When 1 got there, they really had a bad attitude. They were underused.
Not that they didn’t benefit the war effort: They taught all the teams in the fifth group how to conduct close air support (which came in handy later), and the guys were also really physically fit, because they spent a lot of time in the gym.
So when I took over, the first thing I did was get them out and involved. We went clear out almost to the Jordanian border, way up in the northwest part of Saudi Arabia, and conducted operations in support of teams that were preparing for some activities. We were doing long-range cross-country movement using humvees and the GPS system.
GPS is a great system, one of the best things we had in DESERT STORM, because navigating in the bare desert can be close to impossible. With the GPS, you just set it up in the windshield and it told you which way to go. It was important to be able to use GPS across hazardous or rough terrain at night, or driving under blackout conditions with NVGs.
After we came back, about mid-January, we got the special reconnaissance mission.
About the same time, they called me in and said, “We want you to look into hide sites.” At that time, we had no hide site kit, no standard equipment. There was also no SOP on how you developed and did a hide site, so we had to conduct some research and development on our own.
We went out and actually dug hide sites, to determine the best way to go about it. What’s the ideal size for four guys to live in there? How are you going to sleep? How are you going to eat? Because once you go into the ground, you stay in there, for a week, ten days. You’re sleeping in there. You’re shitting and pissing in there. We had to figure out how to do all that....
The hide kits we developed weighed about a hundred pounds apiece with all the poles and the tarps. You have to keep in mind that all this was carried on our backs.
But then we got the mission, and we went into isolation; we prepped, we studied, we got all the current intel, and we brought in the SOAR guys that were going to fly the mission for us, to do route planning.
The mission was actually for us to get into a hide site and place eyes for real-time intelligence up on Highway 7, a major north-south highway that came out of Baghdad, went south down to An Nasiriyah, and then south-cast over to Basrah. It was a major line of communications. We’d be in direct support of the XVIII Airborne Corps commander. Our reports would go directly back to the SFLO, or the liaison officer—the SOCOR they called it, the Special Operations Coordinator that worked at the Corps headquarters. And he was in direct contact with the Corps commander.
The Corps commander wanted to know what the enemy was doing. Were they reinforcing the front? If they were reinforcing, what type of equipment and what type of troops? What sort of tanks?
The mission statement also said that we had to be able to identify signature items of equipment—equipment that is organic to certain units, and which will identify them. The T-72 tanks, for example, were used only by the Republican Guards. If you saw a T-72, you knew that you were dealing with them.
We got our plan together, and were sitting there, waiting and wondering, when the Battle of Khafji broke out—the Iraqis came across the border, and so we got called up there. The main Iraqi units had already pulled out, but our commanders felt there were still some isolated people left who may have been gathering intel, so we went building to building and door to door, kicking doors, clearing buildings. We really got boned up on our urban warfare, if you will. We never did find anybody, but every door you kicked down, you didn’t know.
We were in Khafji when we got the call: “We’re going to execute.” So we came back down to the Bat Cave, got all our gear together, and went up to King Khalid Military City, KKMC, where our task force was located. We spent a couple of days there, waiting.
One of the things we were waiting for was some special boots we’d ordered. American jungle boots leave a telltale print in the soft loam soil through which we were going to be walking, and we didn’t want to leave any tracks like that. Finally, the evening before we were supposed to go in, the brand-new boots arrived. Some of the guys said, “I’m not going to wear them. They’re not broke in.” So I took plastic MRE boxes, cut them to the shape of the boots, and taped them to the bottom of our old boots, so they wouldn’t leave a print.
WE were scheduled to go to a place about two hundred meters off Highway 7 and near a small river, the Shatt al Gharraf. There were also agricultural fields and canals and ditches. The ditches were dug by hand, so the dirt was piled up on the sides. Our intention was to use them for moving around, so if people were out there, we’d be able to get down the ditches and walk if we had to.
We were going to put in two hide sites. One of them would watch north-bound traffic, the other southbound. Periodically, about every four or six hours, we had to report back to headquarters, but if we saw something significant—Scud launchers or a company of armor or such—we reported it immediately.
It’s now February 23, 1991.
From KKMC, we loaded onto two Blackhawk helicopters, four guys on each one.
We had some really great SOAR pilots, the greatest pilots in the world. The SOAR guys had proven themselves time and time again. We knew they would get us in there. More important, I knew they would come and get me.
A guy named Kenny Collier, a chief warrant officer, flew the mission lead on my helicopter. I went up to him and kind of pulled him close. “Kenny, I have no doubt that you’ll get me in there,” I told him. “But if I need you, I need you to come and get me. Don’t leave me in there.” He got a big smile on his face. “I told you, Dawg, you call, we haul.”
We took off out of KKMC and flew to Rafhah, an air base up on the border, for refueling. We were going about 150 miles across the border into Iraq—a long way for a Blackhawk. The SOAR guys determined that by the time they flew us in, dropped us off, and returned, they’d have about ten minutes of fuel remaining.
We wanted to be actually crossing the border at about eight that evening. We were all hyped up, camouflaged: We’re ready, we’re going to war, we’re going in there. The guys are excited. We had trained our entire career for this, to support our country and do these types of missions. We had rehearsed. We had gathered all the intel. We had done very thorough mission planning.
We crossed the border at about eight—and then for some reason, we got recalled. They said, “Abort the mission. Return to station.” So we turned around.
To this day, I don’t know the reason for that recall, but whatever it was, we hadn’t even gotten back yet, when they said, “No, no, execute, execute.”
We couldn’t just turn around, because of the fuel, so we had to get off and refuel the helicopters, all of which put us behind our planning curve. The timing was very tight. If we took too much time on this end, that put us in a potential white-knuckle situation at the other end.
Kenny Collier had been a Special Forces soldier, so he knew the importance of time. They tried to make up some for us. They flew very low and they flew very fast. They may have been twenty feet off the desert floor and just streaming 160 knots or so, going across that desert floor.
I was on the headset with the pilot when I felt the helicopter jump up, and a big thump. I felt her shudder and I didn’t know what it was. It scared me half to death.
“What is that, Kenny? What is it?” I asked over the headset. And he was calm as could be, which really impressed me. We’d hit a sand dune and ripped the rear wheel off the back landing gear. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We just hit a sand dune. We’re all right.” Which calmed me right down.
Because of the delay, the helicopters lost their GPS satellite coverage for a time.32 They had to use some sort of backup navigational system.
“I can’t guarantee you that I’ll put you on the exact spot where you wanted to go,” the pilot told me.
I said, “Well, Kenny, you get me as close as you possibly can, and we’re going to go on with the mission.”
As we a
pproached the target area, he made a few “false insertions”—that is, he would lift, come up high, and intentionally get picked up on radar, then he would touch down and sit there for ten seconds or so, so if the enemy came out to find out what was going on, they’d find nobody there. We did a couple of those, and then finally, he stayed low and swooped in, and we rolled out. And then they were up and gone.
It was an eerie feeling as they were going away, because you could hear the blades propping quieter and quieter, and you realized that you were one hundred and fifty miles in the enemy’s backyard.
ONE of the questions we’d asked intel was, “Are there dogs in that area?” They’d told us there weren’t. The Arabs don’t like dogs. They consider them filthy animals and they don’t own them.
However, while this is true for Arabs who live in the city, the country Arabs—the Bedouins and the farmers—have dogs for the same reason our farmers do. They use them for security. So there were dogs out there. As we rolled off the helicopter and they flew out of sight, I thought we’d landed in a pound. You could hear dogs howling all over the place.
Once the helicopters were out of earshot, though, the barking faded, and we realized they were reacting to the sound of the helicopters and not necessarily to our presence.
The first thing we did was to move off maybe a hundred meters and set up a little defensive perimeter and just listen. It’s a tactic to take in the night sounds, to let your eyes and ears adjust to your environment. There was nothing but silence, which is what I wanted to hear.
I turned to my weapons sergeant: “Bring out your GPS. Let’s see if we have some coverage now.” We did. We were actually north of the area in which we wanted to be, but not far, maybe a mile or two. However, each individual on my team had a rucksack that weighed in excess of 175 pounds, which is extremely heavy. That included our two hide-site kits, twenty-five pounds for each guy. Every team member had five gallons of water—that’s forty pounds. Each guy was carrying radio equipment.
I went on a leader’s recon with my weapons sergeant. We found the area we wanted, determined where we would put our hide sites, went back, picked up the team, and brought them into the area. We pulled out our dehandled shovels and started to dig, and the first thing we realized was that though we had rehearsed in Saudi Arabian sandy loam, this soil up here was agriculture soil. It was hard. There was no way we were going to dig a hide site before dawn with just a dehandled shovel.
The other team, under team sergeant Charles Hopkins, moved back a little bit, found some softer soil, and dug down, but when we tried to do it, too, it became apparent we were going to run out of time. Since we had to get under cover, we decided to put our hide site in one of the ditches that crossed the area. We laid our supports and used that ditch as our hole; we camouflaged it with sandbags up the front as best we could; got some vegetation to put on top of it, and brush, too; and did what else we could in the time we had.
We knew traffic going up and down the highway would never be able to see anything out of the ordinary. It blended in.
Now, we thought that the farmers in Iraq operated the way they do in the States. A farmer plants his fields, then goes out once in a while to check his crops to make sure things are going on. But he’s not out there every day looking. However, in this part of Iraq we failed to take into consideration the fact that their technology is very far behind ours. The kids don’t sit in the house and watch TV and play video games. They don’t have TVs and computers. They play out in the fields. We didn’t realize that.
So we were inside the hide sites at first light, four of us in each hide. One guy was on watch at a peephole (Sergeant James Weatherford); one guy recorded what was going on; and the other two guys basically rested. I was one of the guys resting. I had my eyes closed; but I was aware of what was going on, and heard Weatherford say, “Man, there’s a lot of activity out there. There’s people along the road.”
There was a lot more going on than we had anticipated.
About nine o’clock in the morning, we started hearing children’s voices. And Weatherford said, “There’s kids out there. They’re out there playing.”
They got closer and closer, and as they started getting louder, I got concerned. And then all of a sudden, the sounds stopped. It got quiet. The children came up; and they actually looked into the peephole where Weatherford was on watch. They looked inside and they saw this guy all camouflaged up, looking back at them, and they gave a little scream and jumped back.
At the same time, two of my soldiers came out of the back side of the canal, carrying silenced MP-5 submachine guns and silenced pistols. The kids saw them and took off.
“Chief, what do we do?” my guys asked. “What do we do?”
Now, there’s no doubt in my mind that if I had told them, “Don’t let those kids get away. Shoot them,” they would have done it. And we’d been cleared to do that, if any civilian came in and compromised the mission.
Two of them were girls, maybe seven or eight years old, and one was a boy, younger. It was an instant decision. “No, don’t shoot them,” I said.
I was not going to shoot children.
Several things probably went into that. I have a Christian background. I had children of my own about that age. It just wasn’t in me to shoot children. Whatever happened to us, I was willing to accept that. If they were going to bring in forces, I could defend myself. We had weapons, and I knew we could bring in close air support and that we could get out of there. But I wasn’t going to shoot children.
The kids ran off toward a little village not too far away. We brought up our SATCOM radio and called for immediate extraction. We said, “Hey, we’ve been seen. We got caught. We need to get out of here. Our positions have been compromised.”
While our guys were working on the exfiltration, nobody from the village came back to investigate. I had no idea if the kids had told somebody about us—or if maybe they thought they had seen a boogey man. But after they ran off, nobody came to check us out. At that point, we determined that even though the hide positions were compromised, maybe the mission itself wasn’t.
So we moved back up this canal to another area, and set up again. When nobody came, we canceled the emergency exit.
“Look,” I said, “I feel pretty secure. Nobody’s come. We moved out of the area. We’re going to continue with the mission. At nightfall, we’re going to find another area and get in and continue on.”
All day, we continued to watch, to monitor the highway, to report the traffic. At 1200, we sent back information based on what we’d seen.
Shortly afterward, I was lying on a mound of dirt, watching the road with some binocs, and I caught something out of my peripheral vision back to the side. I looked back and there were two kids, but this time they had an adult with them. I slid back into the ditch real quick, but I knew in my heart that they’d seen me. Even so, I was hoping, well, maybe they didn’t. And I told the guys, “Look, I think we just got... somebody’s just seen me.” And Buzzsaw (Robert) DeGroff scurried up on the side and checked things out. By that time, the folks were moving toward us. “Yes,” Buzzsaw whispered, “here they come.”
I came out of the hide to talk to them. The adult had on a Palestiniantype checkered headdress, and they were all looking at me; and so I gave them my best “Salaam ala’ikum,” and spoke to them in Arabic, thinking of what the intel guys told me: They may be friendly, they may be indifferent. I was thinking hard, hoping in my heart that that was the deal.
Again, the thought of killing these people—that wasn’t going to happen. They were unarmed, they were civilians, there were two kids.
Then they took off real fast, moving backward. This time, we weren’t as lucky as before. It was just a matter of twenty minutes or so when people started coming.
All of a sudden, these teenagers started approaching, a gang of them, maybe fifteen or twenty getting close to us. They were just teenage kids and were ignorant of what was going on. So I spoke to th
em in Arabic. I told them to stop, to get away, to leave us alone. And finally I held up my gun, and when they saw that, they scattered.
I decided to move out.
By this time, other civilians were coming, a lot of them, and pulling up on the road were five vehicles—three deuce-and-a-half military transport—type trucks, a Toyota Land Cruiser, which served as a command-type vehicle, and a bus. The next thing we knew, an Iraqi company was unloading from them, probably a hundred-plus people. Pretty soon, all of them were out there on the road, talking.
At this time, we were all looking at each other: “Hey, we’re in deep shit.”
We called for immediate exfiltration, but they said, “Well, it’s going to be a while before we can get extra birds in there. We’re going to line up close air support for you.”
I said great.
It was time to implement our emergency destruction plan—to make a pile of all the stuff we couldn’t take with us and get rid of it. The engineer already had a block of C-4 made up with a one-minute time fuse on it. He reached in, pulled out the igniter, and we put it down. 1 saved one radio from the pile, an LST-5, because it was a SATCOM radio, but it also did double duty as a UHF radio for talking to aircraft. You screwed a whip antenna about the size of an ink pen into the top of it and it went to UHF. I could call close air support on it.
All the other equipment went into the rucksacks.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi army guys were starting to maneuver on us—coming up this side and that sidc—and some civilians had armed themselves, farmers with their hunting rifles and such. If somebody came into your backyard, you’d go out to defend it. That’s what they were doing.
At this point, the ground war had started, but we didn’t know it. We hadn’t been told when we went in, “Hey, the ground war is going to start at midnight.”