War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom

by Oliver North

  Now, after two and a half days of mind-deadening, butt-numbing, day-and-night movement, Griff and I are back to exactly where we were almost a week ago. The enormous convoy pulls into the facility behind Major Cox’s Humvee and stops on a five-acre paved parade field. Every building around the periphery is shattered, having been hit by bombs, artillery fire, or both. We have stopped only to refuel at points along the route guarded by dust-covered paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. Now the HETs are finally unloading their armored vehicles and preparing to highball it all the way back to Kuwait to pick up another load of equipment and bring it forward.

  Every soldier and vehicle is covered with dirt, as we were during the MOASS dust storm back in March. Those passengers, like me and Griff, who have had to ride in the backseats of Humvees—a space designed by some sadist without knees or feet—are practically anesthetized.

  At times during this interminable “road march,” I jump out of Maj. Cox’s Humvee and jog alongside for a few minutes to prevent a potentially lethal blood clot. The first time I do it, about eight hours into the trip, our driver, SPC Rios, asks me if all Marines do this. “No,” I reply, “only the old men over fifty. And if they can’t keep up we leave ’em behind.”

  Rios, a communicator by training, has a keen sense of humor. After having to stop several times so that various vehicles could fix flats caused by all the shrapnel on the highway, he begins referring to the journey as an “Ordeal by Tire.”

  Now that we’re finally inside a friendly perimeter, Maj. Cox stretches to get out the kinks from sitting so long and goes off to find the unit that will take us north. Griff and I wander through row after row of M-1 tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, trucks, artillery pieces, and Humvees looking for an Easter service. We find one, but not until the chaplain for one of the battalions of the 66th Armored Regiment is already wrapping up a sunrise Resurrection celebration.

  By noon we have linked up with Lt. Col. Larry Jackson, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment. The famed 66th won acclaim during World War II when it landed in North Africa in 1942, and fought across Utah Beach at Normandy two and a half years later. Col. Jackson, a tough no-nonsense professional Army warrior, is adamant that the 66th will live up to its legacy.

  Before we head out of the TAA, Lt. Col. Jackson briefs us on his battalion’s mission: move as fast as possible to occupy and secure a wide swath of terrain northeast of Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit; search for weapons of mass destruction; detain or kill any “Iraqi leadership targets”; protect the oil pipeline and refinery at Bayji; restore essential services and law and order for the civilian population, and protect U.S. forces. And, he tells me, “The area around Tikrit, Saddam’s ancestral home, is the most likely place in all of Iraq where Hussein and those loyal to him will hold out. If he’s there, we aim to get him.”

  I say, “I hope he does—and that it’ll happen soon.” Just before our briefing with Lt. Col. Jackson, the FOX News Channel foreign desk paged me and asked why we hadn’t been on the air for more than forty-eight hours. As gently as I could, I informed them that the satellite equipment Griff and I carry has to be stationary to use, that we had been moving nonstop for more than forty-eight hours, and that we had still another full day’s movement before we’d be able to set up. The desk officer replied, “Well, get up on the air as soon as you can. You’re our last ‘embed team’ in Iraq.”

  Lt. Col. Larry Jackson’s column of tanks, Bradleys, Humvees, trucks, and artillery forms up inside the perimeter of the Republican Guard cantonment and when he gives the signal, it moves. Griff and I are riding in a Bradley about a dozen vehicles back from the front of the column. As we exit the gate, the column has to slow down and wheel right to get on the hardball highway headed north to Tikrit. When we do so, there is a burst of AK-47 fire from a crowd milling about in front of a shabby souk across the highway, less than a hundred meters from our vehicle. As the call goes out over the tactical net, “Taking fire, nine o’clock!,” the gunner for our Bradley’s 25mm chain gun wheels the turret around hard to the left and depresses the muzzle, looking for targets through his thermal sights. I grab my camera as several hundred civilians scatter in panic. In the midst of the crowd I can see two AK-47 barrels pointed skyward, moving with the horde. But before anyone can flip an arming switch or squeeze a trigger, another call comes over the radio, “Hold your fire! Keep moving. Close up your vehicles!”

  I can’t tell who is speaking, but the soldiers do as ordered. No one opens fire and the column continues its movement up the highway. I’m impressed. Green troops with loaded weapons hearing rounds go off or words like “taking fire” can easily overreact—and in this situation, several dozen civilian casualties could have resulted. Remarkably the reaction of these soldiers is what one might expect from troops who have already seen combat. Their training and discipline are already showing—and these guys have just gotten here.

  With overhead cover from AH-64 Apache and OH-58 Kiowa helicopters, Jackson’s column moves rapidly up the four-lane highway without interference—other than crazy Iraqi civilians who totally ignore all known rules of the road. On several occasions, Marine convoys from RCT-5 and Task Force Tripoli, headed south on the other side of the median, were apparently moving too slow for Iraqis going in the same direction. The Iraqi solution was to cut across the median and proceed south in the northbound lanes at high speed. After several near-death experiences with oncoming Toyotas, SFC Terrigino, the scout platoon’s senior NCO, asked for and received permission to replace the Humvee that was leading the expedition with a Bradley. The number of Iraqi “lane jumpers” dropped dramatically.

  Just before dark we’re south of Tikrit and the column halts for the night. As the armored vehicles pull off the road into an open field to establish a perimeter, SFC Terrigino, now back in his .50-caliber-equipped Humvee, swings by and asks if I want to ride with him while he scouts on ahead. Griff jumps into one of the other scout platoon Humvees, and both vehicles race down the empty highway looking for trouble. As we move, the Blue Force Tracker mounted in front of Terrigino shows the location of our vehicle moving north on the map, blue rectangles depicting the other vehicles in the battalion behind us, and two red icons representing possible Iraqi positions about four kilometers up the highway between us and Tikrit.

  “These two symbols are a T-72 and an Iraqi BMP, reported by the helicopters,” Terrigino says, pointing to the computer screen. “We’re going to find out if they are manned or just some abandoned Iraqi armor left beside the road.”

  Terrigino halts his little motorized patrol about five hundred meters from the bend in the highway where the Iraqi vehicles were plotted and sends four soldiers up the hill on foot to reconnoiter the position. I put the night lens on my little camera. A half an hour later, the foot patrol reports back by radio: “The vehicles are abandoned. We’ve marked the exact location on the GPS so EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] can destroy them tomorrow.”

  With that, we turn around and head back to the perimeter. Lt. Col. Jackson already has a CP tent up. Inside the TOC are computer and radio consoles for operations, logistics, and fire support, with watch officers for each already at their stations. It’s very impressive, and far more sophisticated than anything a Marine regiment has—much less a battalion.

  When I ask Col. Jackson about it, he says, “Yes . . . we do have some neat stuff. And I think the younger soldiers really get a kick out of it. But I came from an ‘analog’ Army—much like the Marine unit that you came from—with the old maps, acetate sheets, and grease pencils. Those are still great tools. But I wouldn’t want to go to war without the digital equipment that we have now.”

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #40

  With 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment

  4th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

  Bayji, Iraq

  Monday, 21 April 2003

  2300 Hours Local

  Shortly after dawn this morning, SFC Terrigino and his s
cout platoon brought me and Griff to Saddam’s hometown palace in Tikrit. The opulent mansion is now the headquarters for the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. The CO, Col. Don Campbell, took possession of the real estate yesterday from Brig. Gen. John Kelly, USMC, commander of Task Force Tripoli.

  This is the third of Saddam’s many palaces I’ve seen, but it’s the only undamaged one I’ve been in. Uday’s castle, about a kilometer north, is reduced to rubble, but this one is unscathed. For reasons unknown to anyone here, this particular palace was left off the CENTCOM target list.

  Like all of Saddam’s residences, this one overlooks some of the most beautiful scenery in all of Iraq. Perched high above the Tigris, it’s surrounded by irrigated orchards of fig and eucalyptus trees—and a very high wall topped with razor wire. An enormous swimming pool graces the south side of the ornate, three-story building. Carefully manicured gardens are terraced into the hillside to the east and south. On the west side, there is a six-car garage complete with an armored Mercedes limousine. No one seems to know what really happened to the other five cars, but one Army wag suggests that several Marine sergeants from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalions may be driving back to Kuwait in Mercedes sedans instead of their LAVs.

  On the east side, wending its way through the terraces, a road leads down to the Tigris and an empty boathouse. One of the young Army specialists from SFC Terrigino’s scout platoon suggests that the exterior of the place has all the accoutrements of a resort, and he’s right. No matter where you stand on this property, it’s impossible to see any other house or building. There is a feeling of privacy and remoteness.

  Yet just out of sight in the surrounding neighborhood, there are homes without electricity, running water, or sewage systems. Saddam had to have been totally oblivious to the suffering of his people as he turned the country’s oil profits into his own personal fortune—or he just didn’t care.

  Inside the edifice are more than seventy rooms, not counting closets still full of clothing and more than a dozen bathrooms with gold-plated fixtures. But for all the marble floors, rare hardwood paneling, and high-vaulted ceilings complete with murals, the place is positively tacky. Grotesque, handcrafted statuary and original amateurish paintings depicting Saddam as a Bedouin, an Arab sheikh, a horse-mounted warrior, a farmer tending his crops, adorn rooms with furniture that looks as though it was bought at the yard sale of a bordello. The palace even has a movie theater and a modern Sony TV, but the microwave oven in the kitchen has to be at least fifteen years old. Beautiful tapestries cover many walls, and there are cabinets full of Limoges china with gold-leaf trim, but the rug covering the floor in the main dining room is a Romanian polyester knockoff of a Persian. Martha Stewart would not approve.

  After our tour of what several soldiers call “the evil prince’s haunted castle,” we mount up with Terrigino’s road warriors and head back up the highway. His mission for the day is to find a permanent laager for Lt. Col. Jackson’s battalion in the vicinity of Bayji. The colonel wants a spot where the unit will be relatively safe from roving bands of fedayeen and their “technicals”—the ubiquitous pickup trucks with .50-caliber machine guns mounted in their beds—and still have good access to the main highways that will allow his QRF to get in and out quickly if needed.

  By late afternoon, Terrigino has found just such a spot: an abandoned Iraqi military base on a hillside overlooking Bayji and the rail marshaling yard just outside the city. The location has good clear fields of fire in all directions and grass instead of dirt to minimize the amount of dust and mud. Best of all, the location already has a bulldozed berm surrounding it, and unlike the desert south of here, the earth is soft enough to easily dig fighting holes. The scouts conclude that the site must have been a chemical warfare training facility, given the number of gas masks, decontamination equipment, training manuals, and atropine injectors left lying around. But when he calls in to report his find, suggesting as he does so that the watch officer check his location on the TOC’s Blue Force Tracker, the sergeant is told that Col. Jackson has selected another site about five hundred meters from the “biggest ammo dump we’ve ever seen.” Terrigino checks the CO’s location on his tracker and we mount up and head there.

  When we arrive at the new battalion perimeter, Lt. Col. Jackson has again already set up his TOC in the large CP tent. He’s just starting a meeting with all his company commanders, and several of them are clearly concerned.

  While we were out looking for a suitable place for the battalion bivouac, a helicopter flying overhead spotted an enormous warehouse facility not far from the railroad tracks, and Jackson sent a troop of Bradleys to check it out. Their report stunned everyone. The cavalry commander said that the facility was actually an ordnance depot seven kilometers long by five kilometers wide that contained millions of rounds of every kind of ammunition known to man. Worst of all, it was easily accessible. There were no gates, and no guards, and every inch of barbed wire and chain-link fencing that had once surrounded this place—more than fifteen miles of it—was now gone. The place was wide open to anyone.

  Jackson ordered night ambushes to be set on the avenues of approach to the ammo dump. His instructions were, “Do what you have to to keep anyone from getting into this place, because God help us if the fedayeen get their hands on this stuff.” As soon as his commanders departed to move their troops into position, Jackson was on the radio with Brigade HQ in Tikrit, advising them on what his troops had found and asking that additional ordnance specialists and engineers report to his unit in the morning.

  Shortly after the meeting breaks up, Griff and I go outside to catch some sleep. I grab the hood of SFC Terrigino’s Humvee. He will be leading the QRF if it gets called out in the middle of the night to assist one of the ambush units, and I don’t want to miss capturing some good footage for FOX News Channel. Before rolling up in my poncho liner, I put the night lens on my camera—just in case.

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #41

  With 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment

  4th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

  Bayji, Iraq

  Tuesday, 22 April 2003

  2300 Hours Local

  I hear the first shots at about 0300 and roll over to see what is going on—mostly listening for how close the firing is and evaluating whether I need to jump off the hood of Terrigino’s Humvee and run for a fighting position. The hood of a Humvee is a great place to sleep unless someone is shooting artillery, mortars, or RPGs at your position. Not hearing the tuk, tuk, tuk of a mortar, I sit up and carefully put on my boots. I’ve been using them for a pillow.

  High on the hillside I can see an occasional burst of red tracer—ours—from a Bradley or a Humvee-mounted .50-caliber. There is the lighter, faster cough of a 240-Golf machine gun and of course the very high crack of M-16s. The only enemy weapons audible are AK-47s—which means that the bad guys are definitely outgunned in this fight.

  By the time I have my boots on and my poncho liner stowed in my backpack, SFC Terrigino has his platoon up and ready to move, their Humvee engines idling. The Bradley crew to our left and the M-1 on our right, both part of the QRF, are also ready to roll. But the word to ride to the rescue never comes. Within twenty minutes, the firing dies down, so I wander over to Col. Jackson’s TOC to find out what’s happened.

  I find him inside on the radio to brigade headquarters reporting a successful ambush of a group of men with several pickup trucks who were trying to enter the ammo depot. He promises that I can go inspect the scene right after first light.

  Shortly after dawn, SFC Terrigino and four of his scout platoon Humvees drive up to the ambush site. When we arrive, the platoon commander who triggered the ambush is reviewing with his soldiers what happened. The bodies of fourteen men, nearly all dressed in black, are lying on or near a rutted dirt road that enters the ammo dump from the east. According to the battalion S-2, who has collected identity documents from all or most, only two of the dead were
Iraqi. Of the remaining twelve, four are Jordanian, three are Syrian, two are Egyptian, one is a Saudi, and the other two are Lebanese.

  The foreigners and their two Iraqi guides had disembarked from two pickup trucks about two hundred meters from the Ammunition Supply Point (ASP) and walked straight up the road into the killing zone of a night-vision-equipped platoon-sized ambush. The carnage was completely one-sided. There were no American casualties.

  We spend most of the rest of the day going through the biggest and most dangerously unsafe ammo dump I’ve ever seen.

  According to the engineer officer dispatched by helicopter from Brigade HQ at Tikrit, the site contains more than five hundred ordnance bunkers and revetments and ninety-five steel structures filled to the top with every conceivable type of ammunition and explosive. Dry grass is growing right up to the door of every building and bunker—a major fire hazard.

  Most of the ammunition is in very good shape; some of it—the Jordanian artillery rounds, the Italian land mines, and the Saudi small-arms ammunition—appears to be nearly new. In one shed, several hundred green wooden boxes bear the label “Ministry of Procurement, Amman Jordan,” with a manufacturer’s delivery date of January 2003. In another shed we find cases of surface-to-air missiles: SA-7s, SA- 14s, and SA-16s.

  The man-portable, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles and the tens of thousands of RPGs stored here create the greatest anxiety among the soldiers conducting a quick inventory of the site. These weapons can bring down a military helicopter or commercial jet, and the RPGs can take out a Bradley. Fire enough of them at an M-1 tank and it’ll go too.

  When one of the brigade engineers has a spare moment, I ask him what he’s going to do with all this stuff. His answer is honest. “I don’t know. We haven’t got enough TNT, Det-Cord, and blasting caps to blow all this. Worse yet, there are probably seventy-five to one hundred sites just like this one elsewhere around the country.” And then he echoes Lt. Col. Jackson words: “God help us if the terrorists get their hands on this stuff.”