Attack on Mess Hall in Iraq 10? dead

Fox News Channel | 12/21/04 | ChefKeith

[ChefKeith]

Just mentioned on FNC:

Dining facility on U.S. Base in Iraq hit by rocket attack- 10 dead

Waiting for more info...

[michigander]

'I Can't Hear, I Can't Hear,' Soldier Cried After Noon Attack on U.S. Chow Hall in Mosul

By Jeremy Redmon The Associated Press

Published: Dec 21, 2004

FORWARD OPERATING BASE MAREZ, Iraq (AP) - It was a brilliant, sunny day with blue skies and warmer than usual weather in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Hundreds of U.S. soldiers had just sat down for lunch in their giant chow hall tent.

It was about noon Tuesday when insurgents hit their tent with a suspected rocket attack, killing 13 soldiers, including two from the Richmond-based 276th Engineer Battalion. More than 50 were wounded; civilians may have been among them.

The force of the explosions knocked soldiers off their feet and out of their seats. A fireball enveloped the top of the tent, and shrapnel sprayed into the men.

Amid the screaming and thick smoke that followed, quick-thinking soldiers turned their lunch tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and gently carried them into the parking lot.

"Medic! Medic!" soldiers shouted.

Medics rushed into the tent and hustled the rest of the wounded out on stretchers.

Scores of troops crammed into concrete bomb shelters outside. Others wobbled around the tent and collapsed, dazed by the blast.

"I can't hear! I can't hear!" one female soldier cried as a friend hugged her.

Near the front entrance to the chow hall, troops tended a soldier with a gaping head wound. Within minutes, they zipped him into a black body bag. Three more bodies were in the parking lot.

The military asked that the dead not be identified until families could be notified.

Soldiers scrambled back into the hall to check for more wounded. The explosions blew out a huge hole in the roof of the tent. Puddles of bright red blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.

Grim-faced soldiers growled angrily about the attack as they stomped away.

"Mother (expletive)!" one mumbled.

Sgt. Evan Byler, of the 276th, steadied himself on one of the concrete bomb shelters. He was eating chicken tenders and macaroni when the bomb hit. The blast knocked him out of his chair. When the smoke cleared, Byler took off his shirt and wrapped it around a seriously wounded soldier.

Byler held the bloody shirt in his hand, not quite sure what to do with it.

"It's not the first close call I have had here," said Byler, a Fauquier County, Va., resident who survived a blast from an improvised explosive device while riding in a vehicle earlier this year.

Byler started walking back to his base when he spotted a soldier collapse from shock on the side of the road. Byler and Lt. Shawn Otto, also of the 276th, put the grieving soldier on a passing pickup truck.

The 276th, with about 500 troops, had made it a year without losing a soldier and is preparing to return home in about a month.

"We almost made it. We almost made it to the end without getting somebody killed," Otto said glumly.

At least two other soldiers with the 276th were injured, but it was not clear how serious their wounds are.

Insurgents have fired mortars at the chow hall more than 30 times this year. One round killed a female soldier with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in the summer as she scrambled for cover in one of the concrete bomb shelters. Workers are building a new steel and concrete chow hall for the soldiers just down the dusty dirt road.

Lt. Dawn Wheeler, a member of the 276th from Centreville, Va., was waiting in line for chicken tenders when a round hit on the other side of a wall from her. A soldier who had been standing beside her was on the ground, struggling with shrapnel buried deep in his neck.

"We all have angels on us," she said as she pulled away in a Humvee.

Wheeler quickly joined other officers from the 276th for an emergency meeting minutes after the blast.

Maj. James Zollar, the unit's acting commander, spoke to more than a dozen of his officers in a voice thick with emotion. He urged them to keep their troops focused on their missions.

"This is a tragic, tragic thing for us but we still have missions," he told them. "It's us, the leaders, who have to pull them together."

Just hours before the blast, Zollar had awarded a Purple Heart to a soldier from the 276th who was wounded in a mortar attack on another part of the base in October.

Zollar eventually turned the emergency meeting over to Chaplain Eddie Barnett. He led the group in prayer.

"Help us now, God, in this time of this very tragic circumstance," Barnett said. "We pray for your healing upon our wounded soldiers."

With heads hung low, the soldiers trudged outside. They had work to do.

AP-ES-12-21-04 1118EST

[Eagle Eye]

LOL... hey, what could happen?

[johnmilken]

Burn the bastards? The bastards we are spending so much blood and gold to liberate? There's a tight circle of contradiction that's getting tighter by the day in Iraq.

Half of me says we're scr**ed on this and the other half just loses focus and has vague ideas of a better future. The people who hate us are the people we went to save. Can anyone offer me some realistic hope of antagonim against the US - from the people we are dying to save - decreasing over the next few years? I am not talking about WHY they should be grateful - we all know they should - but about the facts on the ground.

My kid's 17 and I guess this will be hanging over him until it's done with. Should I encourage him to enlist? To fight for what? People who want to kill him? I worry if this drags on he'll have to go over to credits for college. [Joke, but you know what I mean]

[TomGuy]

Workers and U.S. soldiers tend to the wounded after an apparent insurgent mortar attack on a dining facility during lunchtime on FOB Marez in Mosul, Iraq today. (Richmond Times-Dispatch/ Dean Hoffmeyer)

[iceskater]

Richmond-based 276th Engineer Battalion" were among those hit.

Oh no. I hadn't heard that yet.
Pinging the rest of the Richmond folks.

[johnmilken]

South Vietnamese all over again. How can we be there to liberate Iraqis, hand security over to Iraqis, and not mix with Iraqis?

[TomGuy]

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, centre, eats dinner with British troops in Basra, southern Iraq following earlier talks in Baghdad with his Iraqi counterpart Ayad Allawi, Tuesday Dec. 21, 2004.(AP Photo/PA, Stefan Rousseau)

[demlosers]

Insurgents have fired mortars at the chow hall more than 30 times this year. One round killed a female soldier with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in the summer as she scrambled for cover in one of the concrete bomb shelters. Workers are building a new steel and concrete chow hall for the soldiers just down the dusty dirt road.

Box lunches until the chow hall is built. Stay dispersed.

[Ligeia]

Thanks, iceskater.

[TomGuy]

Richmond Times-Dispatch photo gallery from Iraq

[Allegra]

Health , Welfare and morale check for Eagle Eye and Allegra.........worried about ya'll as usual. More when such events occur.

I arrived home for a monthlong R&R yesterday and was heartbroken to hear about this this morning. Prayers for all of these people and their families. This is so horrible...

Thank you for your concern. These folks in Mosul and their families will be close in my prayers for the next several days.

[WestCoastGal]

Well said.....I only hope those at the Pentagon that visit here will pass along our support to Secy Rumsfeld!

[Squantos]

Glad yer OK Allegra...........enjoy your rest.

Stay Safe !

[iceskater]

More from CNN.

Patricaruth - Stryker Brigade is mentioned.

---

Tuesday, December 21, 2004 Posted: 12:06 PM EST (1706 GMT)


MOSUL, Iraq (CNN) -- More than 20 people, including Americans and Iraqis, were killed in an attack Tuesday on a U.S. base in Iraq, said Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of Task Force Olympia.

The attack wounded more than 60 people at the base near the northern city of Mosul -- Camp Marez, Ham said.

The dead include U.S. military personnel, U.S. contractors, foreign contractors and members of the Iraqi army, he said.

A breakdown of the casualties was not immediately available, and Ham said the nature of the attack -- a single, large explosion -- was unknown. An investigation is under way, the general said.

Jeremy Redmon, a Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch reporter embedded with troops at the base, said the force of the explosions inside a mess tent "knocked soldiers off their feet and out of their seats," The Associated Press reported.

Members of the Richmond-based 276th Engineer Battalion were among hundreds of people inside the tent during the attack, according to the AP.

Islamist Web sites posted a claim of responsibility from a group calling itself Jaish Ansar Al-Sunnah for an attack on "a joint US-Iraqi Ghazlani camp near Mosul at 12 noon Tuesday 21/12/2004." The Associated Press said local Iraqis refer to the camp similarly.

The message said that after the attack, "two helicopters were on the scene to airlift the killed and wounded." The message said the group shot video of the operation to be released later.

CNN could not confirm the authenticity of the claim.

Pentagon officials said there are about 8,500 U.S. troops in the Mosul area, 3,500 of them from a Stryker Brigade based in Fort Lewis, Washington.

Mosul has been a site of repeated attacks in recent weeks. When the U.S. military launched a major offensive in Falluja in November, there was concern some insurgents had fled to Mosul and would launch attacks from there. The U.S. military recently conducted an offensive to try to flush out insurgents in Mosul, but the violence has continued.

Tuesday's attack came shortly after British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Baghdad on a surprise visit to Iraq.

During a news conference with Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Blair called the insurgency "a battle between democracy and terror," in advance of Iraqi elections set for January 30.

"On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work ... and on the other side, people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq." (Full story)

Iraqi voters are expected to choose a 275-member transitional national assembly. That body will put together a permanent constitution that will go before voters in a referendum. If the law is approved, there will be elections for a permanent government by the end of next year.

On Sunday, nearly 70 people died in car bomb attacks in the Shiite Muslim holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. (Full story)

During a Monday news conference in Washington, President Bush said "terrorists will attempt to delay the elections, to intimidate people in their country, to disrupt the democratic process in any way they can."

Still, he added, "I'm confident that terrorists will fail, the elections will go forward and Iraq will be a democracy that reflects the values and traditions of its people." (Full story)

Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force early Tuesday launched airstrikes on insurgents fighting American troops west of Baghdad in the town of Hit, a U.S. military spokesman said.

"At approximately 2 a.m. this morning [6 p.m. ET Monday], a U.S. Air Force aircraft, in support of troops in contact, engaged an enemy fighting position with precision weapons," said 1st Sgt. Steve Valley with the Combined Press Information Center.

No other information was immediately available.

Near Baiji, Iraq, on Tuesday, oil pipelines were reported on fire, sources from Northern Oil Company said. The cause of the fire was unknown, the sources said. The fires are near portions of pipelines that were damaged by saboteurs two days ago.

The burning pipelines intersect the Ceyhan export line and a domestic line and carry oil from the Kirkuk oil fields.

CNN's Karl Penhaul in Baghdad and Elaine Quijano and Mike Mount at the Pentagon contributed to this report.

[Mo1]

Thank you for the ping ... I just turned on the news and hearing about the attack

Prayers going out for the troops

[Ligeia]

Thanks, again.

[TexKat]

Happy Homecoming Allegra. How does it feel to be home? :>)

[BurbankKarl]

[TexKat]

Update:

Mosul attack kills 24, wounds 64

[Flora McDonald]

This is heartbreaking. The 276th Engineers are based here in Powhatan. From what I just heard on Channel 8 there are at least two who have been killed from our community.

Please keep these families in your prayers as they wait for word on their soldiers.