Saturday, June 04, 2005 - 08:09 AM
Samarra, Iraq -- At 2 p.m., Spc. Mike Rauch points his tank's massive, 120mm gun at the northeastern tip of the Southern Bypass Bridge that spans the dusty marshland outside Samarra.
Another day of highway patrol, Iraq-style, has begun.
Rauch's job, and that of his two crew members aboard the 70-ton M1A Abrams, is to protect the bridge on the outskirts of this Sunni town, a key link on the main route for civilian and U.S. military traffic from the southern port city of Basra to the border with Turkey in the north.
Every day, from 2 in the afternoon until 10 at night, Sgt. Saikichi Simram, the tank's commander, Pvt. Andrew Queen, the driver, and gunner Rauch, from Mariposa in Central California, watch this stretch of road for what have become the two deadliest threats to Iraqi civilians and the 138,000 American soldiers who are supposed to help protect them: cars that look like they might be driven by suicide bombers and insurgents trying to plant roadside bombs.
Insurgents can hit "any hour of the day," says Simram, 28, who has been in Iraq since February with the C "Chaos" Company of the 3-69 Armored Battalion of the 1st Brigade, 42nd Infantry Division.
Insurgents usually fashion roadside bombs from artillery or mortar shells, detonating them remotely by cell phones, satellite phones or walkie-talkies when a U.S. convoy drives by. Sometimes they disguise bombs in dead dogs, cutting their stomachs open and stuffing the explosives inside. The 23-year- old Rauch tells stories about a donkey cart loaded with gasoline cans that exploded as it was pulling up to a checkpoint. And of a cow with a 105mm shell inserted in its anus.
"Crazy people," Rauch says.
U.S. troops have attempted to counter roadside bombs by putting armored plates on their humvees and driving around with a jamming device called "warlock," which suppresses radio frequencies around a convoy. But insurgents continue to adapt, using car bombs and figuring out new ways to detonate roadside bombs, U.S. soldiers say.
Simram, who comes from Guam, calls his daily mission "eight long, horrible hours."
2:10 p.m. Ten minutes into the mission, and the temperature is 110 degrees. Simram sits on a cooler filled with bottled water, closes his eyes and listens to the hum of passing cars. Queen, 19, smokes in the shadow of the tank, looking east, behind a marsh where egrets nestle in dusty green reeds, at Samarra's jagged skyline.
2:40 p.m. The men watch the wind kick up dust devils between them and the bridge. Suddenly, Rauch exclaims, "You see that up there?" He pulls out a digital video camera, and everyone follows his index finger, which is pointing at the sky. "A cloud blocking the sun!"
Everybody looks at the big gray cloud for a while, thankful for some relief from the broiling rays, no matter how slight or temporary.
A few minutes later, Queen, from Ocala, Fla., puts three hydrogen-filled heaters from army-issued packaged meals into a Gatorade bottle filled with water. He buries the bottle in the hot dust about 20 feet from the tank.
"They blow (up)," Simram explains, without turning his head. "When he gets bored, that's what he does."
The soldiers wait, but the bottle does not explode. The men fall silent as they stare at the traffic on the bypass.
2:52 p.m. First Lt. Jason Scott, patrolling the bypass road in one of the humvees, receives a radio call that a white plastic bag lying near the bridge appears to have wires coming out of it.
"Nine times out of 10 it's nothing," Scott says. But he must monitor the bag until a bomb disposal unit arrives. Scott and his men stand about 150 feet from the bag, training their guns at the road.
About half an hour later, another humvee pulls up. Soldiers unload "Johnny Five," a small robot that will probe the bag. The operator, who asked not to be identified, sits down on a folding camp stool, putting the controls for the robot on the passengers' seat of the humvee. A remote monitor shows the contents of the bag as he guides the robot's pincers to shake the bag. It is filled with garbage. Soldiers climb back into the humvees and drive off.
3:45 p.m. A white flatbed truck cuts in front of Scott's humvee. Scott chases it down and orders the driver and the passenger, who wear long white dishdashas, to step away from their truck. Scott looks nervous. The only cars that don't stop for a humvee, he says, are car bombs.
Soldiers search the truck and the men and find nothing.
Scott comes close to the driver and yells, waving his arms: "Don't pass humvees! Stop, don't f -- ing pass! OK?"
"OK," the driver replies.
Scott turns away to leave, then, as an afterthought, he asks the man: "Speak English?"
The man shakes his head: "No."
4:45 p.m. A beat-up pickup truck is going south very slowly on the bypass road. It pulls to a halt, and Simram raises his M-16 rifle in the direction of the road. The truck makes a U-turn and heads north, picking up speed.
"That's all the excitement we get up here," says Simram, sitting down. Queen sits on the trunk, pouring Skittles into his mouth from a bright red bag.
All of a sudden Simram jumps up again.
"D'yall wanna eat some rabbit?" He grabs his gun and fires a shot at the reeds about 100 yards away. He misses. The rabbit holds absolutely still. He fires again, and misses. The rabbit disappears in the bushes.
"Were you aiming at that rabbit?" Rauch asks.
"No, I was aiming next to it," Simram answers, sarcastically.
He looks at the gilded dome of the Al-Askariya Shrine that dominates the Samarra skyline about a mile away. "I could reach over there," he says, dreamily, referring to his tank's 120mm gun, which has a range of almost 2 miles.
7:15 p.m. A hollow boom comes from the highway. The three soldiers jump to their feet and look at the road. A red truck has blown a tire.
8 p.m. The big orange orb of the sun is about to disappear behind the horizon. Simram and Rauch take out their video cameras and take pictures of the sky, as they do almost every night around this time. The wind picks up, carrying echoes of the evening call to prayer from a mosque somewhere on the other side of the bypass.
At 9:31, Simram puts an extended arm on the gun barrel to steady himself as he looks at the stars. Cicadas rustle in the reeds by the marsh.
"I like this time of the day the best. It's cool, and it's time to leave soon." Simram pauses. "And tomorrow, we do it all over again."
Up to 25 people killed as police raid Haiti slums
June 4, 2005
By Joseph Guyler Delva
59 minutes ago
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) - As many as 25 people were killed in police raids on Friday and Saturday in the slums of Haiti's capital after the government said it would get tougher on gangs, morgue workers and witnesses said.
Clerks at the morgue in the General Hospital said they had taken in 17 bodies on Saturday and three bodies on Friday after the raids in Bel-Air and other Port-au-Prince slums, centers of support for ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
A Reuters journalist also saw five other bodies in two different areas of Bel-Air.
Residents said the dead were shot by police and accused police of setting slum homes on fire.
Police officials had no immediate comment on the death toll and it was not clear whether all the victims were killed in the raids, or if some were shot as gang members returned fire.
Haiti's interim government, backed by a 7,400-strong United Nations peacekeeping force, has sought to stabilize the impoverished Caribbean country since Aristide fled into exile as armed rebels closed in on the capital in February 2004.
Human rights groups have accused the Haitian police of summary executions and abuses against supporters of Aristide -- allegations denied by the government.
Justice Minister Bernard Gousse and other officials said on Friday authorities planned tougher action against armed gangs in pro-Aristide slums, where victims of a recent wave of hundreds of kidnappings are often said to be held.
At least 740 people have been killed in criminal and political violence in Haiti since September. A French diplomat was shot to death this week while driving in the capital.
"The police arrived, they started shooting. There were other people shooting too, but they managed to flee," said Ronald Macillon, a Bel-Air resident. "The police killed a lot of people and set several homes on fire," Macillon said.
Several other witnesses gave similar accounts.
A spokesman for U.N. troops in Bel-Air, Col. Carlos Barcelos, told Reuters the Brazilian contingent based in that slum did not take part directly in the raids, but put up checkpoints and secured the outside perimeter.
The Central Director for the Administrative Police, Renan Etienne, told Reuters he could not say how many people were killed or comment on allegations police set homes on fire, as he had not yet received police reports.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050605/wl_nm/haiti_deaths_dc