Posted on 09/14/2003 5:24:31 PM PDT by Ex-Dem
TIKRIT, Iraq, (Agencies): Your average American soldier in post-war Iraq may want better food, more rest time and above all to go home, but the infantrymen out on night patrol in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit have only one wish - to get shot at. The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment swear they have divine protection and say the easiest place to be attacked is in what they call ‘RPG alley.’ The mile-long main street’s two-storey homes, cafes and furniture shops are daubed with ‘Saddam is our leader’ graffiti and the road is holed by grenades.
But the young and middle-aged soldiers sit tall or stand up in their open Humvee vehicles along what has become Tikrit’s front line, daring the anti-American guerrillas who have killed or wounded US soldiers almost daily throughout Iraq to try their luck with them. As the convoy slowly turns into the street, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell ends the sports banter and the jokes about his major almost falling from the truck with a curt, ‘OK guys, heads up.’ It is after curfew, and only the low hum of the engines and occasional animal squeal can be heard.
Russell’s men snap their black night-vision goggles over their eyes, train their rifles with white lights on roofs and rumble along at five miles (eight km) an hour past dark side-streets that are ideal for hit-and-run assaults. After several passes on one moonlit night this month, Sergeant Gilbert Nail, 31, grumbled that his enemy had stayed indoors. ‘Only the cats are fighting,’ he said.
‘We want the enemy to show himself. And when he does we deal with him,’ said Russell, who leads the convoy’s first vehicle and is charged with hunting Saddam in Tikrit. ‘I want to show them that there is no place we will not go.’ The risky tactic to lure out Saddam die-hards is the US army’s answer to an intensifying guerrilla war in Iraq, where the tanks and fighting vehicles of the world’s only superpower can do little to stop a few men firing from the shadows.
Commanders in the area say such nightly patrols, combined with pre-dawn house raids, have wrested the initiative from the guerrillas and provided intelligence that makes them confident they are closing in on Saddam. For the convoy riders, their success is thanks to God. The soldiers often explain they overcome their fear on patrol by reciting their officer’s refrain: ‘We are immortal until God decides otherwise.’ Russell, a 40-year-old teetotaller from Oklahoma with five children, strums hymns on a guitar before a sortie and reminds his men nobody has been wounded on one of his convoys.
A letter from his eight-year-old daughter inspires the commander. ‘Dear Dad, hope you kill the bad guys. Love, Patricia.’ But it is his unswerving faith that drives him through RPG alley. ‘I truly believe we are protected by God,’ he said. Russell, like all the soldiers, says he respects the Muslims of Iraq and that his fight is only against the guerrillas. His own conviction has been fortified by two episodes when rocket-propelled grenades slammed into vehicles in his battalion.
One failed to blow up when it hit a stack of water bottles, which wrecked the grenade’s activation device. The second barrelled between two rows of soldiers sitting opposite each other and flew out the other side of their vehicle. The chaplain of the battalion, whose official motto is ‘Regulars by God,’ reinforces the unit’s conviction that God is on their side, seeing the war in the same way President George W. Bush has presented it: good versus evil.
Captain Xuan Tran, a Vietnam refugee distributes books entitled ‘Bullet-proof Faith’ and thanks God for protecting the unit at Sunday service sermons. ‘We are fighting darkness here, we are fighting the devil,’ he said. But not all the battalion’s soldiers are believers. After one RPG flew over his head, Specialist Ian Mastro asked to leave Russell. He volunteered for 12-hour overnight sentry duty so that he no longer has to leave the base.
With an unlit Marlboro hanging from his lips, Mastro, 25, retells how Russell jumped from his truck and strode straight into the middle of a well-lit intersection taunting the unseen assailants. ‘Is that all you got? Is that all you got?’ ‘I had to get out of there,’ Mastro said. ‘I can’t deal with that whole being stupid sitting around trying to be shot at. Man, it was scary.’ His replacement, Specialist Jeffrey Barnaby, 25, served under Russell in Kosovo and said he trusts him with his life.
A pint-sized soldier with thick-rimmed, army-issue glasses, Barnaby also believes he has protection from above. Hours before his grandmother-in-law died on the eve of his deployment, she promised him her spirit would work with angels to protect him in Iraq. It was the first time Barnaby had cried since he was 10 years old. ‘I feel like I could go out there with no protective gear,’ he said. ‘They could shoot a thousand rounds and they still would not kill me.’
Also: TIKRIT: Iraqi security forces and US Army military police swept into a desert village outside Saddam Hussein’s hometown Sunday and arrested members of a gang accused of kidnappings, robberies and carjackings on a main road in the north of the country. As dawn broke, more than 70 heavily armed, American-trained police officers accompanied by a few dozen MPs surrounded a tiny hamlet about 20 miles northeast of Tikrit and stormed its half-dozen mud-brick homes.
Their targets were five members of an extended family that had for years been sought for a variety of crimes but managed to elude arrest. Tikrit police said that after the US-led invasion and collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, similar gangs grew more active around this central Iraqi city. ‘They have been carrying out carjackings, conducting illegal checkpoints, kidnapping and rapes,’’ said Lt. Col. David Poirier, commander of the 720th MP Battalion from Fort Hood, Texas. As attack Apache helicopters hovered overhead, the joint police team found their targets and two other wanted felons who had escaped from prison in the chaos after Saddam was ousted. They discovered a number of automatic weapons, two stolen cars and a box full of money.
‘This is very important for Iraqi police,’’Poirier said. ‘Prior to the war they felt they were not supported enough in cleaning this up. Now with our support they are able to affect some change in this area and it will really help the people who traverse this road between Tikrit and Kirkuk. There have been several carjackings and attacks along this highway.’’
The raid was the second in as many weeks along the dusty villages lining the foothills of the Jabal Hambin ridge. Two weeks ago a joint Iraqi-US strike team arrested 27 people and confiscated stolen vehicles. Many of the men involved in the raid have been trained by the MPs. Tikrit and its surrounding province has about 1,500 Iraqi police officers.
In any case, these boys have got some serious moxy, the kind that puts Jihadis to shame.
Your average American soldier in post-war Iraq may want better food, more rest time and above all to go home, but the infantrymen out on night patrol in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit have only one wish - to get shot at. The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment swear they have divine protection and say the easiest place to be attacked is in what they call ‘RPG alley.’
US troops and Iraqis taking out the enemy together. Protected by prayer, ping.
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