Combat and Other Shenanigans

by Piers Platt

  “America good! Go U.S.A.!” They shouted.

  After months of indifference or hostility, it was an amazing change, and felt indescribably satisfying to see them appreciate something we had helped them achieve. I smiled back, shaking hands all around.

  “Iraq good!” I told them, trying to make it clear that it was their success, not ours – they had braved the threat of attacks to come out and vote.

  I was still laughing and smiling when I walked into the large room where most of the work seemed to be focused. At first I was confused at what was going on – the ballot boxes were open, men were frantically counting papers and bundling them with rubber bands into rolls of 100 ballots, and my first assumption was that those were leftover ballots. I wandered up to the nearest man, and saw the ballots he was counting were all filled out.

  “Oh, shit! Stop! Stopstopstop!!”

  They halted and looked at me, annoyed that I was interrupting them – couldn’t I see that they were busy? I motioned to them to put the ballots back in the boxes, to seal them up again and stop counting. They were confused, shaking their heads and speaking rapidly.

  “English? Anyone speak English?”

  There was an Iraqi soldier who had a smattering of English, so we roped him inside and, haltingly, I had him translate for me.

  “You must put away the ballots. They are secret – you understand, secret? No one can look at them.”

  It took a few tries and some charades, but he got the idea, and told the men in the room. They argued back, vehemently.

  “Uh, they say … Tikrit tell them …” he gestured on his fingers, miming like he was counting them, “… all papers.”

  I shook my head, “No!” I picked up the nearest ballot box, showing the seal that they had broken in the act of opening it. “Once someone votes, no one else sees it until Tikrit.”

  Eventually, I convinced them to stop – they weren’t trying to rig the election or get an early count or anything nearly as sophisticated as that, but somehow they had gotten the message to count ballots. The ballot boxes were translucent, so it’s possible that the instructions had been to get a rough estimate by looking into the boxes, or to count voters, but I never knew for sure. The seals were broken on a number of boxes, whose ballots were clearly tampered with, lying as they did in neatly counted rolls, but there was nothing more I could do about it – presumably, the officials in Tikrit would either throw out the votes (I hoped not) or write it all off as a rookie error and count them anyway. We loaded up the boxes, visited one last site to load up, and then escorted the trucks back to FOB Wilson.

  On base, though we were all tired, there was an air of accomplishment as well, everyone quietly satisfied in the knowledge that we’d been a part of history, had helped to secure a nation’s first free elections, and were about to go home. Captain Young and Major Randall found me soon after we returned, having heard my radio report about the ballot counting. I gave them a full account of what had happened, adding my opinion that it was an act of ignorance and misunderstanding, not willful wrongdoing. They agreed, but could not guarantee what would happen to the ballets in Tikrit – it was an Iraqi civil matter, after all. In all, nearly 6,000 Iraqis turned out to vote at our two polling sites that day. Across the country, the citizens turned out in droves, traveling many miles and often at great risk to make their voice be heard.

  My other section had been busy, too. The hide site Sergeant First Class Martin picked for his Bradleys was not far from an isolated house on the eastern side of the town of Ad Dawr. Late that night, Sergeant Newsome noticed a car moving towards the house, its headlights off. That was not entirely unusual – many cars had broken headlights in Iraq – but it could also indicate he was trying to avoid attention. Rather than intercept it straight away, Martin decided to maintain the element of surprise, merely tracking its progress through their long-range thermal sights. Once at the house, the driver parked, opened his trunk, and began digging in his backyard. As soon as they positively identified that he was in fact unearthing a weapons cache, they thundered in and surrounded the building and car, searching both and detaining the man. It was a significant cache – mortar and RPG rounds, rifles, grenade launchers – the usual Soviet arsenal. In the car, they also found a digital video camera, which contained several hours of footage of Rock Troop patrols in and around the city, surreptitiously recorded as preliminary intelligence-gathering prior to an attack. As they later discovered, their captive was a high value target who had been on the wanted list for some months. It was the perfect cap to a successful operation.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Okay: White 4, this is Bulldawg X-Ray … you’re coming in broken. All I made out was something about ‘All they need to know is’ and then a bunch of static, and then ‘so tell them to pull their heads out of their asses.’ Say again, over.”

  -Bulldawg Troop command post NCO

  Sadly, we left Rock Troop immediately after the elections and returned to FOB Mackenzie. As we rolled in the main gate, we found our path blocked by a line of vehicles waiting to enter. It took us a minute, but we suddenly realized they were from 3rd Infantry Division – our replacements were here! Task Force 1-15 Infantry would be replacing us at Mackenzie, and their advance party had just arrived. Our mission was now to secure their movement as their main body began arriving from Kuwait, and start training them up to replace us, just as 4th Infantry Division had done for us at the beginning of our rotation. The relief-in-place operation was scheduled to last several weeks, at the end of which time we would begin our own movement out of theater.

  In preparation for receiving Task Force 1-15, we moved out of our rooms and into a tent village built as a temporary housing area. We grumbled a bit about losing our nice accommodations, but it’s hard to be sour at guys who also represent your ticket home. We continued to grumble about Captain Hoffman’s leadership of the troop, however – it seemed that the closer we got to going home, the more stubborn he became, seemingly inventing new ways to bother us with time-wasting tasks and useless rules. It got to the point that my fellow scout platoon leader, Ryan Simms, and I would look at each other during meetings, trying not to laugh as we listened to the latest bullshit. The outspoken Sergeant First Class Nicholls was not so well-behaved, and like all of us, took particular umbrage at the fact that our troop seemed to inherit more than its fair share of extra assignments from Squadron Headquarters. It seemed like every time he went to Squadron for a meeting, Captain Hoffman came back with another extra duty or mission for us – he was incapable of telling his superiors that we were over-worked and undermanned, and we ended up suffering for it.

  Finally, after a particularly loud argument, Captain Hoffman said: “Sergeant Nicholls: if you don’t have anything constructive to say, and you’re just going to complain, you can just leave.”

  Nicholls had had enough. “Okay,” he said, and walked out.

  I had my own showdown with Hoffman soon after. Half of my platoon was running daily trips to the nearest logistics base and back in our Humvees, serving as guides and convoy escorts for the 1-15 Infantry convoys coming into sector. At the same time, I was running route clearance missions along the road to Samarra in the south, and maintaining observation posts at night in the same area to search for insurgents laying IEDs. When we weren’t out on mission, I was running around FOB Mackenzie arranging for the movement of all of the troop’s equipment back to Germany, while my soldiers tried to squeeze in much-needed maintenance on our burned-out vehicles, and start packing up their own gear and equipment. We were tapped out.

  Task Force 1-15’s supply NCO arrived on one of the first convoys, since he had to inventory and sign for the equipment that we would be leaving behind for them to use. That included our up-armor Humvees, but before we signed them over, Captain Hoffman made an announcement.

  “I want them to be inspection-ready. I want everyone to go to the wash rack and clean out their Humvees, just as if we were in garrison.”

 
; We were incredulous. We had planned to clean them before we handed them over for the final time (that’s just good manners), but not for the inventory: we still needed to use those Humvees for the next few weeks until we left. We couldn’t figure out why Hoffman wanted to impress some Staff Sergeant from the incoming company, who didn’t honestly care what the trucks looked like, as long as the serial numbers matched his paperwork. My soldiers were already operating on about four hours of sleep a night, and now they would have to lose more sleep, spend several hours washing our vehicles, and then soon afterwards take those same vehicles back out on mission, where they would be filthy dirty again in a matter of minutes … and then a couple of weeks later, we would have to wash them again! When Captain Hoffman quickly silenced my objections in the meeting, I decided not to argue the point any further, knowing it would get me absolutely nowhere. Sergeant First Class Martin and I walked back to the tents together.

  “This is a new low for Captain Hoffman, sir.”

  “I know it,” I replied, fuming. “Fuck that, I’m not wasting my soldiers’ time like that. My job is to protect them from bullshit, right?”

  Martin was quiet, letting me vent.

  “We’re not going to do it,” I told him firmly.

  He shrugged. “The boys will get it done if you tell them to, sir.”

  “I know they will,” I said, my anger softening a little. I made up my mind and called them all together for the evening brief. At the end, I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, last on the agenda, the commander wants us to take the up-armor Humvees to the washrack before the inspection the day after tomorrow.” There was a low murmur, and I saw a couple of my soldiers shaking their heads in disgust. Staff Sergeant Barnes raised his hand. I waved him away, knowing he was going to raise the same points I had already made to the commander.

  “… but we’re not going to do that,” I continued. Martin raised his eyebrows at me, but stayed quiet. “If the commander asks you guys why you didn’t wash the trucks, you can just tell him I told you not to. Questions?”

  There were none. Most of them were too tired to find much humor in the situation – after a full year of such bullshit, they just wanted to finish the job and go home. I let them go, but Barnes beckoned me over as they dispersed.

  “Why are you picking a fight with the commander, sir?”

  “I already tried to talk sense into the Lieutenant, Barnes, he doesn’t want to listen,” Martin interjected.

  I answered Barnes: “Because I’m tired of his crap.”

  “Took you this long?” Barnes asked, grinning.

  I laughed. “No. It’s just taken this long for me to be able to do something concrete about it.”

  He was serious for a second. “He ain’t gonna like this, sir.”

  “Whatever,” I said, “I don’t care if he slams me for it, I’m getting out of the Army, anyways.”

  Barnes shook his head and gave me a look that said: it’s your funeral.

  In retrospect, we should have played it differently – we could have blamed the dirty Humvees on poor internal communications in the platoon, or any number of vague but generally more excusable reasons. I tried to make myself scarce when the inspection rolled around, but about 15 minutes after it started one of the operations center crew found me in our tent, doing paperwork. Apparently, the commander wanted to see me.

  “I wonder why?” I asked sarcastically, picking up my rifle and flak vest. He grinned back at me – word had got out.

  Captain Hoffman was inspecting the mechanics’ Humvee when I walked up, loudly praising them for the cleanliness of their vehicle and the obvious care they had taken to make it so.

  “You wanted to see me, sir?” I asked, innocently.

  “Lieutenant Platt, I need to talk to you.” Hoffman pulled me off to the side, but not far enough that we were out of earshot of the soldiers nearby. First mistake, I thought to myself.

  “Did I not tell you to clean and wash your Humvees at the last two troop meetings?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then why is it that your soldiers tell me you ordered them not to clean them yesterday?”

  “Because I disagreed with your order, sir. It didn’t make sense to me.”

  Straight-up insubordination, freely admitted. Hoffman was momentarily at a loss.

  “Lieutenant Platt, I gave you a direct order, and we are in combat …” Hoffman had the good sense not to open up a debate on the merits of his order, at least, but he still hadn’t raised his voice, and apart from blushing heavily, he wasn’t really intimidating me at all. This was the nicest ass-chewing I’d ever had.

  “… if you ‘disagreed’ with my order, you should have raised your objections to me, not just countermanded my order,” he finished.

  I was thinking: I tried, and you just told me to shut the fuck up, when I realized that he had just made his second mistake, and handed me my escape route on a silver platter.

  “You’re absolutely right, sir: I should have raised my objections. Next time I will, sir.”

  He could have pressed the issue, or fired me on the spot – technically he could have court-martialed me, though it would have been the most ridiculous court-martial in history. Instead, he backed down, as I had gambled he would: any disciplinary action he brought against me would have been made public to the entire Squadron, and Hoffman didn’t want the world to know that he couldn’t control his platoon leaders.

  No more than a minute later, one of the operations center soldiers came outside to relay a message from Squadron headquarters: my Humvees were ordered to leave immediately to escort another Task Force 1-15 convoy, who was ready to move to FOB Mackenzie ahead of schedule. The NCO signing for my Humvees hadn’t even had a chance to look at them yet, and would have to sign for them some other time – my scouts were already loading up and flipping their radios on. I barely suppressed my smile as I jumped in the nearest vehicle to join them.

  * * *

  Bulldawg Troop would be swapping out with C (“Crusader”) Company from Task Force 1-15, under Captain Quinn, which included two Humvee-mounted infantry platoons and a platoon of tanks. Since they only had three platoons versus Bulldawg Troop’s four, and my platoon was mainly running ad hoc missions, I wasn’t assigned a platoon to train, which left me more time to finalize the troop’s movement plans. Even those platoons that did have replacements to train struggled to find things to do to occupy their time – Blue, White and Green platoons were all responsible for the checkpoints outside Samarra at this point, which largely meant watching the Iraqi Army soldiers who were manning the checkpoints to make sure they were doing everything to standard, and otherwise simply remaining on site as a physical deterrent to attacks. My fellow scout platoon leader, Ryan Simms, summed it up perfectly:

  “What exactly am I supposed to do with these guys from 1-15 when they ‘mirror checkpoint operations?’” He asked me, rhetorically. “‘Okay, here’s what we do, guys: we sit here and fuck off, and every once in a while we walk over and yell at the Iraqi Army guys if they’re not doing their job.’”

  I ended up teaching the Crusader Company leadership a few classes on some new equipment we had been issued and “lessons learned” from raids and cordon & search operations. They were attentive and polite, and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them: not only because they were just beginning their rotation, but also because their three platoons were inheriting the same missions that we had barely been handling with four platoons.

  Following my raid class, Hoffman tasked me to conduct an actual raid so that they could watch how we operated in the field, so I went to ask the Squadron Intelligence officer if he could find us a target. He was kind of confused – normally, when he received information about a target, he passed it on immediately and we took action on it right away.

  He scratched his head, thinking. “Well, it’s not like I have a list of bad guys sitting around that we’ve never tried to catch,” he told me.

 
“I know,” I said. “Look, honestly, sir? You can point to a random house on the map for all I care. We’re just showing the 1-15 guys the ropes.”

  He nodded, “Okay, still … might as well send you to a valid target.”

  He sifted through some maps, then pulled out a printout that caught his eye. “Ah, this’ll work – been there a couple times but he’s never home, we think he probably skipped town permanently. Has ties to a cell leader in Samarra.”

  I looked at the map, studying the terrain. “Ad Montessim, huh? We know that area well. Good target building, too – isolated, outside of town, near the road. Thanks, sir.”

  He made me some color copies, gave me the target’s name, and I headed back to the tent to relax for a while. Captain Hoffman wanted me to brief my plan to him and the Crusader Company officers that evening, but I’d done so many raids that I could make it up on the fly. There was likewise no need to give my soldiers anything other than a simple Warning Order – when we were leaving, who was going, what and where the mission was.

  At around 6:30 the following morning, we lined up on the access road, two Bradleys with dismounts to clear the building. When Captain Hoffman and the Crusader leadership joined us, I gave a patrol brief for their benefit, and we headed out the gate, my Bradleys in the lead. It might have been a bullshit mission, but it was a beautiful day. The morning was cool, the wind brisk as I stood in my hatch, the turret swiveling purposefully below me as Wasser scanned danger areas with practiced ease. Suddenly, and with something of a shock, I realized I was going to miss all of this – the feeling of leaving on patrol, the adrenaline rush of leading a team of expert, veteran soldiers into unknown challenges ahead. I hadn’t just become used to leading my platoon, I’d become good at it, and I found myself laughing out loud. How the hell had I come to like it here?!

  We roared through Ad Montessim and slid through the turn onto the side road which held our target house. I gave my dismounts a 30-second warning over the intercom, checking my GPS against the map printouts as we neared the house. It emerged around the final turn, and I guided my Bradley past it before directing Schufeld to halt and drop the ramp. Behind me, Landry’s Bradley was doing the same, and as I reported setting the inner cordon to Captain Hoffman, I saw Staff Sergeant Barnes lead one dismount team towards the house in a hunched-over sprint, rifles to their cheeks as they covered the windows and doors ahead of them. The other dismount team headed to the back of the house. As directed, Landry took his Bradley off-road to the far side of the house, not only to cover the dismounts’ movement, but also to ensure that no one escaped from the house. I watched as Barnes’ team kicked in the front door and flowed smoothly inside.