Posted on 12/21/2003 7:19:38 PM PST by Calpernia
With each step the soldiers took, their fawn-colored boots bore deeper into spongy, wet mud. They trekked slowly up a steep hill, eyes to the ground six feet ahead. All around them were dozens of pieces of unexploded ordnance, and one soldier, sidestepping a mortar round, chirped, “BOOM! Four soldiers were wounded in Iraq today….”
His premonitory news telecast, though comically inclined, had also its share of relevance. The soldier, Maj. Collin Fortier, operations officer, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) knows the dangers that face his 3rd Battalion “Iron Rakkasans” during their current mission in the Badush region of northern Iraq. The hills in this region are littered with unexploded ordnance (UXO), and two platoons of the Iron Rakkasans, as well as a team of engineers with the 326th Engineer Battalion, are set to clear this dangerous land by destroying the nearly ten thousand UXOs lying recklessly in the remnants of former regime ammunition posts.
“It’s definitely dangerous work,” Fortier said. Infantrymen from 5th Platoon, Company D, and 2nd Platoon, Company B, were recently tasked with identifying thousands of UXOs across the mountainous Badush region, while engineers of the 326th’s 3rd Platoon, Company C have been toiling to blockade entry in and out of the treacherous area.
The soldiers left their bunks in Tallafar last week and converged into a large wooden building at the heart of the Badush region, nestled at the summit of a rocky crag east of northern Iraq’s largest city of Mosul. Despite the stark conditions and three days of constant rain, and regardless of the menace of the UXOs, as infantryman Spc. Christian Hanna put it, “we’ve seen worse.”
Hanna, like many other infantrymen with Company B, plays dual-roles – at night, as an observation post guard, searching for sheepherders and other travelers, and during the day identifying UXOs with a contracted team of demolition experts. Hanna’s role as a sentry tower guard has been made easier, he said, by the moon’s illumination of nearly the entire region. On a post at a hilltop, he said, he can see all movements up to more than 500 meters away.
“Since I’ve been here, the moon has been real bright,” he said. “I can see 500 meters, easy. I see a lot of animals walking around at night. We have a problem with wolves out here, too.”
While guard duty has been Hanna’s primary responsibility, he said the few times he has spent with the demolition team have gone smoothly. “We haven’t run into any problems yet,” Hanna said. “We’ve stayed safe so far, but I wouldn’t go banging a hammer around.”
Once the infantrymen locate and identify the UXOs, the team of demolition experts collects them and transports them to a blasting site in the mountains and explodes them. Blasting sites are chosen meticulously, each with a radius of more than 500 meters of vacant land.
While the infantrymen search and identify, and while the demolition experts destroy the ammunition, the engineers of the 326th Engineer Battalion have spent the last week creating barricades – soil mounds for vehicles and a barbed wire fence for those on foot – around the region to keep Iraqi citizens from potential tragedy, as well as to keep insurgents or terrorists from using the stockpile of UXOs as arsenal against Coalition Forces, which Fortier said may be responsible for a number of attacks against U.S. troops in northern Iraq.
Spc. Michael Patterson, a bulldozer operator for the 326th, said the recent increase in rainfall has hindered his role in the mission. While the rainy season, as locals call the wet winter and early spring months, is a blessing for many Iraqi citizens, the muddy ground caused by the drizzle has forced him and fellow soldier Spc. Joshua Nettles, to halt construction of six-foot soil barriers to keep vehicles out of the “danger area.”
“Rain keeps us from working, period,” he said. “Rain is a big factor with us, because our tractor will just slide around all over the place.”
While the demolition teams continue detonating the UXOs in spite of work continuing on the soil barricade, Patterson said it’s a gap that cannot be overlooked. “We need [the barricade] to help keep potential terrorists out of the caches, because this is what they’ve been using against us,” he said. Patterson and Nettles are currently working with only one bulldozer, while Patterson said the engineers are scheduled to obtain four more.
According to Fortier, the project dates back to 1991, during the Gulf War, when intelligence reports confirmed large weapons caches in the Badush region of northern Iraq. The U.S. Air Force bombed the sites, but no ground forces were sent in to clean up the mess.
Twelve years later, the Iron Rakkasans are doing just that. The Badush region of northern Iraq was previously under the control of the 101st Airborne Division’s 502nd Infantry Regiment, but when attacks in Mosul began to escalate in November, the unit’s focus turned back to the city, leaving the Iron Rakkasans with one of their final tests before returning home.
Capt. Edward Caraccilo, commander of Company B, said an underlying goal in the project is to ensure fluidity in the handover to Iraqi security forces in the region. The battalion spent much of the fall season training and equipping Iraqi civil defense organizations such as the Iraqi Security Force and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. It’s now up to the Iron Rakkasans to hand control over so that the Iraqi forces will continue the progress already made in spite of the reduction or absence of U.S. forces.
“We’re trying to transfer control back to the Iraqis, but it’s our obligation to make sure that when we leave, [Iraqi forces] will know what to do and how to do it,” Caraccilo said. “We need to establish a system to turn things back over to the people of the country.”
Fortier, Caraccilo, and Sgt. 1st Class Richard Clinton, platoon sergeant for 2nd Platoon, Company B, spent Tuesday driving around the sharp, gritty mountains of Badush. Looking out, they saw progress in motion, as Iraqi and U.S. forces worked together at guard posts and in the field, setting up barbed wire barricades. The December rain was unrelenting.
“We’re like mailmen,” Fortier said of his Iron Rakkasans. “Neither rain nor sleet nor snow will stop us.”
Infantrymen from 5th Platoon, Company D, and 2nd Platoon, Company B, were recently tasked with identifying thousands of UXOs across the mountainous Badush region, while engineers of the 326th’s 3rd Platoon, Company C have been toiling to blockade entry in and out of the treacherous area.
The mus got deeper as they went up the hill? What bizzaro planet were they on?
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