Posted on 06/07/2003 2:17:31 PM PDT by BenLurkin
BAGHDAD - The rounds started popping in a village in the Baghdad suburbs called Al-Musaib, reputedly a holdout hotbed neighborhood of Saddam Hussein supporters.
The convoy of California National Guard trucks pulled off by the side of the road to recon a route into a U.S. Army base called "Dogwood," but by dark, there was no sign of the base. So it was time to get the convoy security out - M-16s and squad automatic weapons, light machine guns that fire a 500-round belt of 5.56 mm ammunition.
There it was again. No, not firecrackers. Small arms fire from Al-Musaib.
Tracer fire has a neat, flaming red trajectory, and it usually counts as a fifth round fired. So, it was reassuring that the tracer fire was arcing skyward into the night. It seemed like the locals were just celebrating, or letting the convoy know there were still plenty of guns in the neighborhood that weren't in American hands.
"You're sure that's not aimed at us?" Sgt. Richard Mosley of Palm Springs asked.
A few minutes earlier, a crowd of curious, friendly children crowded round the convoy truckers who were deployed at the side of the road, brandishing their M-16s.
"Saddam matt!" the children cried, crossing their throats with their fingers. "Saddam - Ali Baba!" Saddam is dead. Saddam is a thief.
The children scattered at the urging of Sgt. Jose Coby of Lancaster. The popping of AK-47 rounds in the area of the village a kilometer away was just enough to keep the halted convoy soldiers uneasy and on their toes until they moved up the highway to take up a position of safety for the night.
Crowds of restive Iraqis make for nervous soldiers anywhere in Iraq.
"Kind of like 'Black Hawk Down,' " said Staff Sgt. James Wilson of Ridgecrest. "Only it'd be 'Green HET down.' "
The night before, coming out of Baghdad, the convoy rolled about a half-hour's drive from a terrorist ambush in the suburb of Fallujah, where three GIs were killed and another six were wounded. The American soldiers killed the Ba'athist killers and held a half-dozen suspects for questioning.
All across Iraq last week, soldiers of the 1498th Transportation Company, many of them from the Antelope Valley, fanned out in convoys of their big trucks.
In their giant, 91,000-pound heavy equipment transport tractor-trucks, they carried armored vehicles.
They carried the armored vehicles to units that needed them near Baghdad, and then they drove the length and breadth of the country (about twice the size of Idaho) to pick up damaged military gear scheduled to be sent home.
"We were fired on, and we shot some rounds, too," said Lt. Paul Peterlin, who leads the 4th Platoon of the unit informally known as the "Big Awesome Truck Company" of the California National Guard.
"Everyone coming back from their missions has somewhat similar stories to tell," said Capt. Matthew R. Hook, commander of the 1498th.
The accounts included ambush or proximity to ambush, mined roads, occasional sniper fire, restive crowds swarming around vehicles and nomadic Bedouins roaming the desert looking for military gear to strip for domestic use.
"I'm not a church-going sort of guy, but I've got to say the good Lord was looking out for us a number of times," said Staff Sgt. Dave Hillyer, who led the first squad of the 1st Platoon, which escorted a Valley Press editor during the convoy.
"Fortune smiles on little girls, leprechauns and the 1498th," quipped Sgt. Doug Duhaime of Hesperia.
Also included in the stories of those returning from convoys were accounts of friendly encounters with Iraqis, often with children by the roadside; the frequent sighting of camel caravans on old "silk road" routes; a couple of soldiers who rode a donkey with the locals; and Mosley, who donated his family bicycle with "Baghdad or Bust" marked on it to a village youngster.
"Anyone would have done the same," he said. "I promised my daughter that I'd ride that bicycle in Baghdad, and then that I'd buy her a new one when I get home."
The "baker's dozen" convoy of 13 vehicles led by 1st Platoon leader Lt. Jorge Hernandez traversed 1,420 miles over seven days, moving through Basra in the south and Baghdad in central Iraq. Finally, the convoy led by Hernandez and squad leader Hillyer rolled on a recovery mission along the Saudi Arabian border, where Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia converge.
If the camel is called the "ship of the desert," the HET truck is the super-tanker. About 1,000 such trucks are stationed in the Operation Iraqi Freedom theater and can be seen on virtually all the roads and highways. Sometimes where there is little road to be found, such as in the drifting sandy wastes that form Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia. Along that forsaken stretch of hard-pan mixed with soft sand, the forces of Operation Iraqi Freedom invaded Saddam's shrunken desert empire.
"This is the ground we fought for when the 3rd Infantry Division came into Iraq," said Lt. Mike O'Hare, a cheerful West Pointer from Kingston, N.Y., who took the 1st Platoon on an Ahab-like quest to pick up his combat bridging vehicles.
The 1st Squad's initial mission was to depart from Camp Victory in Kuwait and carry eight tracked vehicles, armored artillery ammunition carriers, to a place called "Camp Taji" in the date palm country north of Baghdad.
Camp Taji was a former Iraqi air base and a base of the Republican Guard. The 4th Infantry Division was moving into the camp, occupying it after the thrusts in the north that were achieved by the 101st Airborne Division.
Military traffic crowded all the main roads, summoning up visions of what Germany and Japan must have looked like immediately after World War II. Where one Army division was pulling out to head home, another, the 1st Armored "Spearhead," was moving in.
Roads in Iraq range from super-highway-style autobahns, particularly near Baghdad and on the invasion route into neighboring Kuwait, to rough hardpan to virtually no road at all.
Among the drivers, 1st Platoon Spc. Peter Mavropoulos was one of the masters of nearly 1,500 miles of life as a lesson in bad road. But this specialist, and a couple dozen others on this mission, had prepared and worked tirelessly to be ready for this challenge of a lifetime of waiting or training "to get in the fight."
Waiting outside Camp Taji, Mavropoulos reflected on his experience as an independent trucker.
"It's taking longer to get onto the base than it does to get through the truck scales at Banning," he jibed.
For Mavropoulos, the journey to Baghdad and points north, east, west and south culminated a personal odyssey that began on Sept. 11, 2001. More than 20 years out of the service, he rejoined the National Guard "because I was outraged."
Forty-four years old at the time, he wondered if he were too old. Not if he could pass a physical, he was told. So he put his own independent trucking business in cold storage and moved fitfully toward his date in a combat zone, nearly two years after the terror attacks.
"It's all worth it, now that we're here in Baghdad doing our job," Mavropoulos said. "Most of the time we spent (training) at Camp Roberts was a waste, but now that we're here, I'll make this truck do things they didn't know it could do."
Mavropoulos surveyed the former Iraqi base, with its bombed hangars and cratered landing field. He smiled. "Now that it's a U.S. base, we'll make it nice."
Delivery of the armored vehicles delighted Lt. Col. Jim Matties, a Desert Storm veteran who now commands a field artillery battalion. The tracked ammo carriers would have .50-caliber machine guns installed on them and be used for checkpoint security in the Baghdad region, he said.
"It's kind of weird looking at this base," he said. "Most of the Iraqi soldiers just left their uniforms on their hangars. I wonder what it would be like to be a soldier and have people going through my stuff."
With the ammo carriers delivered to Taji, Hernandez's convoy found its way to Camp Dogwood, a headquarters for the famed 3rd Infantry Division that carried the brunt of the fighting. There, the unit got its mission to follow O'Hare and find his combat bridging equipment, which was left in the desert when the invasion was launched.
"When stuff broke down, we just had to leave it and go," said O'Hare, whose 54th Combat Engineers invaded Iraq attached to 3rd Infantry.
A combat bridge weighs 13 tons, and the M-60 tank chassis that carries it weighs another 46 tons, so the 59-ton package needed to be rolled onto the HET trucks or lifted with the M-60 tank chassis hydraulic system.
But to do that, the convoy would have to first drive 300 miles south to the fringe of the Saudi border, a desert wasteland where the sun can look like the moon at midday, where roads are both lost and forgotten and where soft sand can bog down a vehicle into immobility until stripped by nomads.
If there is a viable candidate for "Middle of Nowhere" bragging rights, it is probably Latitude North 30.09, Longitude East 47.13.
A global positioning system navigational aid pinpointed the convoy's location at the exact spot where the vehicle piloted by Mavropoulos and Duhaime became mired in soft sand, bogged under the 46-ton weight of the engineer tank chassis.
"It's simple," Mavropoulos said. "If we get stranded out here, we die."
One vehicle from the convoy was separated in a swirling sandstorm. One team detached its HET trailer for a few minutes to reconnoiter, all this to the frustration of Hernandez, a phlegmatic former Marine enjoying the pleasures of his first combat command.
"I told 'em to get their ass back to that trailer because the nomads were coming to strip it," he said. "They got back in the nick of time."
Then there was the ugly sand viper that slithered off into the shifting sands.
The team of Mavropoulos and Duhaime got their vehicle out of the soft sand by unloading the tank chassis. Then they used the M-60 to pull the truck out of the sand.
Sgt. Sterling Pinto, a New Mexico Navajo with the combat engineers, marveled at the ingenuity of the National Guard truckers.
"My lieutenant is really impressed," he said. "You guys are making it happen. We didn't think anybody could get down that road to pick up those vehicles."
One by one, appearing mirage-like in the desert, the heavy metal combat bridges materialized, like the obelisk depicted in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
The bridges and the tank chassis were loaded and carried out of the wasteland.
Along the 200-mile return trip from the Saudi border to home base, the truck driven by Mosley and Spc. Tracey Ford, broke down, losing two of its 48 wheels. The breakdown was fixed by chaining the wheel "bogeys" to the trailer.
The breakdown occasioned a four-hour jury-rigging job helped along by most of the 26 members of the squad.
"We realized that we had to work as a team, and in that case, everyone really helped one another," Hernandez said.
Rolling back toward home base, Mavropoulos said, "This is just the beginning. There's going to be a lot harder stuff ahead."
At the end of the eight-day trek, one soldier, Spc. James Edson of Palmdale, fell ill and was evacuated from Camp Virginia, another way station on the journey.
"We know this work is dangerous, and we don't have all the answers, but we were fortunate that when we had a (heat) casualty, it was so close to home," Hernandez said. Edson was taken back to Camp Victory, treated and released.
A sign along the Kuwaiti Highway, Route 80, known as the "Highway of Death" for the slaughter of Iraqi invaders during Desert Storm, put it neatly.
In English and Arabic calligraphy, the freeway sign said, "Life is Precious."
"NEAR THE SAUDI BORDER - The California National Guard convoy moves across desert along Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia. The Guard unit, staffed by Antelope Valley troops, recovered a half-dozen 60-ton portable bridge units that were left along the Saudi border during the invasion of Iraq. The convoy covered more than 1,400 miles on the trip. "DENNIS ANDERSON/Valley Press
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