Capt. Robert Robinson, left, and Spc. Mark Webber, center, move down an alley with other soldiers from Blackhawk Company, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment on Wednesday in Samarra, Iraq, as they raid four houses where insurgents might be hiding.
Soldiers hunting insurgents walk fine line between firmness, fairness
MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune
SAMARRA, Iraq - It looks like the bad guys got out of Dodge.
Which is not surprising: They've known for a few weeks that 5,000 U.S. troops were moving in just up the road.
Stryker brigade soldiers so far have met little resistance and found few of the guerrillas they were looking for when they kicked off Operation Arrowhead Blizzard early Wednesday in this dingy, stubborn city of 210,000.
They've made one big catch: a former Iraqi regime official thought to be a senior logistical planner of guerrilla operations. Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment's Comanche Company nabbed him in their first raid early Wednesday.
And they've dealt a heavy blow to guerrillas who try to fight. The day before the operation formally began, a platoon from the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment killed 11 who tried to ambush them in Samarra just as school was letting out.
No U.S. forces have been injured, aside from the guy who accidentally shot himself in the calf with his light machine gun.
The brigade is pouring hundreds of infantrymen at a time into its half of one of Iraq's toughest cities. The other half of Samarra is being scoured by troops with the 4th Infantry Division.
The Fort Lewis soldiers swoop in aboard their Stryker vehicles, shut down several square blocks and go house to house for the folks they're after.
After an hour, or sometimes two or three, they load back up and drive away, just as another company of troops is on its way to do the same in another part of town.
This is what the new Stryker rigs were built for: quickly moving infantrymen into tight spots.
They've been doing this for three days now, varying the pattern and striking new targets. The raids don't always yield detainees and weapons, but each turns up a little more information about who's who in Samarra.
They've turned up a Muslim cleric with a wad of U.S. cash and a bad ticker.
They've turned up bunches of women, children and working men just trying to mind their own business.
They've even survived a brief, confusing firefight with each other - a reminder how easy it is even for well-trained, well-equipped soldiers to make mistakes.
And they've done it all while grabbing a few hours' rest sprawled on benches and seats in their Strykers.
'Stay on your toes'
1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment commander Lt. Col. Buck James checks in via radio Thursday morning with his company commanders.
He repeats his strategy in Samarra: Develop whatever information they can from the people in town and the detainees they bring back to camp for interrogation, then act on hard intelligence.
He won't just send units in without a destination in mind.
"I'm not willing to go on any goose chases, not interested in trawling for contact," James says.
He wants his guys to put the hammer down, but to use common sense as well. He doesn't want to make enemies out of folks who might otherwise be inclined to get on with their lives once the country calms down.
"Stay focused. Stay vigilant. Complacency is our enemy, especially now that we've been here a couple days," James tells his company commanders. "Watch out for the IEDs, the RPGs from the rooftops. I believe they may try to get bold.
"Things may step up a little bit today, so stay on your toes. Good hunting."
Rusty ordnance and an imam
That day, Capt. Robert Robinson's Blackhawk Company of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment is on its third trip into town, this time to clear a couple dozen buildings in the southeast sector.
About two-thirds of their way through, they have found nothing but "dry holes," meaning not much of interest. Then they get orders to peel off and go to a house where several young men have been acting suspiciously on the roof and in the street out front.
It takes a few minutes for all 180 soldiers to return to their Strykers and get on their way. And there is confusion: The map grid the reconnaissance guys gave them doesn't jibe with their description of the house's location.
The Strykers haul butt around the dusty, garbage-strewn streets while Samarrans on the local version of Saturday watch from the roadside.
After several minutes, the troops reach the house. All the bad guys are apparently gone. Only Ali Ibrahim Latif and his wife and three daughters are there.
Blackhawk soldiers find an empty box of 25 mm ammunition, old artillery fuses and a mortar, two rusty AK-47 barrels and more than $500 in U.S. dollars.
Latif says the military hardware belonged to his son, an Iraqi soldier now dead. As for the money, ever since the fall of Saddam Hussein the government has paid him in dollars.
And then the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment's tactical human intelligence team - Staff Sgt. Abe Kauffman, who speaks Arabic, and intelligence collector Spc. Rachel Payne - learn that he's an imam at a nearby mosque.
Payne wants to know what he tells his congregation about Americans.
"That the Americans are good, that they shouldn't fight," Kauffman says, interpreting the imam's reply.
In the end the soldiers cut the plastic flexicuffs off Latif's wrists. He'd already stuffed his coat pocket full of his heart medicine, figuring he was going to be taken away.
But Lt. Col. James didn't want to stir up the trouble he'd have if he hauled away an imam.
Latif's daughters are delighted and quickly bring out a couple dozen warm Pepsis for the soldiers, served with a smile and many thank-yous.
An AK-47 in every home
Across the street from the imam's place, a half-dozen little kids and their mothers are in tears, quietly sobbing, as the Stryker soldiers make their way through their two-story house.
Sgt. Bud Garcia is frustrated he can't find anything in his little Department of Defense Iraqi phrasebook that means don't worry, calm down, it'll be alright.
So he offers the kids Charms candies.
Meantime, his buddies searching the home find a single AK-47 assault rifle - it seems like everybody's got one here - and bring it down for likely seizure.
But the cab driver who lives there pleads with Kauffman and Payne to let him keep it. There are so many criminals in this town, he says - "Ali Baba," is what the Iraqis say - that he needs the weapon to protect his children.
Soldiers search the house and the car. There is a motorcycle in the driveway. The guerrillas attacking Americans often ride motorcycles.
But Robinson, the Blackhawk commander, thinks the guy's story checks. He gives him back the AK. The man promises he's no trouble.
By now the kids are all smiling and giggling. The soldiers leave.
Friendly fire ever-present
The Stryker brigade is probably better equipped than any other unit in the Army to prevent death by friendly fire. The onboard computer screen on Robinson's Stryker is awash in little blue dots on a digital map of Samarra, each one indicating a friendly vehicle.
Between the Stryker brigade on the east side of town, and the 4th Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team on the west, there are a couple thousand troops in the city at one time.
But no computer system, no high-speed radio network can eliminate the confusion that comes in the heat of the moment. The 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment has one of those close calls in the first night of the raid.
Two Blackhawk platoons hold down blocking positions while a third searches buildings. Suddenly a man in a pickup pulls out of an alley between the two platoons and tries to drive past one of them.
The soldiers open fire, knocking out the vehicle and wounding the driver.
But the other platoon thinks they're being shot at, as does the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment's Comanche Company, which is convoying out of town on a nearby road.
Suddenly the night is ablaze with tracer rounds.
In just a few seconds the cooler heads realize what's going on and scream "Cease fire!" over the radio.
Soldiers will spend the next several hours laughing nervously about the episode.
"We are so lucky we didn't just kill somebody right now," Robinson said.
Sleeping five to a Stryker
Between their two missions Wednesday and the next on Thursday, Blackhawk Company spends the night parked around an agricultural outbuilding a mile or so outside town.
The Strykers button up. Those who have room sleep inside; those who don't sleep on top of the vehicles or on the ground nearby. Soldiers take turns pulling security.
Fog rolls in overnight and covers everything with a wet sheen, but it doesn't get very cold.
Inside Robinson's Stryker, there's room for five to sleep fairly comfortably: Pfc. Matthew Dick in his driver's hatch, Robinson sprawled across the gunner's and commander's seat, vehicle commander Sgt. Luis Santiago and 6-foot-4-inch, 270-pound Spc. Mark Webber sharing the long bench along the right bulkhead, and a visiting reporter on the smaller bench in the middle of the vehicle.
The Sheraton Tacoma it isn't. But it's warm and dry.
At dawn they get up and get ready for another day's work, learning they'll make another run in at 9 a.m.
"Some personal hygiene time. Then some coffee time. Then some get-the-bad-guys time," Santiago says, running through his morning's to-do list.
"Then in a year, some go-home time," he continues, thinking a little more long-term. "And then some lovin' time.
"I tell you, man, there's going to be a lot of babies when we get back."
News Tribune staff writer Michael Gilbert is embedded with the Stryker brigade in Iraq. Reach him at mjgilbert41@yahoo.com.
SIDEBAR: Troops keep 'steel' out of circulation
Some other moments from the Stryker brigade's first couple of days and nights of Operation Arrowhead Blizzard in Samarra:
•1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment's Comanche Company came across five men who claimed to be Iraqi police officers, each toting an AK-47 with two 30-round magazines. Only one had an ID card, and it was expired, and the serial number didn't match the one on the weapon like it's supposed to. All were detained.
•Troops from the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment raided a hardware store Wednesday in the northeast part of town, where they seized more than 200 AK-47 assault rifles and detained five men.
•The 1st Squadron, 14th Cavalry Squadron detained several drivers who tried to evade traffic control points at all nine major roads into and out of Samarra. They shot and injured an unknown number, said Lt. Col. Joseph Piek, the brigade public-affairs officer.
•Comanche Company on Wednesday evening was watching a couple of men who appeared to be putting something in the ground, possibly a roadside bomb. When troops approached the men, they ran. The soldiers fired on them but missed, and weren't able to catch them despite the help of OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopters over the next hour or so.
•Brigade engineers spent all day Thursday digging around in the old quarry just outside Samarra where the 1-23rd had set up its forward tactical operations center. They got a report that some 500 mortar rounds were buried somewhere. By afternoon, the sappers had found 71.
The 1-23rd commander, Lt. Col. Buck James, was well-pleased.
"That's less steel that we'll have to catch later," he said.