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C
IVILIANS AND
S
AVAGES
T
he offensive in Ramadi had yet to start, officially, but we were
getting plenty of action.
One day, intel came in concerning insurgents planting IEDs along
a certain highway. We went out there and put it under surveillance.
We’d also hit the houses and watch for ambushes on convoys and
American bases.
It’s true that it can be difficult to sort out civilians from insurgents
in certain situations, but here the bad guys made it easy for us.
UAVs would watch a road, for example, and when they saw
someone planting a bomb, they could not only pinpoint the booby-
trap but follow the insurgent back to his house. That gave us
excellent intel on where the bad guys were.
Terrorists going to attack Americans would give themselves
away by moving tactically against approaching convoys or when
coming close to a base. They’d sneak around with their AKs ready
—it was very easy to spot them.
They also learned to spot us. If we took over a house in a small
hamlet, we would keep the family inside for safety. The people who
lived nearby would know that if the family wasn’t outside by nine
o’clock in the morning, there were Americans inside. That was an
open invitation for any insurgent in the area to come and try to kill
us.
It became so predictable, it seemed to happen according to a
time schedule. Around about nine in the morning you’d have a
firefight; things would slack off around midday. Then, around three
or four in the afternoon, you’d have another. If the stakes weren’t
life and death, it would have been funny.
And at the time, it
was
funny, in a perverse kind of way.
You didn’t know which direction they’d attack from, but the
tactics were almost always the same. The insurgents would start out
with automatic fire, pop off a bit here, pop off there. Then you’d get
the RPGs, a flurry of fire; finally, they’d scatter and try to get away.
O
ne day, we took out a group of insurgents a short distance from
the hospital. We didn’t realize it at the time, but Army intel passed
the word later on that the insurgent command had made a cell
phone call to someone, asking for more mortarmen, because the
team that had been hitting the hospital had just been killed.
Their replacements never showed up.
Shame. We would have killed them, too.
E
veryone knows by now about Predators, the UAVs that supplied
a lot of intelligence to American forces during the war. But what
many don’t know is that we had our own backpack UAVs—small,
man-launched aircraft about the size of an RC aircraft kids of all
ages play with in the States.
They fit in a backpack. I never got to operate one, but they did
seem kind of cool. The trickiest part—at least from what I could
see—was the launch. You had to throw it pretty hard to get it
airborne. The operator would rev the engine, then fling it into the air;
it took a certain amount of skill.
Because they flew low and had relatively loud little engines, the
backpack UAVs could be heard on the ground. They had a
distinctive whine, and the Iraqis soon learned that the noise meant
we were watching. They became cautious as soon as they heard it
—which defeated the purpose.
T
hings got so heavy at some points that we had to take up two
different radio bands, one to communicate with our TOC and one
to use among the platoon. There was so much radio traffic back
and forth that comms from the TOC would overrun us during
contact.
When we first started going out, our CO told our top watch to
wake him every time we got into a TIC—a military acronym that
stands for “troops in contact,” or combat. Then we were getting in
so much combat that he revised the order—we were only to notify
him if we’d been in a TIC for an hour.
Then it was, only notify me if someone gets injured.
S
hark Base was a haven during this time, a little oasis of rest and
recreation. Not that it was very fancy. It had a stone floor, and the
windows were blocked by sandbags. At first, our cots were
practically touching, and the only homey touch was the banged-up
footlockers. But we didn’t need much. We’d go out for three days,
come back for a day. I’d sleep, then maybe play video games for
the rest of the day, talk on the phone to back home, use the
computer. Then it was time to gear up and go back out.
You had to be careful when you were talking on the phone.
Operational security—OpSec, to use yet another military term—
was critical. You couldn’t say anything to anyone that might give
away what we were doing, or what we planned to do, or even
specifically what we had done.
All of our conversations from the base were recorded. There
was software that listened for key words; if enough came up, they’d
pull the conversation, and you could very well get in trouble. At one
point, somebody ran their mouth about an operation, and we all got
cut off for a week. He was pretty humiliated, and of course we
reamed him out. He felt appropriately remorseful.
S
ometimes, the bad guys made it easy for us.
One day we went out and set up in a village near the main road.
It was a good spot; we were able to get a few insurgents as they
tried passing through the area on their way to attack the hospital.
All of a sudden, a bongo truck—a small work vehicle with a cab
and a bed in the back where a business might carry equipment—
careened from the road toward our house. Rather than equipment,
the truck was carrying four gunmen in the back, who started
shooting at us as the truck drove across the fortunately wide yard.
I shot the driver. The vehicle drifted to a halt. The passenger in
the front hopped out and ran to the driver’s side. One of my
buddies shot him before they could get going. We lit up the rest of
the insurgents, killing them all.
A short while later, I spotted a dump truck heading down the
main road. I didn’t think all that much about it, until it turned into the
driveway of the house and started coming straight at us.
We’d already interviewed the owners of the house, and knew no
one there drove a dump truck. And it was pretty obvious from his
speed that he wasn’t there to pick up some dirt.
Tony shot the driver in the head. The vehicle veered off and
crashed into another building nearby. A helo came in a short while
later and blew up the truck. A Hellfire missile whooshed in, and the
dump truck erupted: it had been filled with explosives.
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