Posted on 10/12/2004 2:35:38 PM PDT by TexKat
Masters of Chaos, by U.S. News Senior Writer Linda Robinson, tells the stories of the men who fight the nation's murky wars in the world's far corners. In Iraq, the Pentagon's special operations forces were critical to the capture of most of the top leaders of Saddam Hussein's regime, and they led two of three major battlefronts in the war to liberate Iraq. In one of them, in northern Iraq, Army Special Forces soldiers faced down 13 Iraqi divisions and attacked a camp believed to be harboring al Qaeda terrorists and other foreign jihadists, as well as a shadowy figure named Abu Musab Zarqawi. That battle, Operation Viking Hammer, turned out to be one of the most intense conflicts Special Forces have fought since Vietnam. Excerpts:
There was something old-fashioned about the sight. In the waning dark, the special operators girded for battle alongside the Kurdish peshmerga fighters who had known almost nothing but fighting in their entire lives. This would be an infantry battle, fought by men on foot, with few high-tech tools and none of the heavy tanks that had come to define modern war. The leader of the six-man Special Forces team was a young captain, 29, a college graduate with a degree in chemical engineering, which, to his mother's great regret, he had never quite gotten around to using. The captain's commander had already warned him they would get little air support.
At 7:30 a.m. the team moved out, with more than a thousand Kurds who walked, rode, and trotted over the open plain toward the Sargat Valley. After two firefights and an airstrike by Navy F/A-18s that answered their call, they captured the village of Gulp. The mosque there was intact, but, as the Kurds had claimed, it contained sandbagged fighting positions and a command post. The soldiers also found a suicide vest rigged with explosives and a gas mask. About three hundred Kurds split off to the south, while the rest continued into the heart of the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group associated with al Qaeda and with Abu Musab Zarqawi, who in the violent aftermath of the war would become the most wanted terrorist in Iraq.
Under fire. Just outside the village of Sargat, the valley widened into a bowl. The captain's team sergeant was known universally as "Grit." He was 36, experienced, aggressive, an outspoken commando with 13 years in the Special Forces, including Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and a host of secret missions under his belt. Grit rode his sergeants hard, but they knew he would be their best friend when things started getting hot. Almost as soon as Grit and the unit's medic entered the bowl, they came under intense machine-gun fire from the surrounding mountains. The Ansar fighters, it appeared, had dug in around Sargat to mount their defense. Grit looked around for cover, but the land was as open as a golf course. To the right was a broad field divided by rows of low rock walls barely 3 feet high.
The two men saw their teammates crouched behind the walls farther ahead and dashed for the nearest one. The hidden Ansar fighters began lobbing mortars. Within minutes, the rounds began landing uncomfortably close. The militants knew what they were doing: Pin down the prey with machine guns, bracket them with mortars, then adjust fire for the kill.
Grit and the 28-year-old medic were huddled face to face behind the rock wall. They looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was the first step toward mobilization. "Hey man, we gotta go," Grit told him. Grit had been in plenty of fixes before, but this was as hairy as anything he'd seen. He knew they had to move before the next barrage. On the count of three, they dashed to the next wall and hurled themselves behind it. Then they looked back. The next mortar rounds hit the spot they had just fled.
The Ansar fighters immediately began readjusting their aim. Within minutes, mortar rounds were kicking up clods of dirt and grass all around them. "Get the map out," Grit told the medic. "We've got to land some mortars of our own on them." He raised his head to see where the captain was, and a high-velocity bullet cracked just above his head. "Johnny Cab," he called over the MBITR (multiband intrateam radio), using the captain's call sign. "We need mortars."
The captain radioed back the bad news. The Kurds' artillery was behind them in a pickup truck. He suggested trying to raise another SF team on the radio. Grit tried, but it was too far away.
The captain and about 40 Kurds had entered the bowl first and drawn a hellish rain of Katyusha rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and machine guns. The Kurds' only heavy gun had jammed, so the captain had run back down the open road to urge the Kurds to bring up their own artillery. Then he ran back to his rock wall where his translator, Bafel Talabani, and one of his sergeants waited.
Bafel, an Oxford-educated Kurd who was the son of the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, was so impressed by the firefight going on that he used his satellite phone to call his cousin, who was participating in another part of the operation in the valley. "We are really in the s - - t," Bafel said excitedly. The captain looked at him, wanting to laugh and box his ears at the same time. They had work to do. He needed Bafel to make sure that artillery was brought forward, and fast.
Crouching behind a wall, the captain noticed that the field they were in was actually a graveyard.
He knew that they had to mount some kind of counterattack to change the dynamics. Ansar al-Islam could either overrun them or just pick them off one by one.
The weapons sergeant moved forward to the captain's wall to hear the plan. Under nearly constant fire, he, the communications sergeant, and one of the medics hauled the .50-caliber machine gun from the pickup up the mountain to maneuver on the Ansar positions. It was up to them to turn the tide of the battle. After setting up, the weapons sergeant began firing round after round as his colleagues spotted targets for him. The Kurds' artillery finally arrived from the rear, and joined in the barrage on the Ansar redoubts. The team's second weapons sergeant, from his position on a ridge a kilometer away, killed several Ansar machine gunners with his sniper rifle.
Cave busters. After a brief rest, the team set off to pursue the Ansar fighters fleeing toward the border. The Kurds took the low road into the gorge behind the town while the captain's six-man team climbed into the high ground of the mountain pass. The gorge abruptly narrowed into sheer and rocky walls that were honeycombed with dozens of caves. Arabs were rumored to stay in these caves. A hail of gunfire erupted from the caves as the Kurds approached. The peshmerga returned fire, and Grit shot high-explosive grenades into the caves, but the militants continued to fire. Grit tried to smoke them out with tear-gas grenades, but it was time for something bigger. He pulled out a new cave-busting antitank missile called a "small D." The sound of the explosion was deafening. The small D demolished the cave. The firing from inside ceased.
The team climbed higher into the pass in search of fleeing fighters and the radio transmitter. The soldiers moved through a cluster of about 10 cinderblock huts. They were very near the border. Machine-gun fire suddenly ranged in on the team from the steep mountain walls.
The men ran back to the closest hut; the heavy-caliber bullets chipped away at the cinderblock. There was no way they'd last long like this. Chunks of the wall fell away and holes opened up as the building fell apart around them.
Grit and two sergeants fell back to cover the others' retreat to another hut. He fired at least 700 rounds before they had to move again. The searing barrel of the .50-caliber machine gun fell onto the medic's hand, burning him badly. The captain called for air support. The minutes ticked by--15, 20 passed before the jets came into view. The captain ordered them to drop their 500-pound JDAM bombs "danger close." He had to risk the "friendly fire" if they were to have any chance to escape. The bombs fell, then everything went silent.
Back at Sargat, the next day, the team members made a startling discovery--almost half the dead bodies there were foreigners. The team knew that Ansar al-Islam was a mixture of Kurds and foreigners, but there were many more foreigners in Sargat than they had expected. On the bodies the soldiers found foreign identity cards, visas, and passports from a wide variety of Middle Eastern and north African countries: Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, and Iran. They also found stubs and receipts of plane tickets for travel around the Middle East. It sure looked like an international terrorist training camp to them.
Recognizing their efforts in Operation Viking Hammer, the Pentagon awarded the captain's team three Silver Stars and six Bronze Stars with V for valor. Viking Hammer would go down in the annals of Special Forces history--a battle fought on foot, under sustained fire from an enemy lodged in the mountains, and with minimal artillery and air support. On March 28, 2004, the captain and his men retraced their steps with their Kurdish comrades, their memories of the fight still vivid.
Good post, BTTT!
BTTT
Wow, great article!
Great Post!
"small D" is actually a SMAW-D.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m141.htm
TF Viking - Camp Loki
"Loki is portrayed as a prankster and a trickster. His misadventures often involve creating great problems for the Norse gods and for the inhabitants of the other worlds. When things seemed at their very worse, Loki often provided the remedy to save the day."
Everything in the inventory should be orbiting over these people when they're in the field.
L
Ping
Bump!
Operation Viking Hammer
So is this another of the Viking Kitty special ops missions! :) j/k
Good to see a couple of well motivated soldiers can still get the job done!
Reality is that there are only so many assets and they have a certain window to deliver their ordinance before refueling, etc. It is possible too that those assets might be responding to other calls.
I wonder if any of them will get a million dollar book deal.
*grin*
Bump for REAL Silver and Bronze Star recipients!
Bump!
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