Salam Alaykum!
That's "Peace be with you," in Arabic, the equivalent of "hello" (which actually translates directly as "Marhaba, " which we diligently memorized before arriving in Kuwait, only to find nobody seems to say that here). Other useful Arabic phrases you might like to know include... "Asef" - sorry (Asef that we just shut down traffic in front of your business for 20 minutes), “Shukran” – thank you (Shukran for showing us the permit for the AK-47 you’re swinging around by the trigger and Shukran for not accidentally capping one of us in the process, Wyatt.). "Imshee" - stay back (imshee, kids, my gun truck is not a jungle gym)..... "Shlounek" - how are you (Salam Alaykma, I’ve got a machine gun, Shlounek?)..... and "Mistah you gat chocolata" - Mister do you have Candy… which seems to be the primary phrase of English taught in the local schools.
I spent today doing battlefield managment stuff in our headquarters, a 20-hour day each platoon leader pulls about once a week. Andyway, it gave me a chance to write extensively about things and a recent mission, that should give you a feel for the way things are here, and in the Army in general.
So far, all is well on the Frontier of Freedom. Or as well as it can be, I guess. Things have been extremely quiet for about five days now. That’s good for the health and fitness, bad for the medals count and war story file. More to the point, it’s not exactly a sign that Hajji has decided democracy ain’t so bad after all. No, the first Iraqi Congress is coming shortly, right here in the Green Zone. You can bet you last few thousand Dinar (or one American dollar) that Mr. Zarqawi, and coven are sitting in some festering, infected sore of a hangout, plotting some nastiness or other. In this lull, I fear my men are getting complacent.
On the other hand, I feel really bad for the boys on the checkpoints into the IZ. They know, guaranteed, that sometime in the next few days, one or two or a dozen car bombers are going to try to sneak in. When the drivers get caught, they generally detonate inside the checkpoints, rather than being captured alive.
Imagine being a bank teller and knowing that sometime in the next few days a guy WILL come to your window and he WILL have a loaded gun and he WILL shoot at you and he has no intention of getting away. And all you can do is hope you are fast enough to duck.
The Army never ceases to have some new boggle, some new conundrum, some extra detail, some new complication just to make life a tad more effort intensive. Allow me to delve into a somewhat detailed account of one particular bit of life in the Green Machine, just to give you an idea how things work here, and some of the flavor of the way we approach things.
One day last week, my commander, CPT Jeff Dirkse, 2LT Chris Mendoza - another Platoon Leader (and OCS 2003 Classmate) from Delta - and I drove down to the 1-184 headquarters for what we call an OPORDER - an Operations Order. This is no small fete. Going anywhere here requires three vehicles, thus a minimum of nine soldiers, but usually at least 12. Also, battalion head shed is located at the other end of the nasty highway I wrote of recently. While it isn't along the really bad stretch, it is a road that gets closed a couple of times a week for IEDs, so this was not exactly as simple as picking up a note pad and driving down Santa Monica Boulevard to a client meeting.
Now, there is a templated standard as to how OPORDERS are done and what they entail, almost to the point of being a fill-in-the-blank. In fact, I have a laminated template which I use as the base for the orders I write. Flow through the format, and you should cover all the details. The trick, of course is knowing what should – and should not – go in the blanks in any given situation.
The gist was this, 18 hours after we received the order, we were to launch a raid on an objective outside of our AO. Since operation names are classified, I’ll call it Operation Whiskey Sweep. We were attached to another company in our Task Force, so they were in charge of who did what and when. The objective was a huge orchard of palm and orange trees, unofficially called “little Viet Nam,” several kilometers long, immediately adjacent to where our Alpha Company has been shooting it up with Hajji. (Hajji is our ubiquitous term for the locals, usually referring to the bad guys, much the same way the Viet Cong were called "Charlie" 35 years ago).
The thinking was that Hajji logically should be using this grove of trees to hide weapons caches. The intent of Whiskey Sweep was to go check out the place and see what there was to see, and destroy any caches we found The first thing always covered in an OPORD is terrain and weather, and here it was significant. By the time we would be half-way through, the trees and brush would be so thick we would not see a guy 10 or 15 meters away. That's a bad thing.
Chris and I immediately started scratching our heads. The unit we were working with, Echo Battery (an air defense artillery unit), doesn't usually do this type of mission, and it seemed to show. They had not prepared any coordination for the movement of the various units. We use thingamabobs called Phase Lines (lines drawn on a map) to make sure units move in synch. Echo had not planned for any. Phase lines ensure the folks on the left aren't 200 meters farther ahead than the guys on the right. That would be bad – very, very bad if the unit that’s behind gets into a firefight and orients its fires just a bit to the side. That's how fratricide occurs, and in terrain where you can't see an enemy10 meters in front of you, it is easy to kill a friend 200 meters to the left. Our hosts promised to work on those and a couple of other kinks, and we went our separate ways, with a plan to link up at 6 the next morning.
Our objective, Walrus, was the strip immediately next to the houses where lots of insurgents and sympathizers are thought to live. Complicating matters, about 700 meters on the other side, in the middle of the grove, lay about 50 homes of impoverished poor folks with whom Echo Battery was going to talk so they could gather information and make nice (Mistah, you got chocolata?).
I was tasked with leading FIDO platoon on a dismounted clearance of heavily vegetated terrain frequented by irregular enemy troops. It was a mission right out of a Vietnam history book.
We got the order around 2:00 p.m. (1400 for those of you in uniform) and planned to head straight back to our home, here at FOB Freedom, to conjure our own plans and get ready. Unfortunately, the battalion had other ideas. Chris and I ended up sitting around for nearly four hours waiting for the boss to get out of other meetings. We went to the mess hall and had a decent meal for the first time in a while, savoring it as we would not likely get much time to eat until the operation was done, and because the chow hall where we live is SO lousy. Remembering, all the while, our hit time was 8:00 the next morning. I made the rounds to find some friends who had seen the area to get a better grasp of the terrain. They told me that the trail through the AO was elevated and barely passable for our vehicles. It was productive research, but the clock was ticking, and we knew it.
Now, one of the many rules of leadership in the Army is called "1/3-2/3." If my boss gets a mission to execute in 18 hours, he has 6 hours to get me an order, leaving 12. I then have 4 hours to get my section leaders their order, leaving them eight to get ready to go. They have less than three to come up with their own plans – but they’re only planning for a handful of people. We didn't even get back until nearly seven hours after the first round of the order was done, so you can figure where that put me. Just about every higher headquarters in the army is notorious for blowing right through the 1/3 standard, but having us sit on our hands was just plain frustrating.
One other piece of the puzzle, both a plus and a minus, was that we were given two ancient M113 armored personnel carriers for the mission. They each carry eight soldiers, allowing us to leave our trucks behind, and thus have more folks for the mission (dismounting our four trucks means leaving eight of my 16 men behind, the APCs meant I got to keep most of them). The downside was that no one in Delta has used an M113 in years, and we had hardly anyone to operate them.
With some quick work and brain gymnastics by SFC Ron Lloyd (my tenacious if grumpy platoon sergeant), we were able to get an order out to the platoon by 10:00 pm. We took a close look at the satellite imagery of the area and formulated our plan. It was simple enough –dismount short of the objective, enter the palm grove silently on foot, spread out about 150 meters online and leave the two M113s about 100 meters behind with heavy machine guns in case we got in deep kimchee, then everybody roll forward slowly. If you find something of note, everybody stops and we inspect it.
We would put the metal detector and digging tools we were supposed to get on one of the M113s, and also use tracks to carry out prisoners and casualties, as needed.
One open question was the weather. It was raining and had been most of the day. The forecast I got from Stalker X-Ray, our battalion HQ, said it would be partly cloudy and in the 60s at the hit time.
But, the biggest concern was the local neighborhood. About 25 houses backed up to the palm grove, every one a potential sniper outpost or over watch position. There was no way to secure them, only to plan to react to them with overwhelming force.
My OPORD would reflect Echo’s. In fact, OPORDs across the Army, at all levels, always follow the same exact same five-paragraph format: Situation, Mission, Execution, Service Support, Command & Signal. It is the same from Division headquarters through the smallest fire teams, for administrative units through Rangers and Special Forces.
Essentially, OPORDS tell us who’s doing what, the commander’s intent, which slice of the objective we are handling, how we all get there, what to do there, the timeline of the operation and how to report information. Each subsequent level of command uses the previous framework as brackets for providing guidance as to how those tasks will be handled at ever smaller , levels. My OPORD followed the same format as the one from Echo Company (the unit that was driving the effort) and flowed within the plans they had created. Echo talked about the whole area, and tasked me with Walrus. I talked about Walrus and tasked my section leaders with different sides of it. Echo talked about restrictions and specifications for the search, I spelled-out how we would organize the search and my Section Leaders then figured out who would handle those taskings in their elements. Mission, the most important part, is always the shortest. One sentence, always read twice, so everyone can execu
te, even if the key leaders are dead.
We gathered the platoon in the company conference room, a plywood clad area with an old table and plastic lawn chairs, to brief the order. SFC Lloyd started off, which was a bit unusual, by telling the men straight out. This mission gave us the greatest likelihood of anything we’d done to make contact with Hajji. All signs were, that if he wasn;t in the trees over watching caches, they were either booby trapped or he would harass us with snipers from the surrounding houses.
The platoon mission statement for Operation Whiskey Sweep, short and repeated, was as follows: FIDO Platoon, Delta Company, 1-184 Infantry, clears objective Walrus, No Later than 0800 the next morning, in order to deny Anti Iraqi Forces the use of weapons and equipment.
We used hand drawn charts, maps and satellite imagery (including some produced by Lizard Tech, a rival of an old PPMG client) to show everybody what they were doing. We gave them coordinating instructions like supply lists and time lines, then sent the sections off to get ready. It was already 2300 (11:00 p.m.).
We were to leave at 6:00 a.m. for link-up with Echo, and start the day, bright and early, at 4:00 am. At the point we finished the order, if my men already had everything prepared, they would get five hours of sleep before a very long day.
For Sergeant Lloyd and I, the fun had just begun.
About the time we finished briefing the plan, everything shifted. The M113s failed pre-combat inspection and were deadlined (out of action). Huddling with the commander, CPT Dirkse, we concluded we would use our four Humvees, but that meant losing half the platoon to operate them. Clearing a 150-meter front with folks spread 20 meters apart in 10-meter jungle is not good.
After swilling plans around in our heads like we were quickly sampling bottles of expensive wine to select for a dinner that was already on the table, we sent our NCOs off to bed and told them we’d give them a new plan at 4:30 in the morning, and just flex from there. It was nearly midnight.
I grabbed an MRE and ate a few "easy to work and munch" items.
Sergeant Lloyd made the rounds to the other platoons (most of whose leaders were already in bed or wishing they were) and did some good old fashioned horse trading to get us some truck crews on loan. Those poor guys were sound a sleep, not knowing that they’d just been bought and paid for!
Around 12:30, we finally had a plan set, but now we had prep work to make it happen. I visited the arms room and collected up smoke grenades and tracer bullets for key leaders. Our commo guy, SPC Bradford, was loading secure frequency sets in the radios.
One of the last things we did was take a good look at the map to find two open areas we could land helicopters on if we had to evacuate casualties. We both wrote the grid coordinates down where we could get them in a hurry.
When all of our equipment was set, the plan finalized (sort of) and we were clear in our own heads about what the morning would entail, I headed for my room to prep my own equipment, making sure I had maps, fresh and extra batteries, water, some sort of food and extra ammunition in my pack. I washed, shaved and made a quick call to Maribel, telling her only that I had some things to do the next morning that had kept me up late. By the time my head hit the pillow, it was 2:00am. I slept with my uniform and boots on, too tired to take them off and not wanting to lose five minutes of sleep putting them back on.
One of my NCOs woke me just before my alarm was to sound at 0400, and I headed straight to the company command post. It was pouring rain, but I checked with battalion and they promised the forecast was for partly cloudy skies. I stepped back outside and in the morning twilight could see breaks in the clouds. Only later did I discover Stalker hadn’t quite bothered to get an updated weather forecast over night.
At 4:30 our leaders gathered in the platoon office to get the final fragmentary order. Basically, everything had changed, except the mission and basic concept. Also in the room were four guys from other platoons who went to bed thinking they had an easy day ahead, but who groggily found themselves trying to fathom why somebody woke them in the middle of the night for a mission somebody else (us) was doing.
We used a new chart SFC Lloyd created with all of the new OPORD information posted concisely. It was so good, all they had to do was read it.
With my leaders finally in a position to do the jobs they were supposed to, I went to get my gear on for the mission. I entered my room to the incessant beeping of my alarm clock, and my room mate, 1LT Matt “Beans” Benasuly glaring at me. A collection of things from around his bed defined an impact zone around my clock caused by his tortured efforts to silence the buzzer that was trying to roust long absent me. I apologized and gave him his pillow back but knew he couldn’t be too mad. A few days before, I actually had to wake him up because he slept through his alarm and I didn’t (“Beans, that’s YOUR alarm ringing”).
At 0600, we headed off to link up with Echo Battery, discovering that the simple route they’d described had a variety of turning options that were not quite so obvious. Much to my chagrin, CPT Dirkse had found the route quite easily and was, to say the least, not pleased by our tardiness. When we finally arrived, the drizzle had become a steady moderate sprinkle, and we sat down for a final briefing. Zero phase lines had grown to four of irregular shape. The entry point to the grove was a spot for which Echo had a 10-digit grid (accurate to less than 10 meters)… but who exactly had it, well they weren’t quite sure. “There is a trail through the objective,” they said. “It’s easily passable to any vehicle.” Oh, and that line in the middle of the imagery? That’s not a trail, that’s a six-foot wall, (A WHAT?!) and you need to channel through a hole that’s in it, with your vehicles. The hole is somewhere on the right. The metal detector would go to my designee, just as soon a
s they were sure it was working and, um, that they did, in fact, have it. Chaos reigned. I spent 30 minutes trying to get the phase lines on my map correctly, instead of conducting rehearsals.
Finally, at 7:30, I emerged to find the same consistent drizzle and my men already soaked. All I had time to do was get our vehicles lined up, pass out the phase line, wall and trail information and gather my men for one final briefing by the Echo commander. He predicted a four hour mission. The battalion Chaplain, Major Bob Blessing (no, really) gave led us in prayer, he spoke of David, the warrior king and prayed for our safety. I slid my hand down to my rifle, quietly flipped open my electric sight and switched it on. “Amen.”
From the outset, things did not go well. Our lead truck got clipped by a garbage truck as we left Echo’s CP. The top-heavy gun truck nearly flipped, tearing off part of a fender. Worse, the men had allowed a potential VBIED to get within lethal distance, and we were supposedly at our most alert, enroute to a gun fight. Given our rules of engagement and standard procedure, I was shocked that the gunner didn’t light up the truck. I wanted to deal with it, but there was a bigger mission at hand.
We reached the location 90 seconds later and everybody dismounted quickly, but spread over 200 meters. Unfortunately, the lead truck rolled to the front, instead of allowing us to enter quietly. The entrance road ran along the side of a house, and two men with AK-47s emerged to see what was going on. The AK’s are perfectly legal here, so all we could do was keep an eye on them. More problematic, the supposed entrance road was blocked with obstacles, and now the gun truck was canalized.
We backed it up and moved 30 meters away to a break in the surrounding fence. Immediately we noticed two men outside a small lean-to style shack. We fanned out in a slight wedge, eight men abreast, when things came to a halt. Echo Battery wouldn’t give us permission to roll until everybody was in place. That took 10 minutes, and in that time any hope of surprise in the immediate area evaporated. The two men just stood and watched us, like we were some sort of car accident on the 405.
The area we started in was an old farm. There were clearly defined fallow plots and an obsolete irrigation ditch system. 24 hours of rain had turned the fields into nothing but calf-to-knee-deep mud. With my first step, I fell nearly face first. We slogged through the slop, totally exposed to any enemy who might have been watching, unable to maneuver with any effectiveness in the tactical sense. Visions of the Somme passed through my mind.
We moved to the shack – a construction of palm fronds and plastic sheets - and, through our interpreter, interviewed the two men living there. They denied knowledge of any insurgent activities, and said they just lived and worked in the grove. They might have been poor peasants, but we also know that mortars have been shot from nearby. Did they really expect us to believe they knew nothing, never saw anything, had never even heard of anything? Well, we sorta had to, in as much as there was nothing we could do about it, and no evidence firmly to the contrary.
I got the platoon up, and started heading forward. Soon we found a small shelter and a tarp, but no sign of weapons. I called for the metal detector, only to be told that no one brought it. The guy who was tasked with it decided in all the night’s confusion that, surely, someone else had been given that task. And, damnit, no one checked on him.
Oh, but the fun was still only just about to begin.
The rhythm of the rain began to hasten and the drops became big, warmish juicy blobs. We were now thoroughly soaked, just 30 minutes into the mission. We hadn’t even crossed the first phase line, all the overt evidence of enemy presence was being washed away before our eyes and the only resource with which we had to really search anything was sitting two miles away at Echo’s command post.
Perhaps most disheartening, we knew Hajji wasn’t going to go stumbling about in a stupid rain storm. He might be willing to die for Allah, but being wet and miserable is something entirely different. Not having to look forward to a gun fight is about the worst thing for an infantry soldier.
So, to review, we have soldiers who are soaked and getting wetter, barely starting a mission, with little sleep, hadn't really eaten for at least 18 hours, held no hope of success and no tools to achieve it with facing an enemy who was smart enough to go be warm and dry – and thus not likely to engage.
We slogged forward slowly, reached the wall and its hole, passed both sections through and started to bring up the gun trucks.
CPT Dirkse’s went first. Not through the hole in the wall, mind you. He was too far back. No, his was the first truck to slide off the collapsing trail that was quickly becoming a mud bog. The second was the vehicle behind his, which had moved up to pull him back onto the trail only to suffer the same fate.
The lead truck then moved off the trail, through a farm plot and down, down, down to the axels in mud. With in seconds the truck behind it was sliding off the edge. Four vehicles were immobilized in less than 3 minutes. Our fire support, casevac and everything but my very wet soldiers were trapped.
After two hours of winch working and wheel spinning and watching trucks flip and flop across the muddy ground like fish out of water, we finally got all of them back to the starting point. Embarrassingly, for us light infantrymen, it was an M113 tracked vehicle (like the ones we left behind) that pulled all of the trucks out. It was bad enough that the two guys from the shack came up to offer to dig us out with their one shovel.
It was now almost 11:00. We were three hours into a four-hour mission and hadn’t covered a quarter of the area.
After what seemed like a wait that would never end, we finally got on track. The men realized all the implications of the situation, but did their level best to maintain a professional, soldierly bearing. Franly, they made me proud. We proceeded forward, tripping and slipping and slogging through ever increasing density of foliage. Any sign of holes in the ground or slightly out of place foliage had been cleaned up in the deluge. The only real chance was obvious disturbances, and we soon found those.
Piles of dozens, if not hundreds of palm fronds, stacked in some sort of agricultural management technique, created exactly the opposite of the problem we had faced moments before. Far from no hope of finding anything, we were soon faced with mounting numbers of potential hide sites that we could not hope to search, especially without a metal detector.
We tossed through what we could, finding dry palms just a few inches down, but no signs of weapons. We marked the positions of the largest concentrations in our GPS systems, then moved on, sorting through the piles randomly as we went. The deeper we got into the foliage, the more cluttered it became. “Wait-a-minute” vines with sharp thorns tore at our skin and tangled out legs. Paths cut through the mess provided fast passage but were too obvious potential ambush sites, forcing us, as always, to go the hard way, across furrous through vines and around low-hanging branches.
We passed the phase lines more rapidly, however. Our fire support vehicles were now parallellign our movements on the streets in the adjacent neighborhood, and I kept CPT Dirkse informed of our progress every step of the way.
Finally, after about 90 minutes of stumbling stepping, we reached the end road of the orchard. Low and behold, we found a rubbleized house and four men who claimed to be farm workers. They had no ID but didn’t appear to be evil incarnate. We took their pictures, confiscated a pistol that they couldn’t produce a license for (and to think, most of our guys are NRA members) and left them to go about their day.
At 1:00, five hours after we hit the ground, we piled our exhausted, wet selves into two M113s from Echo Battery, and rolled back to their CP where we linked up with our vehicles for a debrief.
24 hours after we first heard the name, Operation Whiskey Sweep was over. We had little to show for our efforts and we were going home.
To prepare for the next mission.
Recent Comments