But the Iraqis did know it, and that’s what must have gotten them so excited.
They were also probably overconfident. They didn’t realize what they were up against. They probably thought we were a downed air crew—easy pickings—and they could just come out there and grab us.
Anyhow, we set the charge on all our sensitive and classified equipment, and then threw the rest of our rucksacks on top of that to lighten the load. All we had on was load-bearing equipment—just the nylon straps on which you clip your ammo pouches, your canteens, and so forth. I stuffed an MRE into my pocket and had a night-vision device hanging around my neck. We kept a single GPS system that contained our egress route; all our way points were in it.
Then we pulled the time fuse on the C-4 and ran as quickly as we could back up one of the canals. Suddenly, we hit an area where the canal got shallow, and there was a turn. We were basically stuck in this elbow in the canal.
When the charge went off, the Iraqis were less than a minute behind us, and close air support was twenty minutes out. I knew we were in some deep shit. A company-sized element was maneuvering on us, trying to outflank us.
As soon as the charge went off, we came under heavy fire. We waited. We held our fire.
It wasn’t easy, though. The most accurate fire didn’t come from the soldiers. The Bedouins were hunters, and they were good.... I mean, kicking the dirt around our heads.
As the soldiers came in, they moved in groups of four or five, walking upright, looking and holding their guns up to the ready. They had on low-quarter shoes, office shoes. These were not front-line troops, combat soldiers; they were office workers. They’d been told to grab their guns and go out and get us.
A U.S. infantry squad would have kept a low profile, doing fire-maneuver and bounding and going off to position, but these guys were just standing upright. That was to our benefit.
Buzzsaw said, “Do we fire? Do we fire?”
Finally, I said, “Yes, open fire.”
Nobody did anything for a while, because everybody was sort of reluctant to get it going. They knew that once we started shooting, we were in deep trouble. So I gave it again: “Fire.”
Buzzsaw opened up with his 203 (a 40mm grenade launcher attached to an M-16). The other 203s opened up. The grenades went out and landed among the Iraqis. All of a sudden, a guy’d be out there with tattered clothing staggering around. The rest of them had dropped. You wondered what in the world was going on.
My guess is that in that opening volley, we eliminated probably forty of them.
All of a sudden, we were in a hell of a firefight, but holding our own, desperate for close air support.
We had to set our SATCOM radio back up in the UHF mode so we could talk to the aircraft. We set up the SATCOM dish, then went to put in the whip antenna. We had lost it.
It seems that when things go bad, they go really bad. We were in the midst of a firefight, and we didn’t have any way to talk to the aircraft.
But sometimes you get lucky. Sergeant DeGroff just happened to be carrying a PRC-90 survival radio. He pulled it out, turned to Weatherford, my communications sergeant, and said, “Hey, will this thing work?”
Weatherford looked at it. “It’s a line-of-sight radio,” he said. “1 don’t know if it’ll work or not. I doubt it. Not unless somebody’s in the area to pick it up.”
The air support was out there. We could hear them over our SATCOM; they were calling for us, but we couldn’t get them back. So they flew around without finding us.
After a while, one of the sorties took out a nearby bridge over the river because he didn’t have anything better to do, and that actually helped us. A lot of civilians had come out for the show, and there were women and children out there, but once things started blowing up and they realized bombs were being dropped, the civilians fled.
About that time, we moved over into what 1 guess you’d call Plan B. We had school-trained snipers on our team, good-quality people; and as the Iraqi troops got up and tried to maneuver, we’d drop them. And we just stayed down in the ditch, which was probably the most secure place we could be. Had we gone up out of it, it would have been the end of things.
For a little while, things got quiet enough for DeGroff to pull out the PRC-90. He made a call over it and picked up an AWACS. And I’ll tell you, when that voice came back over it, it was just miraculous. I can’t use any other word. It was miraculous that we had a PRC-90 radio—fifties-vintage technology. But it worked, and it saved our skins.
Pretty soon, they got a forward air controller to talk to us, and then they started sending sorties of F-16s. F-16s are not your ideal close air support platform, but they were the ones that could get there the quickest. So the -16s got on the Guard net, and we could talk to them directly on the PRC- 90 radio. We used it to call close air support the rest of the day.
We still had a problem: We were in the midst of a firefight. We were taking fire from the flanks. We had to direct the planes in for close air support—there were a pair of them. But they couldn’t spot our position.
We didn’t bring smoke. We had pin flares, but it was the middle of the day, so pin flares didn’t work. We did have signal mirrors, so we did what we could with them. The two F-16s flew over, and we were huddled down there in the ditch, trying to flash them with the signal mirrors.
That’s when it came in handy that these guys had just taught close air support to the entire theater.
Buzzsaw said to the F-16 pilots, “Look, this might sound strange, but I want you to fly from the moon to the sun.” Though it was about one o’clock in the afternoon, the sun and the moon were both out there at the same time. “When you’re above me, I’ll tell you. ”
So they came around, and that’s exactly what they did. One of the aviators picked us up, identified our position, and relayed it to the other. They went through a long conversation about our precise position, but once they’d done that, we were in business.
Meanwhile, some of the Iraqis had gone out there on the highway and were flagging down other vehicles, trying to get more people into the fray. It happened that an entire convoy of military vehicles, mostly deuce-and-a-halfs, was passing about then, and they got them to stop. So when our first strikes came in, they also destroyed the convoy—a lot of secondary explosions came off those deuce-and-a-halfs.
After that, vehicles would come down the highway, and people would try to flag them down, but they’d see bodies burning and wouldn’t stop. They’d keep on going. They’d say, “I’m not going to get involved in that.”
Later, I found out that one of the F-16 flights had picked up a column of armor coming into the area and had taken them out on the road before they came close to us.
However, that still left us with a lot of folks out there on one flank that was real hot, and other folks on the other flank, and I was up directing the fire, shifting back and forth. It was working very effectively, and 1 was very pleased: The guys were doing a tremendous job knocking off targets, keeping calm, saving the ammunition. Nobody stood up, like you see in movies, shooting full automatic from the waist. It was very calculated—lowering the barrel, taking a sight picture, pulling the trigger, and dropping the target.
But still, one of the flanks was very hot. We were really getting a lot of fire off it. We had to call in a close air support mission with cluster bombs. It was going to be close—what we call danger-close, which is anything within a thousand meters. It was maybe two hundred meters—not far at all.
We knew there was a risk—there always is, particularly with cluster bombs—that those cluster bombs would get the friendly forces. And that scared the shit out of me as much as the enemy soldiers did, getting blown up by our own Air Force.
But we called in the close air support on the flank. They came in, and again, it was almost miraculous. It was such an effective strike. The cluster bombs came down—looking like they were going to drop right on top of us—and then the clam shells opened up, and we could hear
the bombs from down in the ditch.
When cluster bombs hit, they start ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba; it works into a crescendo, then tapers back down. And that’s what happened. The bombs came right across and eliminated probably a platoon-worth of folks over on the flank that had been giving us so much trouble.
We did the same on the other side.
Then what worried me most was the ditch itself. It wasn’t straight. It was twisty. If you tried to look down it, it wasn’t like looking down a railroad track. You could only see maybe ten meters before it twisted out of sight.
By that time, I knew they couldn’t come in on the flanks unless they started using fire maneuver and maybe brought in heavier support—but if they wanted to, they could come in force down the ditch and overrun us in really quick time.
Another air strike was coming in, and we called it right down this ditch. As soon as they lifted, my intel sergeant, Sergeant Robbie Gardner, and I went shoulder to shoulder (that was about the width of the ditch) back down the ditch, hoping to catch them by surprise. And we did.
We went maybe fifty meters and came up on the Iraqi point element coming up the ditch, but they weren’t going anywhere just then, because the strike had got them down; and their guns were lying by their sides.
We came around, at the ready, and then we were face-to-face. Before they could pick up their guns, we were able to eliminate them.
We then walked all the way back down to the place where we had loaded up our rucksacks, and we found bodies all through the ditch. I recall coming up on one guy in particular. His leg was mangled and blown off, and he was about dead, but he was still breathing heavily. We got close to him and moved the gun away. He took his last breath, and that was it, he was gone. It was profound. It didn’t strike me so much then as later, when I looked back.
We went all the way down to where we’d blown the rucksacks because it was getting into evening now and it gets cold in the desert. We dragged out some Gore-Tex jackets and any kind of chow that we could find. Although the jackets had been blown up by cluster bombs and our own explosion, it would still provide some warmth. We grabbed some stuff, moved back up into our fighting position, and hooked back up with the guys. By this time, the firefight had become less intense.
There was a kind of rhythm. A sortie would come in and then leave, and there’d be a lull when we didn’t have air cover. At that point, the fireworks would pick up. Once a squad-size element—maybe five or six people—stood up and actually charged us, giving out this crazy battle cry: “Hey tetetetetetete.” It was just suicidal for them, because we were able to pick them off as they were coming in.
The Iraqis were actually pretty game early on, but as we got into the evening and the F-16s had hit them a few times, I think we destroyed their morale. They’d thought this was going to be easy pickings, this air crew out there, and all of a sudden they ran into heavy resistance. There’re the M- 203s. There’re expert marksmen. And there’s close air support, with F-16s coming in. And so the later it got, the more the battle died down.
After nightfall, I put on my night-vision goggles, looked out into the battle area, and didn’t see any movement whatsoever.
Then we got word that our exfiltration was twelve minutes out.
I couldn’t help but think of Vietnam then. One lesson we’d been taught was that the North Vietnamese, knowing there’d be a rescue attempt, would lie in wait. That way they had a bigger target.
Thinking of that, I decided not to give the Iraqis the chance to do the same thing.
Back behind us, maybe another three hundred or four hundred meters, was a berm that I had identified. We moved out and did a retrograde operation across to the other side of the berm. I wanted to put some cover between the Iraqi force and the helicopters when they landed, to prevent the Iraqis from stepping up.
Because the helicopters were flying low, we couldn’t talk directly to them. We had to talk through the F-16 that was above us, and he would relay to the helicopter. The F-16 guy came through: “Give me your exact location so that the birds can pick you up.” I turned to the weapons sergeant, who had the GPS, to get a reading. But when he pulled it out, it turned out that it was ruined. It had gotten busted up when he had fallen during the fight.
In my mind, I was seeing these guys coming in and getting the shit shot out of them. But then I remembered that that old PRC-90 radio had a beacon on it. So I said, “Can they pick up that beacon?”
They said, “Well, turn it on.”
Buzzsaw kicked on that beacon, and within a few minutes we heard the wok-wok-wok and they swooped, and almost landed on top of us. I bet it didn’t take us ten seconds and we were off the ground.
And it wasn’t until then that it struck me that we were very fortunate. We had had an Iraqi company on top of us, and we had been able to get out of there. It was a tribute to the Special Forces A Team, and to the training that we had gone through.
Later, it struck me exactly what had happened to us and what we had done. I’m sure that battle is still on the minds of those people in that village today. One thing that personally satisfies me is that somewhere there are some kids, probably teenagers now, who are leading productive lives and don’t know how close they came, just a decision away, to being shot.
Just before we got ahold of these F-16s, two of the guys, DeGroff and Dan Kostrzebski, one one side of the ditch, one on the other, turned around and waved good-bye to each other. It was like: This is it, we’re not going to get out of here.
And one of the things that struck me at the time, and particularly later— one of the gravest responsibilities of a ground commander—is that you are responsible for the lives of men, both losing them and taking them. Losing your own and taking from the enemy.
It’s a grave responsibility, and I remember thinking, “We’re gonna get overrun here, and if we do, I hope I’m one of the first guys that you’re taking out, because I’m not gonna be able to stand it, fighting in this ditch and watching my guys die in front of me.” But thankfully it never got to that.
XIV
THE FACE OF THE FUTURE
Carl Stiner:
One of the proudest moments of my tenure as Commander in Chief of USSOCOM occurred during the spring and early summer of 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf War. It was called Operation PROVIDE COMFORT. Within a few short weeks, special operations forces, allied with many other wonderful organizations, saved thousands of lives. Our Special Operations troops used their soldier and special operator skills to bring peace, order, and stability instead of war, destruction, and violent change. In the end, the better part of an entire population of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, all of whom had been dispossessed from their homes, were able to return to their farms, towns, and villages.
These people were Muslims, but that is only marginally important. These people were people.
The story of how they were saved is important for all the reasons mentioned above. But it is also important for reasons that are more immediately relevant. In the war against terrorism, any Special Forces troops ordered into countries to root out terrorists and their bases will need the exact skills and training that stood them in such good stead in PROVIDE COMFORT. They will need to gain the trust, respect, and support of some significant part of the local population. They’ll need the locals to help them, and the locals will have to be shown that the SF teams are necessary to their own future well-being.
The difference between peacetime and wartime operations is always radical, and yet the similarities are greatly enlightening.
It will happen again and again: Our special forces will have to shoot at people at night and shake their hands in friendship the next day.
REBELLION
Tom Clancy:
As the Gulf War came to an end in the winter of 1991, Saddam Hussein faced rebellions in both his south and his north—continuations of deep-and long-running conflicts. Though President Bush gave these rebellions verbal support, actual American
aid was limited.
In the south, Shiite Muslim groups, long at odds with the regime and the country’s Sunni majority, rebelled, with Iranian help. Mutinying Iraqi army units and the Shiite majority in several southern towns formed the backbone of the revolt, which began in Nasiriyeh on March 2, 1991, and reached its peak around March 7, when Shiite groups controlled Basra, Amara, Kut, Hilleh, Karbala, Najaf, and Samawa. By then, Saddam had already organized a counterattack, reassembling Republican Guard units that had escaped the coalition onslaught in Kuwait. By March 16, the tide had decidedly turned against the rebels; a week later, the revolt had all but ended.
While Saddam’s attention was in the south, in northern Iraq the Kurds renewed their own rebellion. For generations the long-oppressed Kurdish tribes had considered their homeland to include parts of southern Turkey, northwest Iran, and northeastern Syria, as well as northern Iraq—Kurdistan. In the 1980s, they rebelled to make this homeland a reality. In a brutal counterattack, Saddam’s forces used nerve gas and defoliants, together with more “conventional” forms of massacre, to suppress this attempt at self-determination.
The always-fractious Kurds were too splintered among tribal and political groups to present a common front against the Iraqi leader, but continued oppression brought the different groups together, and the allied campaign against Iraq provided them with another opportunity to assert their independence. On March 4, 1991, a rebellion by the Kurdish Democratic Party under Masud Barzani liberated the Kurdish town of Ranya in northern Iraq, igniting a freedom movement across the region. On March 11, the major Kurdish factions met in Beirut under the banner of the Joint Action Committee of Iraqi Opposition to discuss a coordinated rebellion. On March 14, a day after the conference ended, 100,000 members of the Fursan—a Kurdish-manned Iraqi army auxiliary in northern Iraq—rebelled. In a series of firelights with regular units, the Kurds captured a dozen major towns and a hundred-mile arc of territory. By March 21, the insurgents controlled the provinces of Suleimaniya, Arbil, and Dahuk—the so-called Autonomous Region of Kurdistan. They also controlled much of Tamim and its capital city of Kirkuk, a region with considerable oil resources. The rebel guerrilla forces called themselves “Pesh Mergas,” or “those who stand in the face of death.”