War Stories (25 page)

At this point I lose it. More than thirty years ago in Vietnam, a valiant Navy corpsman saved my life. In my anger and exhaustion, I have probably heard the pilot's words as much more derogatory than he meant them. In my fatigue, I am not being reasonable. I grab him
by his flight suit and am about to swing at him when his copilot and crew chief jump between us and break up the fracas.

Disgusted, I walk back to our bird, only to discover that Doc Comeaux, the door gunner aboard Griff's bird, and several of Stroehman's men have witnessed the whole episode. A short while after the H-60 takes off—without our dead Navy medical corpsman aboard—some of them come to talk to me about the incident.

They see it as a case of righteous indignation—believing that the H-60 pilot deserved a good thrashing for refusing to take the corpsman's body with him. But having calmed down, I disagree.

I explain. “Set aside whether a former Navy welterweight boxing champion pushing sixty could have prevailed over a man half his age if the altercation had gone the distance. There are really two other issues that matter more: First, I lost my temper—never a good thing to do in any circumstance. Losing your temper always clouds your judgment. In combat that can get good men killed. And second, because I lost my temper, I didn't accomplish the mission.”

I add, “My reason for approaching the pilot wasn't to exchange blows with a thirty-year-old. I went to persuade him to evacuate the body of our dead corpsman—and I failed.” The H-60 has departed and the body of Navy Hospital Corpsman Third Class Michael Vann Johnson, Jr., is still lying on the ramp of our helicopter.

He is finally taken to the rear about four hours later when a CH-46 from HMM-268 shows up with the repair parts for Fester's broken helicopter. They take the body aboard on the way back to Ali Al Salem Air Base. I regret that it took so long to notify his family in Little Rock, Arkansas, of their terrible loss.

With the new parts installed, and the sandstorm now well past, Griff sticks a camera in Capt. Aaron Eckerberg's exhausted, dirt-streaked face and asks for his thoughts on “The Sandstorm from Hell.”

“I'm just happy to be alive” is all he can manage to say.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHAT QUAGMIRE?

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #17

      
With HMM-268 Detachment

      
RCT-5 CP, 20 km south of Ad Diwaniyah

      
Thursday, 27 March 2003

      
1230 Hours Local

B
y dawn this morning—the first time we've seen the sun rise in five days—HMM-268 had four replacement helicopters and crews positioned with RCT-5. Joe Dunford's reinforced regiment, with RCT-7 in trace, was on the move up Route 1 toward the Tigris River and Baghdad. Off to our east, despite continued harsh engagements with small groups of foreign fedayeen, Task Force Tarawa and RCT-1 have succeeded in forcing the passage through An Nasiriyah and reopened the offensive up Route 7 toward Al Kut. Farther south, the British have surrounded Basra, secured Iraq's southern oil infrastructure, and liberated the towns along the Shatt al Arab waterway so that it can be swept for mines. Off to the west, the main attack by the Army's V Corps, spearheaded by Maj. Gen. Buford Blount's 3rd Infantry Division, has beaten the Medina division of the
Republican Guard and is now resupplying its armored columns north of Najaf.

From our satellite hookup with FOX News Channel in New York we learn that last night, as the dust storm blew itself out, more than nine hundred paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted onto a strategic airfield north of Mosul, setting the stage for the northern offensive that had been derailed when NATO ally Turkey refused to allow the 4th Infantry Division to enter Iraq through Turkish territory. And now, with the air clear for the first time in five days, the sky above us is filled with Marine Cobras, AV-8 Harriers, and Navy and Marine F-18s, flying close air support (CAS) missions for the lead elements of RCT-5 as they close in on Ad Diwaniyah.

During the sandstorm, deep strikes directed by JSTARS and AWACS aircraft had continued, but these close-in missions directed by Marine FACs with units on the ground had all but ceased while we were enveloped in orange dust. This morning they are back with a vengeance, firing TOW and Hellfire missiles from the Cobras and dropping laser-guided bombs on enemy armor and emplacements that threaten the Marine column.

We are only
seven days
into Operation Iraqi Freedom, and almost half the country and nearly all of its resources are in coalition hands. The 485,000-man Iraqi army is being mauled in every confrontation with American and British forces. More than eight thousand Iraqi soldiers have been taken prisoner and tens of thousands more have decided that they are unwilling to die for Saddam and have simply walked away from their defensive positions.

While some Iraqi units, like those at Najaf and An Nasiriyah, fight fiercely, and surrender ground reluctantly when confronted with overwhelming U.S. firepower, many others will engage for a few minutes, and in some cases a few hours, and then the soldiers quickly slip into civilian clothes and join the local population. It's not uncommon
for Marines sweeping through a trench line from which they have just taken fire to find the position littered with green uniforms, helmets, gas masks, empty magazine pouches, and black boots. And then, a few moments later, dozens of beardless young men with short, military-style haircuts, garbed in Arab dress, are just standing around with no apparent place to go. Everyone knows that just minutes or hours before, they were wearing the discarded uniforms. Yet stopping to detain these “civilians” will delay the Marines' movement north—and exacerbate an already strained logistics system if trucks have to be diverted from resupply runs to haul EPWs south to the prisoner-of-war camps.

Given that there have been a handful of well-publicized suicide attacks against the Marines and a good deal of “scuttlebutt” about phony surrenders resulting in Marine casualties, it's still amazing to some of my colleagues in the press that there haven't been more “civilian” casualties. In fact, there have been some—most notably during the close fighting in An Nasiriyah, when several carloads of civilians ignored orders to stop at a Marine roadblock or defensive position and were fired upon. That there have been relatively few such incidents is a tribute to the exceptional discipline of these young men. It's apparent to me, if not to all of my media colleagues, that the small-unit NCO leadership—corporals, sergeants, staff sergeants, and gunnery sergeants, the people who make the difference in a firefight—is exceptional.

So too is the compassion that these Marines are showing toward the foe and the Iraqi people. Since crossing the Euphrates, and leaving the trackless southern desert behind, we've been passing by or through increasing numbers of small villages, palm groves, harvested fields, and cultivated farms, many with livestock. Each time we halt for an hour or more, the Marine battalions and companies in RCT-5 and RCT-7 send patrols off to the flanks of the column, which now
stretches from just south of Ad Diwaniyah all the way back to the Euphrates. At any moment, now that the weather has improved, thirty or more squad- to platoon-sized combat patrols are deployed off the flanks of the two RCTs moving north up Route 1. Often, if there is no enemy contact, civil affairs, human exploitation teams, and medical personnel accompany these patrols to win some “hearts and minds” by providing limited emergency medical help, humanitarian rations, water, and even small amounts of fuel for tractors and irrigation pumps.

Shortly before 1000 hours, I am accompanying one such patrol into a tiny village about four hundred meters west of the highway. A single RPG had been fired from here at the lead elements of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines. It was an incredibly stupid, long-range shot that had detonated harmlessly fifteen meters short of the nearest Marine vehicle. Rather than leveling the eight or ten structures with fire from an Abrams 120mm main gun, the company commander ordered one of his 2nd Tank Battalion M-1s and an AAV to drop off the route and post an overwatch on the column's left flank in case the perpetrator showed himself again. When the RPG shooter moved to take another shot, the tanker, peering through his thermal sights, dropped him with a three-round burst from the Abrams' coaxial mounted machine gun.

The staff sergeant leading the reinforced squad on patrol orders his Marines up and across the field of waist-high wheat between the roadway and the one-story, dun-colored, brick and stucco buildings. As the fifteen Marines spread out and start across the field, the gunners in the tank turret and on the AAV up-gun traverse their weapons left and right searching for targets, prepared to respond in an instant if the Marines moving in the open are fired upon.

When the grunts, sweating in their protective gear and burdened down with weapons and ammo, reach the little hamlet, fire teams
conducting tasks to secure the area cover one another as two-man teams run from building to building, disappearing for a moment inside each one, then running out and yelling, “Clear!” There are a few chickens in the courtyard of one house, a half dozen sheep fenced behind another, and two emaciated cows and a few goats behind a wall. But no sign of the human inhabitants until one of the two Cobras dispatched to support this little patrol reports that there is a person on the roof of a building behind us and that several dozen people—apparently civilians, some of them women and children—are behind the gated wall surrounding the largest house at the end of the dirt street.

The staff sergeant orders his Marines to approach the structure cautiously and positions a G-240 machine gun off to one side as a base of fire. With the Cobras snarling overhead, wheeling back and forth over the little hamlet like giant angry hornets, he then dispatchs one fire team to check out the wall while another climbs to the roof of the building where the helicopters report seeing a person.

Within minutes both fire teams report. The one sent up to the roof found the headless corpse of a young male in civilian clothing. A smashed RPG was beside the body. The fire team leader brought back the only document found on the cadaver: a Saudi passport.

The other fire team counted nine adult males, eleven adult females, and nine small children behind the wall of the house at the end of the street. All but one of the men appeared to be well over the age of fifty. In a garage inside the compound the Marines also found a Ford tractor, a Toyota pickup truck, and a Kawasaki motorcycle.

One of the young Marines spoke some Arabic and one of the young women spoke a little broken English. By signs and gestures, she indicates that the tractor and pickup belongs to the head man of the village; that the Kawasaki belonged to the dead “foreigner” on the roof of her house; that they had all been told to gather in this courtyard
by that man and two other armed “foreigners” who had arrived early that morning by motorcycle; and that the other two had fled when the shot had killed the fedayeen on the roof.

Once this exposition is finished, the staff sergeant calls back to the tank on the radio that “the village is Alpha Sierra”—meaning “all secure”—and that his patrol is returning. Before heading out of the little cluster of homes, he warns his Marines to stay off the dirt road going out to the main highway, since it could be mined.

As the squad moves back out through the wheat field, the only young male adult in the small community follows us. He carries a small child, a little boy only about four years old who is obviously in pain. One of the fire team leaders gestures to the man to stop following them, but he persists. Finally, the squad's medical corpsman approaches the man and examines the boy. It is obvious to the corpsman that the youngster's left arm is broken. When the corpsman informs the staff sergeant of this, the squad leader allows the man and boy to accompany us.