Posted on 12/04/2003 5:32:45 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
NEAR DIWANIYAH, Iraq - The Stryker brigade rolled into Iraq on Wednesday and brought along the Fort Lewis weather.
It rained all morning on the five convoys pushing north across the border, making it a cold, nasty ride, especially for the soldiers riding in open Humvees.
"I just want everyone to make it there safe," Spc. Victoria Wright said before her convoy pushed off about 4 a.m. at the Kuwait-Iraq border.
She got her wish. When they arrived some 250 miles later at an Army camp south of Baghdad, nobody had been shot at and nobody had been hurt.
Many more will follow over the next several days as the Army's newest combat unit, built up at the South Sound post, makes its real-world debut.
"Everything we've done over the past three years is all going to pay off right now," 1st Sgt. Martin Haun told his soldiers from the brigade's signal company before they left Camp Udairi in Kuwait on Tuesday with the first day's convoys. Afterward he went around to each, shaking a hand and wishing safe travels.
It's likely to get much tougher today along a route that passes through areas where anti-coalition activity has been heaviest. Soldiers said that the ordinance disposal crew cleared eight roadside bombs along the route Tuesday.
Everywhere they go from now until they come home in a year, the soldiers will be watching out for threats: snipers, ambushes, rocket-propelled grenades, mines, car bombs and improvised explosive devices, set to go off in sequence.
For security reasons, The News Tribune isn't publishing the brigade's destination in Iraq until it arrives.
The soldiers in "Vinnie's Gun Truck" - the Humvee belonging to brigade headquarters commander Capt. Vinnie Bellisario - were heavily armed and ready for anything along the route Wednesday.
Bellisario and Capt. Matthew Pike, Sgt. David Williams and Spcs. Neil Clayton and Peter Gokey were among the convoy's rapid reaction force.
Their job, along with the Stryker vehicles riding along in each segment of the convoy, is to protect everyone else should they come under attack.
Bellisario and company mounted a .50-caliber machine gun on the roof and two squad automatic weapons on each corner at the rear of the vehicle. Gokey, the driver, has his sniper rifle, and the others have M4 and M16 rifles, plus Bellisario's and Pike's 9 mm pistols.
And they've got incendiary grenades, fragmentation grenades and, just in case, an AT-4 shoulder-fired antitank missile.
Soldiers passing by as Gokey and Clayton loaded up the rig Tuesday at Camp Udairi stopped and stared - either in awe of the firepower on a mere Humvee or to laugh at the "Beverly Hillbillies" motif.
In addition to the weaponry, it was loaded down with soldiers and a News Tribune reporter, all their gear, five boxes of MREs, bottled water and a seemingly endless cache of cookies that Williams got in a care package Tuesday from his wife back at Fort Lewis.
But for all that, the most exciting moment Wednesday came when Gokey fell asleep at the wheel.
It's no wonder. He's the headquarters armorer, and with everyone up to the hilt in weapons training the past two weeks, he'd been working from before sunup to well after sundown.
He got to bed late in the evening Tuesday and slept under the stars with the rest of the soldiers at the border. And like everyone else, he had to be up by 1 a.m. - even though the convoy wouldn't leave for another three hours.
So there he was, wheeling the Humvee down the highway in Iraq just after dawn. Everyone else in the vehicle was quiet.
That is, until it started to drift rather severely to the left. First it was the guys in the back, Pike and Clayton, and then Bellisario and Williams: "Gokey!"
Just in time, he snapped to and pulled hard to the right just a few feet before he would have hit the center guardrail. It was a fine recovery, with a little fishtail in the dirt for good measure.
"I heard all you yelling but for a second I thought it was part of my dream," he said during a rest break afterward.
It was the talk of the line.
"I thought you guys were done, I really did," said 1st Sgt. Dan Stroud, who watched the episode from the vehicle just behind the gun truck.
One Humvee did tip over not far past the Kuwaiti border. Apparently no one onboard was seriously hurt.
Much later Wednesday, as they finally pulled into the second-night destination, they laughed about it again.
"Someday, when you're like 59 or something," Bellisario said, "I'm going to call you up and say, 'Gokey! Wake up!'"
Staff writer Michael Gilbert is an embedded journalist with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, the Army's first Stryker brigade. He can be reached at mjgilbert41@yahoo.com.
(Published 12:01AM, December 4th, 2003)
TNT in Iraq The News Tribune has sent journalist Mike Gilbert to Iraq with the first Stryker Brigade from Fort Lewis. Follow his reports in Iraq. • 1st Stryker Brigade
Good Lord, you gotta love these kids!!!
Godspeed, Stryker Brigade.
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