War Stories (45 page)

      
With 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment

      
4th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

      
Bayji, Iraq

      
Tuesday, 22 April 2003

      
2300 Hours Local

I hear the first shots at about 0300 and roll over to see what is going on—mostly listening for how close the firing is and evaluating whether I need to jump off the hood of Terrigino's Humvee and run for a fighting position. The hood of a Humvee is a great place to sleep unless someone is shooting artillery, mortars, or RPGs at your position. Not hearing the
tuk, tuk, tuk
of a mortar, I sit up and carefully put on my boots. I've been using them for a pillow.

High on the hillside I can see an occasional burst of red tracer—ours—from a Bradley or a Humvee-mounted .50-caliber. There is the lighter, faster cough of a 240-Golf machine gun and of course the very high crack of M-16s. The only enemy weapons audible are AK-47s—which means that the bad guys are definitely outgunned in this fight.

By the time I have my boots on and my poncho liner stowed in my backpack, SFC Terrigino has his platoon up and ready to move, their Humvee engines idling. The Bradley crew to our left and the M-1 on our right, both part of the QRF, are also ready to roll. But the word to ride to the rescue never comes. Within twenty minutes, the firing dies down, so I wander over to Col. Jackson's TOC to find out what's happened.

I find him inside on the radio to brigade headquarters reporting a successful ambush of a group of men with several pickup trucks who were trying to enter the ammo depot. He promises that I can go inspect the scene right after first light.

Shortly after dawn, SFC Terrigino and four of his scout platoon Humvees drive up to the ambush site. When we arrive, the platoon commander who triggered the ambush is reviewing with his soldiers what happened. The bodies of fourteen men, nearly all dressed in black, are lying on or near a rutted dirt road that enters the ammo dump from the east. According to the battalion S-2, who has collected identity documents from all or most, only two of the dead were Iraqi. Of the remaining twelve, four are Jordanian, three are Syrian, two are Egyptian, one is a Saudi, and the other two are Lebanese.

The foreigners and their two Iraqi guides had disembarked from two pickup trucks about two hundred meters from the Ammunition Supply Point (ASP) and walked straight up the road into the killing zone of a night-vision-equipped platoon-sized ambush. The carnage was completely one-sided. There were no American casualties.

We spend most of the rest of the day going through the biggest and most dangerously unsafe ammo dump I've ever seen.

According to the engineer officer dispatched by helicopter from Brigade HQ at Tikrit, the site contains more than five hundred ordnance bunkers and revetments and ninety-five steel structures filled to the top with every conceivable type of ammunition and explosive. Dry grass is growing right up to the door of every building and bunker—a major fire hazard.

Most of the ammunition is in very good shape; some of it—the Jordanian artillery rounds, the Italian land mines, and the Saudi small-arms ammunition—appears to be nearly new. In one shed, several hundred green wooden boxes bear the label “Ministry of Procurement, Amman Jordan,” with a manufacturer's delivery date of January 2003. In another shed we find cases of surface-to-air missiles: SA-7s, SA- 14s, and SA-16s.

The man-portable, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles and the tens of thousands of RPGs stored here create the greatest anxiety
among the soldiers conducting a quick inventory of the site. These weapons can bring down a military helicopter or commercial jet, and the RPGs can take out a Bradley. Fire enough of them at an M-1 tank and it'll go too.

When one of the brigade engineers has a spare moment, I ask him what he's going to do with all this stuff. His answer is honest. “I don't know. We haven't got enough TNT, Det-Cord, and blasting caps to blow all this. Worse yet, there are probably seventy-five to one hundred sites just like this one elsewhere around the country.” And then he echoes Lt. Col. Jackson words: “God help us if the terrorists get their hands on this stuff.”

But that may have already happened. As my camera documents, many of the surface-to-air missile and RPG boxes are open and empty.

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #42

      
With 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment

      
4th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

      
Bayji, Iraq

      
Saturday, 26 April 2003

      
1200 Hours Local

We spend most of April 23, 24, and 25 with the 3rd Battalion scouts patrolling the area between Tikrit and Bayji. Terrigino's troopers are eager to do what's right, and I continue the practice I started early in the war of letting them tell their own story on the air with FOX News Channel. As often as I can, I put a microphone up to the face of one of these youngsters and have Griff point the camera at him while he tells the American people what he does and how well he does it.

And just like the Marines before them, each time we dial in to FOX News Channel in New York, a crowd of soldiers gathers around our miniature TV set to learn what's happening back home or
elsewhere in the war. That's how we learn about the capture of other Iraqi leaders and how well things are going for U.S. forces north of us in Mosul and for the British in Basra.

On Thursday, one of SFC Terrigino's patrols followed a looter from a Republican Guard camp just south of the city back to his home. He had a truck full of sinks, toilets, and plumbing fixtures ripped out of the government facility and was apparently intending to make a new start in the home improvement business. The looter's house was then surrounded by scout platoon Humvees while Terrigino called the MPs and the battalion's intelligence officer. A truck was dispatched to the site and seven Iraqi males were taken into custody. Also taken were the stolen plumbing fixtures and a number of weapons and grenades that the scouts removed from a chicken coop.

Yesterday, a twenty-six-year-old Army 1st Lt., Osbaldo Orozco, became the first Fort Hood soldier to die in Iraq, when his Humvee flipped over while on a patrol. The incident prompted me to go back over to Saddam's palace in Tikrit and chat with Col. Joe Campbell about how he sees things shaping up.

“Our biggest challenge right now is civil affairs,” Campbell tells me. “We've got to get the infrastructure up and running again. We're working civil affairs to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi civilians,” he says, and then adds, “American soldiers are here to liberate. And it doesn't matter how long it takes.”

But it might well matter how long it takes.

He tells me, “The security of Tikrit and this part of Iraq, the home of Saddam Hussein, makes it especially tough. But our soldiers are up to it. They're conducting aggressive patrolling.”

When I ask Col. Campbell what the most difficult aspect of all this is for him, he says, “I think it's tougher now because you don't know who the enemy is. He's dressed like the normal civilian in the city, so
you really have to keep your guard up. And you have to be vigilant in terms of how you execute your missions and have to keep your eyes and ears open.”

When I return to our lonely outpost in Bayji, I learn from FOX News Channel that Tarik Aziz—Saddam's former deputy prime minister and the only Christian in the Baath Party inner circle—has been captured. As in so many other cases, he was fingered by an Iraqi civilian. The Iraqi people really do hate Saddam's regime.

It's late when we retire. Griff is exhausted, but before he takes off his boots and puts his head down on top of the Humvee next to the one I'll be sleeping on, he calls back to the FOX News Channel bureau in Kuwait to order more videotape—we're almost out. When he finishes, he tosses the Iridium sat-phone to me, reminding me that we have to do a live “hit” with the Friday night edition of
Hannity & Colmes
that, for us, comes before dawn on Saturday morning. I tuck the phone up against my chest, inside my flak jacket, so that its vibration will awaken me when they phone up from New York. That's where it is when the foreign desk calls to tell us, “Come on home.” But as welcome as those words are, as is so often the case in this war, it's easier said than done.

   
AFTER ACTION REPORT

      
Dulles International Airport

      
Washington, DC

      
Monday, 28 April 2003

      
1830 Hours Local

If getting there is half the fun, then arriving home is the other half. It's been that way every time I've come home from war: twice from Vietnam, multiple times from Central America, Grenada, and Beirut. But this return was really special. My wife, Betsy, has contacted all our
children and they are there to welcome Griff and me at Dulles Airport. It is the first time in nearly two months that we actually arrive at our intended destination, at the appointed time, and without casualties.

The odyssey didn't start out that way. The H-60 Black Hawk we boarded on the morning of April 26 didn't get anywhere close to Baghdad, our intended next stop. Instead, we landed at Tikrit South, a captured Iraqi air base—and eventually caught another H-60 for the long run down the Tigris to the new Baghdad International Airport. Actually, the only thing “new” about it is the name—“Baghdad” has replaced “Saddam”—but I suppose another new thing is the fact that it is now under U.S. management.