War Stories (44 page)

I can't tell who is speaking, but the soldiers do as ordered. No one opens fire and the column continues its movement up the highway. I'm impressed. Green troops with loaded weapons hearing rounds go off or words like “taking fire” can easily overreact—and in this situation, several dozen civilian casualties could have resulted. Remarkably the reaction of these soldiers is what one might expect from troops who have already seen combat. Their training and discipline are already showing—and these guys have just gotten here.

With overhead cover from AH-64 Apache and OH-58 Kiowa helicopters, Jackson's column moves rapidly up the four-lane highway without interference—other than crazy Iraqi civilians who totally ignore all known rules of the road. On several occasions, Marine convoys from RCT-5 and Task Force Tripoli, headed south on the other side of the median, were apparently moving too slow for Iraqis going
in the same direction. The Iraqi solution was to cut across the median and proceed south in the northbound lanes at high speed. After several near-death experiences with oncoming Toyotas, SFC Terrigino, the scout platoon's senior NCO, asked for and received permission to replace the Humvee that was leading the expedition with a Bradley. The number of Iraqi “lane jumpers” dropped dramatically.

Just before dark we're south of Tikrit and the column halts for the night. As the armored vehicles pull off the road into an open field to establish a perimeter, SFC Terrigino, now back in his .50-caliber-equipped Humvee, swings by and asks if I want to ride with him while he scouts on ahead. Griff jumps into one of the other scout platoon Humvees, and both vehicles race down the empty highway looking for trouble. As we move, the Blue Force Tracker mounted in front of Terrigino shows the location of our vehicle moving north on the map, blue rectangles depicting the other vehicles in the battalion behind us, and two red icons representing possible Iraqi positions about four kilometers up the highway between us and Tikrit.

“These two symbols are a T-72 and an Iraqi BMP, reported by the helicopters,” Terrigino says, pointing to the computer screen. “We're going to find out if they are manned or just some abandoned Iraqi armor left beside the road.”

Terrigino halts his little motorized patrol about five hundred meters from the bend in the highway where the Iraqi vehicles were plotted and sends four soldiers up the hill on foot to reconnoiter the position. I put the night lens on my little camera. A half an hour later, the foot patrol reports back by radio: “The vehicles are abandoned. We've marked the exact location on the GPS so EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] can destroy them tomorrow.”

With that, we turn around and head back to the perimeter. Lt. Col. Jackson already has a CP tent up. Inside the TOC are computer and
radio consoles for operations, logistics, and fire support, with watch officers for each already at their stations. It's very impressive, and far more sophisticated than anything a Marine regiment has—much less a battalion.

When I ask Col. Jackson about it, he says, “Yes . . . we do have some neat stuff. And I think the younger soldiers really get a kick out of it. But I came from an ‘analog' Army—much like the Marine unit that you came from—with the old maps, acetate sheets, and grease pencils. Those are still great tools. But I wouldn't want to go to war without the digital equipment that we have now.”

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #40

      
With 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment

      
4th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

      
Bayji, Iraq

      
Monday, 21 April 2003

      
2300 Hours Local

Shortly after dawn this morning, SFC Terrigino and his scout platoon brought me and Griff to Saddam's hometown palace in Tikrit. The opulent mansion is now the headquarters for the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. The CO, Col. Don Campbell, took possession of the real estate yesterday from Brig. Gen. John Kelly, USMC, commander of Task Force Tripoli.

This is the third of Saddam's many palaces I've seen, but it's the only undamaged one I've been in. Uday's castle, about a kilometer north, is reduced to rubble, but this one is unscathed. For reasons unknown to anyone here, this particular palace was left off the CENTCOM target list.

Like all of Saddam's residences, this one overlooks some of the most beautiful scenery in all of Iraq. Perched high above the Tigris,
it's surrounded by irrigated orchards of fig and eucalyptus trees—and a very high wall topped with razor wire. An enormous swimming pool graces the south side of the ornate, three-story building. Carefully manicured gardens are terraced into the hillside to the east and south. On the west side, there is a six-car garage complete with an armored Mercedes limousine. No one seems to know what really happened to the other five cars, but one Army wag suggests that several Marine sergeants from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalions may be driving back to Kuwait in Mercedes sedans instead of their LAVs.

On the east side, wending its way through the terraces, a road leads down to the Tigris and an empty boathouse. One of the young Army specialists from SFC Terrigino's scout platoon suggests that the exterior of the place has all the accoutrements of a resort, and he's right. No matter where you stand on this property, it's impossible to see any other house or building. There is a feeling of privacy and remoteness.

Yet just out of sight in the surrounding neighborhood, there are homes without electricity, running water, or sewage systems. Saddam had to have been totally oblivious to the suffering of his people as he turned the country's oil profits into his own personal fortune—or he just didn't care.

Inside the edifice are more than seventy rooms, not counting closets still full of clothing and more than a dozen bathrooms with gold-plated fixtures. But for all the marble floors, rare hardwood paneling, and high-vaulted ceilings complete with murals, the place is positively tacky. Grotesque, handcrafted statuary and original amateurish paintings depicting Saddam as a Bedouin, an Arab sheikh, a horse-mounted warrior, a farmer tending his crops, adorn rooms with furniture that looks as though it was bought at the yard sale of a bordello.
The palace even has a movie theater and a modern Sony TV, but the microwave oven in the kitchen has to be at least fifteen years old. Beautiful tapestries cover many walls, and there are cabinets full of Limoges china with gold-leaf trim, but the rug covering the floor in the main dining room is a Romanian polyester knockoff of a Persian. Martha Stewart would not approve.

After our tour of what several soldiers call “the evil prince's haunted castle,” we mount up with Terrigino's road warriors and head back up the highway. His mission for the day is to find a permanent laager for Lt. Col. Jackson's battalion in the vicinity of Bayji. The colonel wants a spot where the unit will be relatively safe from roving bands of fedayeen and their “technicals”—the ubiquitous pickup trucks with .50-caliber machine guns mounted in their beds—and still have good access to the main highways that will allow his QRF to get in and out quickly if needed.

By late afternoon, Terrigino has found just such a spot: an abandoned Iraqi military base on a hillside overlooking Bayji and the rail marshaling yard just outside the city. The location has good clear fields of fire in all directions and grass instead of dirt to minimize the amount of dust and mud. Best of all, the location already has a bulldozed berm surrounding it, and unlike the desert south of here, the earth is soft enough to easily dig fighting holes. The scouts conclude that the site must have been a chemical warfare training facility, given the number of gas masks, decontamination equipment, training manuals, and atropine injectors left lying around. But when he calls in to report his find, suggesting as he does so that the watch officer check his location on the TOC's Blue Force Tracker, the sergeant is told that Col. Jackson has selected another site about five hundred meters from the “biggest ammo dump we've ever seen.” Terrigino checks the CO's location on his tracker and we mount up and head there.

When we arrive at the new battalion perimeter, Lt. Col. Jackson has again already set up his TOC in the large CP tent. He's just starting a meeting with all his company commanders, and several of them are clearly concerned.

While we were out looking for a suitable place for the battalion bivouac, a helicopter flying overhead spotted an enormous warehouse facility not far from the railroad tracks, and Jackson sent a troop of Bradleys to check it out. Their report stunned everyone. The cavalry commander said that the facility was actually an ordnance depot seven kilometers long by five kilometers wide that contained millions of rounds of every kind of ammunition known to man. Worst of all, it was easily accessible. There were no gates, and no guards, and every inch of barbed wire and chain-link fencing that had once surrounded this place—more than fifteen miles of it—was now gone. The place was wide open to anyone.

Jackson ordered night ambushes to be set on the avenues of approach to the ammo dump. His instructions were, “Do what you have to to keep anyone from getting into this place, because God help us if the fedayeen get their hands on this stuff.” As soon as his commanders departed to move their troops into position, Jackson was on the radio with Brigade HQ in Tikrit, advising them on what his troops had found and asking that additional ordnance specialists and engineers report to his unit in the morning.

Shortly after the meeting breaks up, Griff and I go outside to catch some sleep. I grab the hood of SFC Terrigino's Humvee. He will be leading the QRF if it gets called out in the middle of the night to assist one of the ambush units, and I don't want to miss capturing some good footage for FOX News Channel. Before rolling up in my poncho liner, I put the night lens on my camera—just in case.

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #41