Traveling alongside the tanks, five hundred meters in front of the rest of the battalion, were the CAAT vehicles, the Humvees of the combined antiarmor team. They were equipped with state-of-the-art TOW antitank missiles, .50-caliber machine guns, and MK19 grenade launchers. They were lighter and quieter than the tanks and were useful in scouting out the terrain and enemy situation ahead of them. With the thirteen-power sight on their TOW systems, they could see almost five kilometers. They had a lot of firepower, but Dyer knew their punch was limited. The CAAT marines felt better when the tanks were around. If you get in contact, you want to bring out the heavy right hand of the boxer. You want to bring out your bruisers.
He read off his position from his satellite-navigated GPS, or Global Positioning System. They had crossed the 22 northing, still over ten kilometers south of Nasiriyah. There was no hurry.
Whoosh.
Out of nowhere, there was a whistle and the thud of a mortar landing nearby.
Captain Scott Dyer looked around, momentarily confused. He recognized the sound of the incoming shells as 120 mm mortar rounds. At the same moment he heard rounds pinging off the tank’s two-inch-thick steel ballistic skirts. His first reaction was surprise rather than fear. So this is what it feels like to be shot at.
In his tank up front, Major Peeples watched as a shell landed off to his right, followed by the thud of another one, then another. That can’t be Izzies shooting at us. While most marines referred to Iraqis as hajjis, Peeples insisted on calling them Izzies, from IZ, the two-letter military symbol for Iraq. The intel had predicted that the Iraqis would be surrendering. They were not supposed to be shooting at them. And tactically it was madness. If the Izzies are shooting, why are they engaging a company of tanks with mortars?
“Timberwolf. This is Panzer 6. We are receiving mortar and small-arms fire.”
Peeples reported back to the battalion command post what he was seeing. Rounds were skipping off the small dirt mounds and berms in front of him. To his left and then his right the thud of mortar shells threw up a fountain of dirt. From his TC’s hatch he first looked at one side and then the other. Where are those rounds coming from? The sensation of being shot at was odd. They weren’t being overwhelmed. But he felt harassed. I hope the fuel bladders don’t get hit. Attached to each of his tanks was a great big rubber balloon that contained fifty-five gallons of aviation fuel, so that they didn’t have to go back to the rear so frequently to refuel. He’d never trained with them, and there was some debate with his marines about what would happen if they took a round. No one had come up with a satisfactory answer for his concerns. He wanted to cut them loose, but for the moment decided against it.
Captain Dyer had tried to stay buttoned up by fighting with the hatches closed, but now he threw them open. He was struggling to see his other tanks and the enemy. Even with his torso out of the turret he was having difficulties pointing out targets to his gunner. The rules of engagement they had been given said that they were supposed to identify legitimate targets before shooting. He’d been shocked that they felt it necessary to tell him this. He knew they were not there to fight the Iraqi people or demolish their buildings. We are here to liberate them. Yet now, the rules of engagement seemed rather hazy. The rounds were coming from groups of houses on both sides of the road. The Abrams’ main gun would have demolished the buildings, but there were Iraqi civilians milling around. We can’t just shoot anyone up.
Darting between the tanks, Dyer saw the CAAT Humvees unleashing rounds from their .50-cal machine guns and the Mark 19 grenade launcher. This was not how he imagined they would be fighting. He was expecting to be confronted by men in army uniforms. All he could see were black-robed Iraqis running from one building into another. A fresh burst of machine-gun rounds smacked into the sides of the CAAT vehicles from the direction of the building that the black-robed men had run into. One of the CAAT marines aimed a TOW missile directly at the front door and fired. It was guided by a thin wire that spooled from the missile as it was fired. As long as he kept the crosshairs on the target it would impact. There was an explosion and the building crumbled. They sent two more TOW missiles, flying at two hundred meters a second, into the other building. Half that building came down, too. Through the sighting system, marines could see black-robed men stumbling away from the rubble. Women, too, were now escaping from the battered houses. One of them was dragging a child away. Half the boy’s arm was missing.
Immediately, the amount of incoming fire diminished substantially. Captain Dyer scanned the horizon for more targets. Up ahead he saw a truck heading toward them. His gunner called out the range requesting permission to shoot. There’s something odd about that truck. Dyer looked again and saw that it had the markings of a U.S. Army truck. In one of their intel briefings, Dyer had been warned that irregular forces were likely to gather American equipment and uniforms either to commit atrocities against the local population and blame it on the Americans or to use it as a ruse to get close to them. Dyer took stock and radioed Major Peeples. If there’s a chance that it’s packed with explosives, I’m going to take it out.
“Panzer 6, this is Panzer 5. There is a truck coming down the road. Looks to be an American vehicle. Doesn’t seem to be a threat at this time. Continuing to observe.”
Peeples also saw the truck coming toward them. Then it seemed to take fright, turn round, and head back up the road.
“Panzer 6, this is Panzer 5. The truck is turning round. I’m going to let it go.”
Dyer tried to report the sighting back to Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski at the battalion forward command post a couple of kilometers to his south.
“Timberwolf, this is Panzer 5. We have observed what appears to be an American truck to our north.”
He keyed out of the radio transmission so that enemy forces couldn’t track the call. He keyed back in again.
“Do you know of any friendly forces between us and Nasiriyah? Panzer 5 out.”
Battalion did not reply. He repeated the message. Again there was no reply. Suddenly Dyer became aware that there was so much chatter going on over the battalion net that he could not get his message through. The CAAT vehicles were reporting every action of their firefight. The infantry companies were reporting the explosions they could see to the north. He wished they would get off the radio and give him a chance to find out what was going on.
He was puzzled. First Battalion, 2nd Marines was the lead element. And he was at the very front of the column. As far as he knew, there should be no friendly forces in front of him. And certainly not the U.S. Army.
Then, through the dust and smoke ahead, he saw three more vehicles, two of them large trucks, accelerating toward him. This time there was no mistaking. As they got closer, he saw that they were shot up and leaving a trail of smoke behind them. He watched as one of them, a U.S. Army Humvee with bullet holes in its windshield, screeched to a halt just behind Major Peeples’s tank. Who the hell are these guys?
Major Peeples was just as confused as Captain Dyer. What is going on? He jumped out of his tank and ran toward a U.S. soldier who was now crouching behind his Humvee, pistol drawn. The soldier was breathless and agitated. He could hardly get the words out quickly enough.
“We’ve got people north of here. Soldiers. U.S. soldiers. They are pinned down and they’re getting shot at.”
It didn’t make sense. There was nothing in front of them. His tanks were the lead element. He didn’t understand. The soldier tried to explain that he was the commanding officer of an army maintenance convoy that had got lost in the night. They had mistakenly driven into Nasiriyah. Just as they realized their mistake, they had been ambushed and chased through the city. Several of his soldiers were wounded, and there were more of them caught in a firefight a few miles up the road.
“You’ve got to help us. Please help us.”
Peeples tried to get the battalion command post on the net, but there was just a cacophony of noise as everyone tried to talk on the radio at the s
ame time.
“Timberwolf, this is Panzer 6. I’m with a U.S. army soldier who says we’ve got people in a firefight to the north. Am going to investigate.”
Peeples tried again. When there was no response for a second time, he called Captain Dyer on the company net.
“I’m going to head north and try and rescue these soldiers. Call Timberwolf and let them know what we are doing.”
“Roger that.”
As Major Peeples took off, Dyer got on the battalion net. As the XO, or executive officer, it was normal for him to act as a backup for his company commander and talk up the chain of command, communicating directly with the battalion commander. But there were so many voices on the net that he couldn’t break through to either Grabowski, call sign Timberwolf 6, or Major Sosa, the operations officer, call sign Timberwolf 3. Instead, he heard individual marines talking on battalion tac 1 communicating pointless bits of information. He knew they should be on the administrative network. Get off the net, you idiots. You should be using battalion tac 2. He heard lance corporals doing radio checks with each other. That’s good practice in training, but not in the middle of a firefight. He yelled at the radio in frustration.
“What the hell are you doing? Get off this net.”
His job was to let battalion staff know what he was doing. It was also his duty to paint the battle for those in the rear. Now, he found he just couldn’t break in. He feared this might happen. The battalion staff has such a steel grip on operations that marines are monitoring battalion tac 1. They are afraid of doing something that the operations officer, Major Sosa, hasn’t authorized. In over seventeen years as a marine, Dyer had not seen anyone exert such control. It got to the point where he saw Major Sosa ordering individual marines how to park their vehicles. It was good for commanders to show they were in charge, but Dyer felt that Sosa and some of the others exhibited a level of retentiveness that caused confusion.
He tried the radio again. Nothing. He put out his message but got no answer. He couldn’t wait any longer. Followed by tanks from the 1st and 3rd Platoons, he chased north after Major Peeples. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that no one had come with him. The platoon of infantry that Bravo had given them to make up their Team Tank configuration had stayed behind. He cursed them silently. Useless idiots.
Major Peeples headed north along the dusty highway. Either side of him were fields of mud, crisscrossed with irrigation ditches and dotted with groups of mud brick houses set back from the road. A few kilometers on, he came across a bizarre scene. Ahead of him was what looked like the city dump, and in the middle of it, pulled off to the side of the road, was a column of battered and shot-up Army trucks. Thick black smoke was pouring from the engines and the trailers. Many of the Army vehicles were in flames. Through the thick smoke, sweeping across the road, he saw muzzle flashes lighting up the area. There was some sort of fighting going on. As he got closer he saw, spread out over a few hundred meters, several U.S. soldiers lying by the side of the road, firing at buildings to the east and west. Peeples drove his tank in front of them to provide cover from the incoming fire. He jumped off his tank and ran over to them. He now saw that there were six or seven anxious and scared-looking U.S. soldiers, some of them wounded. They were in a bad way. There was no room on his tanks to medevac them, and the platoon of infantry attached from Bravo were nowhere to be seen. What do I do next? Looking south, he saw the rest of his tanks coming up the road, including 2nd Platoon, the tanks that were attached to Bravo company. He was relieved. He now had all his tanks with him and could maneuver as a single tank company. There was machine-gun and AK fire coming at them from a building complex to the northeast and from buildings near a railroad track just ahead of them. Machine-gun fire erupted from behind some large oil storage tanks to their north, the rounds skipping off the tanks’ thick armor. His tanks rumbled into position. Second and 3rd Platoons traversed their main guns to point to the east of the road. First Platoon took the west side.
Peeples radioed his platoon commanders.
“Use the coax.”
He was thinking about which gun to fire. The rules of engagement that he’d received meant that he was supposed to return small-arms fire either with the loader’s M240, or with the coaxial machine gun that was mounted next to the tank’s main gun. His marines let off rapid bursts, kicking up dirt around the positions where most of the fire was coming from.
Whoosh.
A deadly rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, careered between two of his tanks. That changed things. The rounds in the main gun of Peeples’s tank were “battle carried.” It meant that there was already a round in the chamber.
“Gunner. MPAT. Target that building.”
Peeples’s gunner, sitting in front and below him in the well of the turret, traversed the cannon, put the red crosshairs on the small building where most of the fire seemed to be coming from and squeezed the trigger on the power-control handles. The twelve-inch recoil on the thirty-two-foot main cannon rocked the tank. With a deafening boom, and an orange fireball from the muzzle, the round, traveling at Mach 5, smashed into one of the buildings. The MPAT or multipurpose antitank round was designed to penetrate a target before exploding. Peeples watched the building disintegrate.
Below him, the loader pulled a lever to access another round, loaded it with both hands into the gun, and closed the breech.
“Driver, hard right, hard right. Stop. Forward. Stop. Lower gun tube. Traverse right. Traverse right.”
His tanks maneuvered around each other, making intricate adjustments by pivot steering—locking one track in order to pivot on it.
As Peeples traversed his turret, it caught in the fuel bladder and brought the main gun to an abrupt halt. Peeples was momentarily panicked. I was afraid this might happen. He got a knife out and cut the bladder away, splashing JP8 fuel over the road. He saw the rest of his company doing the same. It was a relief finally to get rid of the bladders. None of the tankers were happy with a hundred gallons of fuel strapped to their tanks while the rounds were flying.
Peeples could now see five army vehicles. Three of them were large tractor-trailers, which looked as though they carried maintenance equipment. One was a Humvee and the other was a fuel truck. They looked battered and beaten. He looked back at his tanks. For the past two days they had stayed, clumped together on the hard road, unable to spread apart because of the numerous irrigation canals. It was not ideal. Normally, his company tried to spread itself over an area of one thousand meters to give the tanks more maneuvering room and to present a more difficult target. Now he saw one of his tanks attempting to do that by moving off the road onto the shoulder. Moments later he received a panicked radio transmission.
“Panzer 6. We’re stuck in the mud.”
Peeples turned to see a tank, commanded by Captain Romeo Cubas of 3rd Platoon, sinking into some of the worst mud he’d ever seen. What looked like hard-packed dirt near one of the irrigation ditches was a pool of thick, oozing mud.
Peeples grabbed the radio handset and called Staff Sergeant Aaron Harrell, one of 2nd Platoon’s tank commanders, and tasked him with the recovery. The tanks were still receiving small-arms and machine-gun fire. Thank God it’s not that accurate. With one eye on the unfolding fight and the other eye on the stricken tank, he switched between manning his guns and giving orders on the radio. He saw Harrell’s loader crouched on the front slope of the tank, unhooking the tow cables as rounds passed overhead and mortars landed in the fields off to the side. Harrell hooked up the cables to Cubas’s tank and ordered his driver to push his own tank forward. Slowly Cubas’s tank was pulled out.
At the same time, Captain Jim Thompson, a marathon runner and triathlete, had jumped off his tank and was running toward one of the wounded soldiers. He expected to be able to carry him to safety, but as he tried to heave him up in a fireman’s carry, the weight of the soldier just crushed him. Thompson was so exhausted from the fight that he could hardly lift him. Two other marines ran over
and helped the soldier limp to safety behind one of the tanks.
Captain Dyer rolled to the conduct of fire net. As the leader of the company’s designated FiST, or fire support team, his job was to communicate with battalion staff to get more fire power. Frustratingly, he still didn’t know whether he was getting through. He shouted instructions into the radio. No one acknowledged him. The amount of incoming fire had now increased. Mortar and artillery shells were throwing up mud and dirt around the dump.
“I need counterbattery support. I need to know where those mortars are coming from. We need to run some air missions.”
The fire support net was silent. He tried again on battalion tac 1, not sure whether anyone could hear him.
With him was Major Donald Hawkins, the forward air controller, who supervised air support from the ground. With no reply from battalion, Hawkins called up close air support using the UHF “guard” frequency. Several Cobra attack helicopters and fixed-wing planes had come on station and were circling overhead, surveying the unfolding firefight from the air. Speaking directly to Hawkins, they told him that they could see hundreds of Iraqis beginning to encircle them. They started to take antiaircraft fire. Then one of the pilots spotted a T-55 tank moving toward them.
Dyer and Hawkins both looked. They couldn’t see it because it was hidden behind a railroad bridge. The Cobra pilot had a good view of it and took aim with a Hellfire missile. Dyer saw it leave the rail and then go “stupid,” losing its direction and missing the target. Hawkins called on the Cobra to laser designate the target and then contacted a Hornet circling overhead to drop a laser-guided bomb. The Cobra pulled to the right, painted the target, and the Hornet came in to attack. Just then, the voice of the battalion fire support coordinator, who was based at the forward command post, and whose job was to oversee what each FiST was doing, came over the radio.
Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War Page 4
