fallen asleep in enemy territory.
* * *
Somehow, after our tanks had driven the route often enough, there formed a small mound outside the perimeter of FOB Rex which was about three feet high. It was a fun little bump to ride over in the tank, enough to rock the tank’s heavy suspension and elicit a “Whoo!” from any passengers. Staff Sergeant Peiper soon got it into his head that he was going to try to jump his tank off this bump, and after I’d had a chance to set up my video camera, he hit it at full speed one afternoon, and actually managed to get the entire 70-ton tank airborne. Unfortunately, the violent landing also broke his .50 cal machine gun mount, but I think the tax-payers would agree that it was worth it for the footage.
One of our priorities along the route north of Samarra was to make it as hard as possible for any IEDs to be hidden along the highway, starting with clearing the undergrowth choking the roadside in some places. Normally this is a task that an engineer unit would handle, but we were low down on the priority list, so we improvised: we escorted a fuel truck along the road, stopping occasionally to pay out the hoses and squirt diesel fuel onto the plants. Diesel fuel, however, is not as easy to light on fire as one might expect.
We tried lighting paper on fire with a lighter and dropping it on the fuel, but the wind blew it out before the fire could catch. Next, Peiper tossed a smoke grenade, which doesn’t explode, but does generate a lot of heat. It got some of the plants to smolder, but still no outright flames. Finally, frustrated, Peiper had a flash of brilliance. I saw him reach for the radio on his tank.
“Hey Green 1 – move back and get your camera out.”
I groaned, keying my own microphone. “No gunfire, Green 2.”
“Yeah roger, roger,” he answered, slightly peeved.
I saw him buttoning up his tank, locking the hatches tight, and realized what he was going to do. The M1 Abrams tank has two smoke grenade launchers mounted on the turret. They fire special smoke and white phosphorus grenades which are designed to launch into the air above the tank and then explode, generating a thick screen of white smoke behind which the tank may displace without being seen by the enemy. It’s a spectacular sight, like smoky fireworks close to the ground. As usual, Peiper’s brilliance paid off: he launched his smoke screen, the white phosphorus grenades caused the brush to burst into flame, and we got a kick-ass picture out of it.
* * *
One morning on our way out to the observation posts, Peiper and I found an IED along the highway just outside of Samarra: a mound of recently-overturned dirt, with a visible wire protruding that looked like it ran all the way back to the nearest buildings on the edge of Samarra. We secured the area, with Peiper blocking one side of the highway and my tank the other, and called for an explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) team. They pulled up about 45 minutes later in a couple of modified Humvees with large storage containers on the backs. I hopped down off my tank and pointed out the IED to their senior NCO.
“Okay, I see it,” he told me.
In my experience, normal protocol for EOD at this juncture would have been to go yank the wires out from a safe-ish distance, slap together a couple of blocks of C-4 (plastic explosive), have one guy walk up to the bomb (praying that the bomb could only have been detonated by the wires they just removed, and that there wasn’t a backup wireless device), carefully put the C-4 on it, and then blow the C-4 when he reached a safe distance. EOD techs get a substantial bonus for doing what they do, along with the fun of blowing stuff up constantly, but in my opinion, no amount of money is worth having to walk up to bombs with your fingers crossed all day.
The EOD Sergeant leaned over to yell at his subordinate in the rear Humvee: “Sergeant Pilke! Get out the RCV!”
“RCV?” I asked.
“Remote control vehicle, sir.”
“You guys got a robot?”
“Yes, sir.”
I relayed this twist to Peiper, and then walked over to their other Humvee, where they were carefully unloading a large, silver, treaded robot, that looked like a cross between a NASA Rover and Johnny Five from Short Circuit. The remote control itself was a massive steel briefcase, complete with fold-out antennas, multiple joysticks, and a view-screen streaming live video feed from the robot’s camera. They flipped the robot on, tested it briefly to make sure it was receiving commands from the remote control, and then trundled it over to the bomb, all of us watching intently.
It took a couple of attempts, but they succeeded in yanking out the wire with one of the robot’s pincer arms. Nothing happened when it disconnected.
“Okay, do a couple donuts on top of it,” the NCO directed.
Incredulous, I watched as the controller guided the robot up onto the bomb, spinning it in place a few times and rolling back and forth.
“How much is that thing worth?” I asked the soldier controlling it.
“Uh, about ten grand.”
I suppose it was the safest way of dealing with the bomb, but it was a stubborn IED, and not even a hundred pounds of expensive robot was going to set it off. Then the robot got stuck.
“Shit.” The soldier was flipping joysticks, but the robot appeared mired, its tread stuck in something. We could see it straining to move, but no amount of spinning treads was getting it unstuck.
The senior NCO sighed, “Not again. Okay, shut it off and I’ll go get it.”
He headed for the wire first, staying away from the bomb until he came across the wire. He must have been a curious guy (not a trait that leant itself to survivability in Iraq), because he began to follow the wire south away from the bomb, eventually walking up to the buildings along the edge of Samarra.
Back on my tank, I called Peiper: “You watching this, 2?”
“Roger. Guy’s gonna get himself killed.”
Armed only with a 9mm pistol, the EOD Sergeant was poking around the buildings, hundreds of meters away from any friendly forces. An insurgent team in the right place could have killed or kidnapped him with their eyes closed. Finally, much to our relief, he followed the wire back to the bomb, cautiously extricating the robot and sauntering back to the Humvee behind my tank.
“Weird thing, sir,” he held up some of the wire for me to inspect. “Fishing wire. Won’t carry an electric charge, so it wouldn’t have worked as a detonator.”
“Hmm.” I held it, scratching my head. “The explosives are real though?”
“Oh yeah, sir – it’s an artillery round.”
“Weird,” I said. The insurgents we had fought so far didn’t generally make rookie mistakes like using the wrong kind of wire. I wondered if perhaps the fishing wire was a decoy, meant to draw us in to investigate, and said as much to the EOD Sergeant.
He took the fishing wire back from me, shrugging. “Could be, sir … we’ll probably never know for sure. The wire went a couple more blocks into the city, but I didn’t want to go too far in.”
“Yeah, we were about to come get you – this is not known as a good neighborhood.”
“Okay, we’re going to drop some C-4 on the bomb and take care of it. We’ll give you a head’s up when we’re about to blow it.”
It took them about five minutes to rig a few blocks of C-4 and hand it off to the robot, which slowly rolled its way back to the bomb. Peiper and I were both getting a little ants
y by this point – we’d been sitting there in the same positions, within spitting distance of Samarra, for going on two hours, and our instincts were telling us we had stayed too long. Slowly, haltingly, the robot placed the C-4 in the middle of the mound and made its way back to the Humvee. The senior NCO gave us a countdown, which I relayed over the net to Peiper. I hunkered down in my turret, hatches closed, awaiting the blast.
“… three, two, one!”
Pop.
It was a dud detonator or a faulty set-up: either way, the C-4 did not explode. Now the bomb area was exponentially more dangerous – not only was there an unknown bomb hidden under the earth, there was a block of C-4 sitting on top of it which had failed to detonate. Apparently the NCO was getting impatient, too, because he didn’t wait for the robot this time, but instead rigged a small clump of C-4 with another detonator and jogged over to the bomb himself, placing the small piece atop the bigger block of explosive. He was getting it situated just right when a mortar round landed about 75 meters to the right of Staff Sergeant Peiper’s tank.
It was a big round, too – we all saw and felt it, and Peiper most of all. He immediately had his driver kick the tank into reverse, backing up fast to clear out of the impact area. This is the correct procedure when receiving indirect fire – immediately displace as fast as possible, so that the enemy is forced to adjust his aim, and try to hit a moving target. Unfortunately, the only direction Peiper could safely move was directly back towards the IED rigged to detonate. As the EOD NCO sprinted back to my tank, I opened my hatch and waved him down.
“Is it ready to blow? We need to clear the fuck out of here!”
“Yeah! It’s ready – but I can’t blow it with that other tank coming at us – he’s going to get too close.”
I flipped my radio on. “Green 2, Green 1: short halt right there. I need you to stop in place so we can blow this thing.”
“Have you noticed them shooting at me?!”
“If we don’t do it now, they’ll just be shooting at us again when we come back, over.”
I saw him stop the tank.
“That far enough away?” I asked the EOD team leader. He poked his head over my tank’s front deck, eye-balling Green 2’s position and the IED.
“That’ll do,” he yelled back to me. “Fire in the hole!”
I dropped down into the turret as the controlled detonation rocked the air around me and buffeted the tank, rocks and sand raining down on us in the wind. I poked back up out of my hatch to see a large crater in the side of the road where the bomb had been. Peiper was already on the move.
“Thanks, guys! Appreciate the help.”
The NCO nodded, “See you later, sir – we’re out of here.” His team was loaded in the Humvees already, and he jumped in as they tore off and headed back to their base. Peiper and I followed suit, getting off the road in a hurry and making for the observation posts farther out of range of the city.
* * *
Mortar attacks were a common occurrence during our time out at FOB Rex. About every other day a team of insurgents from Samarra would drive to the edge of the city in a pickup truck, drop a mortar tube into place, and lob half a dozen rounds our way. FOB Rex was small enough that they were never able to get the rounds inside the wire, but it was still a rude awakening whenever it happened. We would respond by dispatching the tanks from both FOB Rex and the observation posts near Samarra in the hopes of catching the truck in a pincer before they scooted back to the safety of the city, but they were usually too quick.
In late August, while Peiper and I were manning the observation posts outside of Samarra, we heard FOB Rex report incoming mortar fire. We started the tanks immediately and roared down to the highway, heading for the general area we knew they would be firing from. At FOB Rex, one of my soldiers on guard duty had noted a white pickup truck high-tailing it out of the area shortly after rounds started impacting. Although probably not the mortar team, he thought their activity unusual enough to send us a radio report – perhaps they were acting as the “spotter” element for the mortars.
At the same instant, Peiper and I spotted two white pickup trucks – one south of the highway heading towards Samarra off-road, the other driving leisurely down the highway towards us. My gunner, Sergeant Cleary, had our tank’s sight pointed at the one to the south, and thought he spotted a large metal tube in the back.
I keyed my microphone: “Green 2 this is Green 1, you take the one on the road, I’ll go after the one to the south.”
“Roger.”
I guided my driver off-road and we headed after the truck in the desert. From about a hundred meters away, I waved at them to slow and stop, but they either missed my signal or disregarded it, and kept going.
“Warning shot, sir?” Sergeant Cleary had the main gun tube trained on the fleeing truck.
“Roger. Burst ahead of him.”
With its characteristic shredding sound, his machine gun let loose a stream of tracers that arced in front of the truck, kicking up bursts of sand on the dirt track ahead of them. The truck slewed wildly and braked hard, the passengers piling out with their hands in the air. We pulled up next to them, and while I covered them with my rifle, Sergeant Cleary dismounted and searched the truck – they did indeed have a metal tube, but it turned out to be the chimney to a rusty old stove. The rest of the truck was clean.
Back on the road, Staff Sergeant Peiper swerved his tank as he neared the second pickup, bringing the armored vehicle to a stop at an angle fully blocking the road. He pointed the main gun tube firmly at the oncoming truck, whose driver got the message immediately and stopped where he was. Behind him, Sergeant First Class Nicholls and his wing tank pulled up, blocking any escape to the rear.
Peiper and Nicholls were out quickly, pulling the man from the truck and prostrating him on the hot tarmac. When I had my own tank back on the road, I hopped down to see what they had found.
“This guy’s fishy, sir,” Peiper reported.
“Oh yeah? Anything in the truck?”
“Yeah, wouldn’t you know it? A fucking cordless phone, just like the ones we’ve been finding by the IEDs.” Several of the IEDs we had found so far had used a cordless phone as a wireless detonation device, which made them harder to spot (with no wires running away from the site). The technique had become something of a calling card for the IED builder in our area.
Peiper gestured down at the man with his rifle, “And he’s got a real attitude, you know? Fucking guy had a smirk on his face when we first pulled him over. When have we ever seen that, you know? Usually they’re scared shitless.”
Nicholls agreed: “I say we bring him in.”
The phone was flimsy circumstantial evidence to say the least, but considering his appearance at the same time we received mortar fire, I agreed with them readily.
“Definitely, let’s bring him in. It’s not much evidence, but maybe Division’s looking for this guy.”
And indeed they were. By pulling over a random car – one among thousands we would pull over during the rotation – mostly on a hunch, we ended up bagging one of 1st Infantry Division’s top High Value Targets: the brother and trusted lieutenant to the most wanted man in our sector, and a leader of his own insurgent cell.
Headquarters radioed this happy news to us just hours after we sent him back to Mackenzie, and we were all pretty stoked. We got word a couple days later that the story made the Associated Press, but since the nearest reporter was in Baghdad (I assume – we certainly never saw one), they gave the credit to 1-26 Infantry, since Samarra was in their sector. God damn reporters.
* * *
A few weeks later we got word from Squadron that Major General Batiste, the Commanding General of 1st Infantry Division, was visiting FOBs Wilson and Mackenzie by Humvee, and was also planning on swinging through FOB Rex for a brief visit. We went through the usual preparations – policing up the trash, putting our extra uniform pieces on, double-checking that the guard posts were alert, etc. I was a
nnoyed because this was supposed to be my rest cycle, but as the senior man at FOB Rex, I’d now have to stay awake and give him the tour when he got here.
Sergeant First Class Nicholls was manning the observation posts outside Samarra when the general’s convoy appeared, and called me up as we finished our preparations.
“Green 1, this is White 4. I’ve got visual contact with the General’s convoy – ten minute warning, boys. Have fun showing him around.”
“Yeah – thanks, White 4,” I replied, sarcastically. “How do you always manage to weasel out of these things?”
“Years of experience.”
I smiled. I was about to put my radio microphone down and head over to the guard post by the main gate when I heard Nicholls on the radio again, calling his wingman.
“White 3, White 4 – you seeing this?”
White 3 answered quickly: “Shit – yeah, roger. Starting up my tank now.”
“Green 1, White 4.”
I keyed the net again. “Green 1, over.”
“This is White 4: General Batiste just missed the turn and is headed straight into Samarra, over.”
“Green 1: acknowledged. We’re starting up here, too, leaving in two minutes.” Perfect: a two-star general driving into the heart of insurgent-held Samarra with four lightly-armed Humvees. I flipped off my helmet and relayed this news to SGT Cleary, who swore and kicked our crew awake. Peiper had overheard the conversation and was readying his tank, as usual ready far quicker than I was able. As we started for the gate, churning up clouds of soft sand, Nicholls came on the net.
“Stand down, Green. He’s figured it out and is turning back out of the city now, headed your way.”
“Roger … thanks White.”
I sighed in relief, the mental image of our tanks fighting their way through hordes of insurgents fading gratefully. The last thing I wanted was being partially responsible for landing a General on Al Jazeera surrounded by masked insurgents.
