Patrolling with the Manchus

After a couple hours of much-needed sleep, I got up at 0530 to link up with the patrol I was accompanying. On Haifa Street with the 1-14, I’d mostly focused on the battalion/squadron and company/troop echelons, so for this embed, which was shorter, I decided it would be better to latch onto a platoon — after all, if things go as planned, a platoon is what I’ll be leading as a lieutenant a bit more than three years from now. So in the early morning darkness, I made my way over to the barracks of 3rd platoon, Alpha Company, 4-9 Infantry (the Manchus) and introduced myself to the platoon leader, 1st Lt. Daniel Lowe.

The lieutenant, who had received his commission through ROTC in 2005, was a small, reserved officer whom the platoon’s soldiers seemed to respect greatly. During the two-plus hours of preparation before the patrol, I got acquainted with some of the soldiers I’d be riding with in Lowe’s Stryker. There was a loud, blustering team leader named Sgt. Howard, a veteran infantryman who loved guns of all kinds — “I always carry, 100 percent of the time,” he assured me. “You need to stay protected.” Manning one of the rear machine guns hatches was the gigantic Hawaiian Sgt. Wojo who never seemed to speak but occasionally tackled other soldiers — “Don’t worry if he does that to you,” one specialist explained, “it’s a sign of affection.” Two soldiers were from Boston: a big, angry specialist and a redheaded corporal with a tendency to brag and a bit of an antagonism with Sgt. Howard. Another specialist, named Baker, was Jewish and proud of it; the dynamic between him and the rest of the team, with constant Borat-style money-and-horns jokes, reminded me constantly of that one Jewish soldier on the patrol in “Saving Private Ryan.” Another, Spec. Lall, had been born in Bombay, raised in Latin America, and had enlisted soon after he arrived in the States; even while he was out serving in Iraq, he pointed out to me in a thick Indian accent, “The government still took two years to let my wife into the country.”

They were an interesting bunch, and seemed much less discontented than the infantrymen I’d met on Haifa Street, probably because a) they were engaged in a real, medium-intensity fight, as they wanted to be, and b) they’d only been here since April — not enough time for the 15-month bitterness that beset the 1-14 to set in. Howard, one of the Bostonians, and possibly Baker (it was extremely difficult to tell when he was being sincere – maybe never) seemed to believe completely in the war effort, and among the others I heard none of the frustration I’d seen at the other unit.

It was light out by the time we finished chow, mounted the Strykers, and rolled outside the wire, but it wasn’t hot yet — probably less than 100 degrees still, which believe it or not actually feels very comfortable when you’re used to 120. The mission today was to ride from Camp Taji toward a small village named after its elder, Sheikh Hamad, dismount before getting to the main market, and then proceed on foot, clearing the route of IEDs as we went; in the market, the Alpha Company commander was to met with a sheikh who had promised the day before not to let IEDs be planted on his land so long as he was guaranteed security. We would then patrol through the village, gauging local attitudes since the unit hadn’t been by in a while, and clear another stretch of road north of the village before mounting up and returning to base. The whole thing, a routine route clearance mission combined with a presence patrol, very basic to counterinsurgency, was supposed to take less than four hours.

The Stryker ride was like any other — hot and crowded, with nine soldiers and myself crammed into the vehicle. Since I was in the hull and not the gun hatch, I had time to talk a little with the soldiers before we came to a halt, the ramp crashed down, and the squad piled out, splitting into two teams and rushing to either side of the road to take up security positions. We were on a narrow, raised gravel road, the sides sloping steeply into some kind of irrigated farmland. Beyond the road, everything was wet and green, worlds away from anything else I’d seen in Iraq — and the air was humid.

For maybe a minute we stayed standing on the road while 1st Lt. Lowe moved back to the second Stryker to talk to the second squad leader. There were about 30 soldiers out with the platoon today, not including vehicle crewmen, and we were split into three squads: while one squad escorted the company commander to his meeting with the sheikh, the other two, led by the lieutenant, advanced through the fields below either side of the road, clearing, foot by foot, a stretch several hundred meters wide. The procedure was simple: we walked down the fields on a wide front, checking for the telltale copper wires used to detonate many IEDs. While the squads spread out into lines and moved off down either side of the causeway, I went with Lowe: he branched off from one of the squads to check a line of vegetation at the far end of the field. Following a safe distance behind him — you always want to maintain spacing, so that one blast is less likely to take down more than one soldier — I pretty quickly stopped snapping pictures and started looking as carefully as I could for wires. For several hundred meters we saw none, just tall, green grass, cattle, flies, and shallow, murky water everywhere.

Then one of the team leaders called over the radio: He’d found wire. Lowe and I quickly cut across the field, or paddy, or whatever it was, and linked up with the lead element of the team that had called. A minute later the other team appeared as well, taking up an overwatch position above us on the road while we investigated the wire. The sergeant was right: a thin strand of copper wire was visible in the dirt. Gently pulling it, Lowe followed the wire back into the tall grass until it snagged, on a second wire. That wire led back through the grass toward the squad, into a part of the field we’d just come through, until it crossed a third wire. A specialist realized that his leg was tangled in a fourth wire. “Tell those Strykers to back up,” Lowe told his radioman – there was no telling how far the wires led, and until the area was clear, the vehicles couldn’t come any closer.

The wire was everywhere, crossed and buried and leading from some place at the far side of the field toward the piled dirt under the road causeway — a perfect and incredibly easy place to bury an IED, and with absolutely no way of telling which wires, if any, led to actual bombs and which were decoys meant to slow us down and keep us stationary. While the interpreter and I stood still on the crumbling dirt slope, not sure what to do, the soldiers began to methodically uproot and cut the wires. Every one was a dead end — either decoys or the command wires to past IEDs that had already detonated. If they were decoys, they’d achieved their purpose: A few stretches of copper wire had stalled the platoon’s advance for half an hour while it carefully checked every trail. Only then were we able to continue the clearance, pushing just as slowly up the rest of the road until we reached the little cluster of buildings at an intersection that passed for a village, a pair of Apaches now circling overhead to back us up. In the road, as we clambered up the slope again into the village, we could see a huge crater, 12 or 15 feet across at least — the scars of an IED that had not been found in time.

In the village, while Lowe and his sergeant positioned their soldiers on all four roads of the intersection to block traffic, the Strykers finally rejoined us, bringing with them the company commander and the squad that had gone with him. With the Apaches flying wide, low circles around the village, keeping an eye on traffic and intimidating any would-be attackers, the captain talked briefly with some of the villagers, and then it was time to move again. With the Strykers, the platoon pressed up the road through the village toward a small mosque, the area beyond which would be our staging point. There, they dismounted, and the three squads formed up; this time, since the stretch of road requiring clearance was much longer, each squad was given a sector to clear, with one fire team to the left and one to the right.

To the sound of the guns

Down in the field, I kept on trailing Lowe as we repeated the procedure, slowly pushing across the grassy area, eyes peeled for wires, with half of the lead squad spread out to our right. As before, it was a slow process, and the day was getting hotter, but this time we didn’t find anything, and began to trudge back to the road. As we climbed up the steep slope of the causeway and reached the road surface, where the Strykers were supposed to come in a few minutes to pick us up, we heard a loud Crack — the report of an M4 carbine being fired somewhere off in the palm groves to the left of the road, in the other team’s area. A second later, as we all hit the dirt and the soldiers raised their carbines to the ready, aimed toward the tree line, the shot was followed by another, and then a long, drawn out crackling of machine gun fire just a few hundred feet distant, in the palms. As the fire ceased, the soldiers on the road rose, and, weapons still at the ready, moved immediately in the direction of the noise. As the squad fanned out into the dense palm grove, with two riflemen pushing off in one direction while the others went in another, I followed a soldier named Spec. Gomez, about midway down the line — no need, I figured, to be right at the front unarmed if we were moving into a firefight, but I did want to be close enough to get some good pictures. Advancing toward the sound of the guns with a squad of armored Manchu infantrymen in a damp, muddy palm jungle — definitely an exhilarating feeling.

There were no more shots. A few hundred yards beyond the tree line, on a muddy little path strewn with copper wire, we linked up with the platoon’s lead element, and the soldiers explained what had happened. While clearing the are in a fanned-out formation, they’d spotted unmistakable IED command wires on the ground — the ones we’d just passed — and then an abandoned white bongo truck. But as they prepared to approach the vehicle, a man in a white top rushed toward it, grabbed something from inside the cab, and took off running. The soldier on point fired at him — the first shot we’d heard — and then the SAW gunner poured half a box of 5.56mm rounds after him. He escaped, no telling whether he’d been wounded. Now, as the full squad secured the scene, we found a prepared IED-detonation position right where the man had first appeared: an area of flattened grass with a perfect view of the road and the end of a spool of wire just sitting there. In the truck, which the soldiers approached extremely cautiously, there was more of the same, although no actual explosives. Apparently the insurgent, if he was alone, had already planted the IED and had been lying in place, waiting to detonate it when our Strykers rolled by.

The prime task now was to find that IED. While the radioman made contact with the Apaches circling the area and told them to stand by for instructions to destroy the abandoned truck, the rest of the squad formed up, hydrated, reloaded, and prepared to fan out to follow the wires. But, the squad leader realized after a moment, we were two men short – the pair of riflemen who had moved south off the road to flank the triggerman were nowhere to be found, and the squad leader wasn’t able to raise them on the radio. Task two: Find those soldiers. The squad fanned out, moving quickly through the bright green vegetation, eyes peeled for wires and any sign of the two soldiers.

Five, maybe 10 minutes later, as we heard the whirring of the approaching Apaches, we found the soldiers: at the muddy base of one of huge palm trees, one was sprawled on the ground, barely moving, while the other was crouched over him. There had been no more shots and there was no blood, so clearly it wasn’t a combat injury, but I was at a loss as to what could be wrong until the crouched soldier looked up and shouted at us as we approached: “It’s his diabetes! Get the medical kit!” The soldier had dismounted without any kind of sugar tablets or medicine, and the extreme heat and humidity had combined with the spike in adrenaline during the pursuit to trigger some kind of attack. While three or four soldiers sprinted back toward the road to get the medical gear from the Stryker, temporarily forgetting about the search for the IED, Lowe and two sergeants dashed over to the sick soldier and tugged his armor off to cool down his core, a risky but necessary call that the lieutenant had to make. “Does anybody have an MRE?” Lowe asked. Nothing. “Some candy?” I popped open one of the pouches on my armor and threw over a packet of Gatorade powder — it was sugary, at least, and until the other soldiers came back with the medical kit, it would have to do. One sergeant tore open the packet and poured the powder into the soldier’s mouth, followed by some water. A second later he vomited some of it back up, but it seemed to do the trick. Within five minutes he looked less stricken and was able to sit up. By the time the medical kit arrived, it looked like he was going to be OK. After he’d been given his medicine, the soldier was able to stand up and, with some help, walk slowly back toward the trail, with the rest of the squad again fanned out again, looking for the IED.

Finding an IED

There was copper wire everywhere, along with a spool and trigger device, but no IED. The wires were tangled and ran deep into the underbrush, and some, like the decoys at the last site, led nowhere. By the time we reached the causeway and trudged back up onto the road the trail had gone cold. Maybe the insurgent hadn’t planted an IED at all yet – maybe he had been scouting the area, or just planting decoys. But as the squad stood waiting for the Strykers to arrive, the soldier next to me suddenly looked alert and told me to step away from where I was standing. He began to prod the thick, dry vegetation between us on the side of the road with the muzzle of his carbine, and summoned the lieutenant over – and just as Lowe asked, “What have you got?” the soldier flipped a layer of brush off and uncovered a gigantic propane tank, rigged with wires. “HME,” Lowe said loudly, to the squad – homemade explosives. I was standing less than three feet from a gigantic homemade IED.

Without pause, the whole squad except the lieutenant and platoon sergeant assembled and began to walk quickly back down the road toward the Strykers. I went with them. A minute later we were back inside the Strykers, and soon afterward the lieutenant joined us. He’d made a decision: Since the area around the IED had been cleared and the triggerman driven off, and since we had not yet finished clearing the area we’d been assigned, our vehicle was going to drive past the bomb and deposit me and four riflemen on the other side to finish the sweep. Calling in the explosive ordnance disposal squad to defuse the IED now would take too much time, and we had to finish the mission. So the lead Stryker rolled up the rode past the bomb, the ramp crashed down, and out we jumped for one more bout of road clearance.

As before, the soldiers fanned out across the muddy terrain below the road and moved forward in a line, with me trailing and taking pictures. Finally, we’d cleared the whole area, and we climbed back up the causeway next to the house that delineated the sector to wait for the Strykers. Then, as the team leader and one of the riflemen argued over whether we should go ahead and clear the brush on the other side of the road, there was a short, loud Whoosh and then a deafening explosion – one of the circling Apaches had launched a Hellfire antitank missile and destroyed the IED triggerman’s bongo truck.

That Apache strike would have been a perfect note for the patrol to end on, but the platoon still had to deal with the IED or, more precisely, wait around and secure the area until the explosive ordnance disposal crew arrived from Taji to “safely” detonate it. That whole process took about two hours, which meant naptime for me and the soldiers inside the hull and ended with a tremendous explosion when the EOD squad and their robots had finished their work. It turned out that the bomb had also been packed with shards of metal for shrapnel, including a little crucifix that one sergeant kept as a souvenir.

But we weren’t done quite yet; on the return trip to Taji, which should have been a 20-minute drive, the Stryker following ours somehow took a wrong turn and got stuck up to the axles in deep, thick mud. The soldiers in my Stryker were furious, since we now had to haul the other vehicle out with a tow-cable and would not make it back to the FOB in time for chow. Finally, around 1500 — a good four hours longer than anticipated because of the skirmish, diabetes incident, IED, and stuck Stryker — we rolled back into Taji.

I’d just seen another small portion of the counterinsurgency fight, this time in an area contested by al Qaeda, rather than the Mahdi Army as on Haifa Street. Now I had about six hours to sleep, eat, write, check e-mail, etc. before reporting back to 1st Lt. Lowe’s third platoon, Alpha Company, 4-9 Infantry again to roll out to the Mushada Joint Security Station, where I was going to spend the night — the same Joint Security Station I’d visited with Gen. Petraeus.

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Tags: Iraq