War Stories (23 page)

      
With HMM-268 Detachment

      
Somewhere on Route 1, north of the Euphrates River

      
Wednesday, 26 March 2003

      
1030 Hours Local

“It was MOASS—the Mother of All Sand Storms! If you were a tank commander, you couldn't see your front slope. If you were a driver, you couldn't see your ground guide.”

—Gunnery Sergeant Erik Benitez, USMC

W
e can finally see more than a few meters around our helicopter. The worst sandstorm any of us has ever seen is finally blowing itself out.

It began after dark on Monday, March 24, with a low-pitched moaning wind that lashed into the helicopter, whipping dirt around inside the bird. The temperature dropped as the wind rose, and even though we were all wearing our chemical protective suits, I had to wrap up in my poncho liner to stay warm enough to sleep.

When Griff and I arose at 0330 hours to set up our gear for a 0400 “hit” on
Hannity & Colmes
, the wind was blowing so hard that we had to use a sandbag to anchor our satellite antenna to keep it from blowing over. And when we went on the air, the image, green-tinged by our night lens, sparkled as though sprinkled with pixie dust—an effect caused by ionized particles of sand suspended in the air.

Unfortunately, the blowing sand has the same effect on the night-vision goggles used by the Marines, considerably reducing the effectiveness of their NVGs. Some of the pilots suspect that this condition was a factor in the terrible crash of one of the squadron's CH-46s on the first night of the war. Whether or not it was a problem then, it is certainly one tonight. On the roadway fifty meters to our west, the never-ceasing stream of armored vehicles, trucks, artillery pieces, and tanks moving past us to the north has slowed to a crawl because the drivers can't see the rear of the vehicle in front of them. I'm glad that our birds haven't been called out for a cas-evac. The idea of flying at night through this pea soup at 120 knots (about 138 mph) only fifty feet above the ground is not appealing.

Dawn was late this morning—made so by the unearthly haze of wind-whipped sand. Although the sun came up, it didn't change things much. Only the color of the haze shifted. During the day the powdery dust turns everything—earth, sky, vehicles, even the haze-gray helicopters—the color of rust. It coats our clothing, lines our nostrils, cakes our skin, and stings our eyes if we venture outside the helicopter without dust goggles. Worse yet, it makes it almost impossible for the young Marines looking for the enemy to see anything much beyond a few meters—day or night.

Because the storm has already slowed the pace of operations, many of those in the RCT command group who have been very busy for five days and nights suddenly find themselves with little to do. Some catch up on much-needed sleep. Others engage in “bull
sessions”—a long-standing military tradition, but one seemingly little enjoyed so far in this operation. Over a generously offered cup of hot coffee, prepared on the hood of a Humvee, I eavesdrop on a long discourse by two CIA paramilitary officers who are debating whether the storm that has descended on us is properly described as a sharqi or a
shamal
. They decide to resolve the issue by consulting the two Kuwaiti officers who are accompanying RCT-5 as interpreters. Unfortunately, the Kuwaitis are brothers and they disagree as well, prompting one of the Americans to observe with a shrug, “And it's been that way over here for thousands of years—the people in this part of the world can't even agree about the weather. Let's just say that this is a sandstorm of biblical proportions.”

Climbing to the top of a one-story building that had once been a schoolhouse—turned into a small arsenal by Saddam's Baath Party cadre and now a CP for RCT-5—I find a four-man Marine fire team on lookout. Each member of the team has staked out a corner of the rooftop. They're wearing their helmets, body armor, and chemical suits, and in addition to their dust goggles, they've wrapped their faces Bedouin-style with the dark green slings from their first aid kits. The wind is fierce. It's actually cold. I ask the fire team leader, a corporal, what he sees.

The young Marine NCO looks at me somewhat skeptically and replies, “The entire Iraqi army could be out there and we wouldn't know it until they were knocking on the front door.”

That may be true for this fire team, and perhaps for every other infantryman on the ground beneath this dust storm. But if the Iraqis thought that the sand blinding us had made them invisible, they were dead wrong.

Even as we stand on that windswept roof, unable to see anything more than a few yards away, we can hear the sound of the 11th Marines' 155mm howitzers firing RAP rounds over our heads. They
aren't shooting in the blind. Although the dust storm prevents forward observers from spotting or adjusting fires, the batteries of big guns, multiple-launch rocket systems and the big-payload, high-altitude strike aircraft like the B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s still have plenty of good targets.

Iraqi artillery, rocket, and mortar men, normally wary of firing for fear of being hit almost immediately by an air strike, have been emboldened by the sandstorm's concealment. Last night, as the dust cloud enveloped, they started peppering the Marines' front-line units with 122mm Katyusha rockets, 152mm heavy artillery, and 82mm mortars.

But even before the Iraqi rounds hit the ground, American counter-battery radars linked to fire-control computers are plotting the location of the enemy launchers. And literally within seconds, whole battalions of American 155mm artillery pieces fire back at those who had just fired at us. These highly sophisticated measures can't prevent the Iraqis from firing at us through the rust-colored sky. But the quick response almost guarantees that those enemy gunners who do so will never fire again.

The sandstorm's restricted visibility means that low-level fixed-wing and rotary-wing close air support are out of action—and the Iraqis know it. But what they don't know is that high above them—aboard U-2, JSTARS, and EP-3 aircraft—automated target plotters are observing Iraqi troop movements and communications. The sensors aboard these platforms are generally unaffected by the reduced visibility on the ground, and within minutes of the detection of an Iraqi convoy or radio emission, one or more of a wide variety of GPS-guided munitions is very likely to come streaking out of the sky to obliterate the target.

While standing on the roof of the school–turned Baath ordnance depot–turned U.S. Marine CP, we can hear over the wind the sound of aircraft at high altitude. And minutes later we feel, as much as hear
the rumble of a large warhead detonating well off to the north. Whether it was a two-thousand pound AGM-130 or JDAM or the explosion of a five-thousand pound GBU-37, we can't tell. All we know is that some unsuspecting Iraqi who thought he couldn't be seen has just been hit—prompting a predictable response from the Marines: “Yeah, man! Get some!”

A few minutes after this invisible demonstration of American military prowess, Griff appears out of the orange mist at the base of the building and shouts up to me, “We have a cas-evac. Let's go.”

As I climb down to the ground and head inside for the mission briefing, my first thought is that the artillery barrage or the high-altitude strikes we've just heard might have hit “friendlies.” But when I join Lt. Col. Jerry Driscoll, the air officer is updating him, and I learn that's not the case. Two RCT-5 Marines have been seriously wounded by an RPG during a skirmish with an Iraqi infantry patrol. Driscoll and his wingman, Capt. Aaron “Fester” Eckerberg, plot the grid of the pickup zone and the en route checkpoints on their charts, jot down the frequency of the unit waiting for them on the ground, and quickly head for the helos. Though the weather is deteriorating by the minute, neither pilot challenges the wisdom of making the run. A company commander under fire has called for an emergency cas-evac. It's Driscoll's job to pick up the wounded and save their lives by getting them safely back to a hospital. No questions. No complaints.

We stumble through the gathering gloom back to the aircraft. Griff and his camera are aboard Fester's bird, and I strap in with my camera on Driscoll's #12 while he briefs the crew and our two shock-trauma corpsmen on the mission. As we lift off, the crew chief, Gunnery Sgt. Jesse Wills, observes over the intercom, “Nice day for flying, eh, Colonel?”

Driscoll responds, “Ah yes. Red Dragons . . . real players.” As I hang out the right side hatch with my camera, I notice that Capt.
Eckerberg's CH-46, though only seventy-five feet away, is nearly invisible in the dusty haze. We're heading northwest up Highway 1 toward Ad Diwaniyah, but instead of flying at twenty-five to fifty feet at 120 knots, we're at seventy-five feet—and traveling at less than fifty knots. Ahead of us, through Driscoll's windscreen, the ground is barely visible. There is no horizon and everyone aboard is now looking outboard or ahead for power lines, radio towers, light poles, and highway overpasses in hopes that we see them before running into them.

It takes nearly forty minutes to get to the casualties. A lieutenant, commanding the rifle platoon that had called for the cas-evac, does a good job directing us to his location, about 1,500 meters east of the highway. Though we can't see him and he can't see us in the soup, he succeeds in bringing us in by the sound of our rotors flapping around him in the orange muck.

And now, for a few moments, the sandstorm works to our advantage. We have flown past the Marine position, and over the radio, the platoon commander tells us to turn back to the south, but in so doing we fly directly over the enemy force that attacked his platoon an hour ago. As we make our approach, I can hear the distinctive “crack” of AK-47s firing in our direction. But the Iraqis or fedayeen can't see us and are firing wildly. I thank God once again that these guys don't know how to shoot.

Somehow Driscoll finds the zone and we land to find that one of the two casualties—the platoon's Navy medical corpsman, hit by the full force of an RPG—has died without regaining consciousness. The Marines who race aboard our CH-46 gently lower the litter holding his body to the floor of the helicopter and run back out again.

The other casualty, a Marine corporal, has multiple fragment wounds—one of which is a life-threatening piece of shrapnel from an RPG that has penetrated his abdomen. Driscoll orders the wounded corporal to be loaded aboard Eckerberg's aircraft, and then
as we launch, he calls DASC on the secure radio to inform that we're headed for the Army shock-trauma hospital set up at the Tallil FARP, some fifty miles to our southeast.

But now the full effects of this sharqi or shamal—or whatever this sandstorm is called—descend upon us. Unable to see the ground from fifty feet, Driscoll brings us down to twenty-five feet and reduces air speed to less than thirty knots. As we arrive back over Route 1 and turn left, we're virtually air-taxiing—the wheels just off the ground, the rotor tips barely visible in front of us. We're making our way slowly down the highway with Eckerberg's helicopter following—we think—some one hundred feet behind. Col. Driscoll says over the intercom, as calmly as if he were out for a Sunday afternoon drive, “Gunny, keep a sharp eye out. I sure don't want to bump into someone coming this way in our lane.”

We creep along this way for a half an hour—Wills hanging out the right side door as the helo edges up to overpasses, light poles, and power lines, hovers up over them, then carefully comes back down on the other side of the obstacles. But then Capt. Eckerberg radios that he's developing engine problems. Driscoll tells him to set his bird down on the roadway, and we do so as well.

After a half an hour or so, Eckerberg reports that he thinks he has the problem fixed, and we resume our harrowing low-speed, low-altitude, low-visibility flight. But after a half an hour or so of this nerve-wracking “flying,” Eckerberg calls in again and says he's about to lose his left engine and is putting his bird down on the roadway once again. We do the same, and this time Driscoll shuts down, telling Gunnery Sgt. Wills to head back down the highway to see what he can do to fix the problem.

Lt. Col. Driscoll, copilot Capt. Bill Pacatte, the .50-caliber gunner Cpl. Harold Stewart, and our two corpsmen stay with the bird to protect it. I agree to accompany Gunny Wills back to Eckerberg's
helo. We each grab an M-16 and some magazines, and I take my GPS and strap on my Camelback water bladder, and then we head out back down the highway, thinking that Eckerberg's broken CH-46 is at most a few hundred yards behind us.

Unfortunately, it's not there. After walking in the orange fog about a mile and finding nothing, we turn around and head back to our helicopter. Neither of us wants to end up like the Army Black Hawk crew or the survivors of the 507th Maintenance convoy—as captives being paraded before the Al Jazeera and Iraqi state-run television cameras.

Later, Griff Jenkins fills in the blanks about what happened aboard Eckerberg's helicopter. He was there and records the events in his own “After Action Report.”

   
GRIFF JENKINS: AFTER ACTION REPORT