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Posted on 04/12/2003 4:36:54 PM PDT by MadIvan
Later, much later, Lt Col Stephen Twitty, the commander of the 3rd Battalion 15th Infantry, would look at the map of Baghdad. "Objectives Curly, Larry and Moe - named 'em after the Three Stooges. Those three intersections will go down in history. They were three hellacious battles."
As they rolled north along Highway 8 towards Baghdad's southern suburbs, the men had no idea that ahead lay desperate, 10-hour firefights against suicidal enemy soldiers - most of them Syrians intent on fighting a jihad rather than regular Iraqi army troops. They did not know that victory would allow a single infantry brigade effectively to capture the Iraqi capital in a day.
All they knew was that Bravo Tank Company of the 2nd Brigade of the American 3rd Infantry Division was to hold a key road junction ("Larry") in the south of Baghdad. Alpha Mechanised Infantry Company would hold another junction - "Moe" - to the north. Meanwhile, the battalion would set up its command post at "Curly", a crossroads about two miles south of Larry.
As Capt Dan Hubbard, 34, a Desert Storm veteran from Tennessee, led his tanks north, he claimed to have long ago lost the butterflies in the stomach that come before combat. There was plenty, however, to worry a less experienced soldier. The streets were littered with burnt-out Iraqi cars, trucks and abandoned anti-aircraft guns. Flames licked the bottom of one three-storey block of flats.
An Iraqi, covered in blood, lay by the side of the road. He rolled over, clutched his head and lay still again. He was barely alive.
Long before they reached Larry - an intersection by a flyover - the men of Bravo Tank Company came under attack. It was impossible to work out where it was coming from. An Abrams tank from another unit, damaged by enemy fire, hove into view. We moved on.
At about 7.20am, Bravo Tank Company reached Larry and immediately came under attack from rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Lt Hunter Bowers, 23, the rugby-playing commander of White platoon, was first on the radio. "My lead tank's been hit. He's on fire on top of the overpass."
As flames took hold on the back of the turret, ammunition inside started "cooking off" - blowing up. Thanks to the strengthened doors of the ammunition compartment, Staff Sgt James Lawson and his crew were finally able to escape, dousing the flames with fire extinguishers. The men were alive, badly shaken, but still able to fight.
For the next 10 hours, they had no choice but to do so. Wave after wave of seemingly suicidal soldiers, driving civilian cars, trucks and even buses, armed only with AK47s and RPGs, threw themselves at the US tanks.
These fighters were, in large part, Syrians. "They drove straight at you at 70 miles an hour, one after the other," said Lt Mike Martin, 24. "They would see about a dozen or more cars already on fire, but that wouldn't put them off."
Lt Col Twitty had positioned himself at Objective Larry as the best place from which to control the battle. Instead, the commander known to his men as "the black John Wayne", had to co-ordinate three separate firefights while also taking his turn at the hatch of a Bradley infantry-fighting vehicle, blazing away at swarms of attackers with his 25mm cannon.
"They were coming at us like bees," said Lt Col Twitty, from South Carolina. "We would kill one lot and then more would appear. It was the most amazing thing."
At 11am, four hours into the fight, Lt Bowers warned that smoke from burning vehicles was making it impossible to see the attackers. "We can't identify anything until it's 300-400 metres away," he said over the radio. "By then they are right on top of us."
Engineers went out in ACEs - armoured combat earthmovers - to shift the wreckage, giving the tanks a clear line of fire and allowing vehicles from other units to push further up the line.
Sgt Jason Reis, 23, from Pennsylvania, returned with his ACE sporting five dents where AK47 bullets had failed to penetrate. Days later he was still shocked, but not by the bullets. "There were bodies burning," he said. "You could smell them and you had to move them out of the way. There were arms and legs lying on the road."
The troops at Objective Moe met equally fierce resistance. "We had four tanks, 10 Bradleys and seven personnel carriers," said First Sgt Jeff Moser, 35, from Detroit. "Just about every vehicle took three or four RPG hits. They were everywhere. They were even firing from the mosque.
"We fought all day and night and took out about 300 [enemy soldiers]. They would come on foot in waves, three at a time. It was almost comical. These guys would be trying to dodge 25mm high-explosive rounds from the Bradleys, which take out everything in a five-metre radius."
The fight was fiercer still at Objective Curly - supposedly a relatively safe location for the battalion's tactical operations centre - which involved about 80 men: staff officers, an infantry platoon and some scouts, who had four Bradleys and a few scout cars armed with 50-calibre machineguns.
The moment they arrived they were set upon by up to 600 fanatical, well-dug-in fighters. Supply sergeants, who never imagined they would fire their weapons in anger, found themselves shooting back for hours on end. Even the battalion chaplain, Steve Hommel, ended up shouldering an M16 rifle.
Sgt Major "Blackhawk Bob" Gallagher, a former special forces solder and veteran of the infamous "Black Hawk Down" mission in Somalia, quickly lived up to his other nickname, the "Metal Magnet". An RPG exploded nearby, causing a shrapnel wound to his ankle, to add to the collection begun in Mogadishu - bullet wounds in both arms and shrapnel in his back. Sgt Major Gallagher, 40, remained standing and carried on firing, ignoring the medics bandaging his legs.
Despite the fanatical opposition, Lt Col Twitty ordered his men to follow normal rules of engagement, firing warning shots to avoid innocent casualties. "This is bullshit," cursed one lieutenant. "This isn't the time for finger-pointing."
While Lt Col Twitty's battalion fought to keep the route of advance open, other units in the brigade swept on to Baghdad. By 9am, they had secured their highly symbolic objective: Saddam's official palace and his parade ground. Back at Curly, Larry and Moe, the fighting showed no sign of abating.
The medics and mechanics moved to what was once a petrol station, but was now a broken mess. As the day wore on it was here that men started to arrive: exhausted and worried, not the easy-going army sure of a swift victory.
Staff Sgt Lawson rolled up, no longer red-faced but ashen, blackened debris visible on his tank after it took an early RPG hit. He blew out his cheeks, shook his head. The day before, the war had still been an adventure, in Lawson's words "an adrenaline rush".
Capt Hubbard came in to refuel his tank, its gun brightly decorated with his wife's name, Rhonda Denise. He discarded hundreds of spent machinegun cartridges in the manner of a motorist emptying an ashtray. "It's a madhouse," he said. Then he was gone.
A single black body bag lay on the grass while, in a makeshift aid station, Capt Mike Cutler, the battalion medical officer, attended to the living. Pte Chris Nauman, 20, of St Louis, Missouri, lay on a stretcher, wounded in the knee. It was either the morphine or the shock, but he couldn't stop repeating his story. "We took some incoming. I pushed my buddy down so I took something in the leg myself. My buddy, he's still fighting. They're all fighting.
"I dropped my M16 but there was no way I was letting go of my 12-gauge shotgun. I was pulling security all the way back on that stretcher. Just as well. This guy pops up four feet away. I just leaned over on the stretcher and I was, like, 'boom!' - I got him."
Slowly it became clear what had been happening on other parts of the battlefield. A rear element of the brigade command had been hit by a missile, with 17 casualties. Three soldiers were killed, two reporters died and two soldiers were critically injured.
American vehicles had started to run out of both fuel and ammunition and the enemy attack showed no sign of abating. "We didn't have a choice," said Chief Angel Acevedo, 36, a maintenance technician who had to attempt to re-supply the unit. "Two tanks were black on [out of] ammo. We had to go but they ambushed us on the way up and it was a good ambush."
Chief Acevedo was in a personnel carrier when his friend, Staff Sgt Robert Stever, 36, from Oregon, was hit and killed as he engaged the enemy with his machine-gun. "He died doing what he had to do, shooting, doing his duty," said Chief Acevedo. "He was a good guy, a happy guy. He had an 11-year-old daughter."
Later, Lt-Col Twitty supplied some conservative battle statistics. About 750 of his men had faced 900 enemy fighters. The only American fatalities were the two men killed when the fuel train was ambushed. There were 30 American casualties.
Not until 7.45pm was the radio finally quiet. Sporadic fighting continued throughout the night and in the days to come. The Americans, however, continued to hold Saddam's palace.
Curly, Larry and Moe were also held, at a heavy cost to the Iraqis and Syrians. Lt-Col Twitty said that only 50 enemy prisoners had been taken. "They preferred to die," he said. "We killed most of those who faced us."
In our personnel carrier, Staff Sgt Bradley Leone, 35, a hard-fighting soldier from Indiana, mused: "All those Syrians. Ain't no one going to tell their wives, their families that they're dead. They just won't come home."
Yes, the mechanized medic outfits sometimes have smoke grenades to help them escape, and yes many medics have carried 9MM and .45 handguns for self-defense, but this is different than a normal soldier; normal soldiers (combatants) may engage in purely offensive action regardless of threat to themselves.
Both combat arms and combat support personnel are "combatants" legally speaking. They claim no special protection under the law. Chaplains and medics do. That is why their is a "Chaplain's Assistant" MOS -- the Chaplain's Assistant, when not learning how to assist with religious rites, learns a rifleman's job specifically for the reason that the Chaplain can't shoot anybody. Hence the statement that the Chaplain's Assistant is "the only combatant member of the Unit Ministry Team."
Even the photographer said he was ready to grap a gun and fire.
My older daughter is further south with V Corps COSCOM. Her favorite tool is that automatic grenade-launcher that sits on a ring atop her HEMMT tractor-trailer. A handy thing to have in "ambush alley"! Quick, Allah! More virgins!
Oh, and speaking of non-combatants: in 1943 on Bougainville, my father was pinned down in a creekbed for more than an hour by a tree-mounted Japanese sniper. The regimental chaplain finally disposed of him with one shot from a .45 automatic. My father was astonished. He had never seen anyone hit anything with a .45, let alone a 50 year-old Methodist pastor with coke-bottle specs.
Perhaps he didn't look behind the movie screen to think of some of the fundamentals behind that conflict... for example the fact that at the time the oval office was disgraced by a rapist traitor that was actively trying to destroy our military. A bit of a different situation now!
I guess God really was on his side ;-)
The really lousy part is that Reis will remember that peculiar stench for the rest of his life, and the oddest and most inocuous things will serve to bring back that horrific memory to him. You don't ever forget that smell - I know.
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I have heard first-hand reports of chaplains doing this in training when there was a risk of a battalion's position being overrun. "Stuff happens," I guess. Frankly, I would do it myself if I were a chaplain. I just wish the reporters would have the good sense to shut the hell up about this.
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