Chasing catastrophe, p.11
Chasing Catastrophe, page 11
Iraqi border guards were dispersed along the southern border with Kuwait, and the colonel warned us we’d be in range of the Iraqi’s artillery tubes. The guards also had AK-47s, T-55 tanks, and armored personnel carriers (APCs) and troop carriers with machine guns.
The battalion planned to cross the berm five kilometers south of the border, breach the concertina electrified fence, climb over an eight-foot berm, and then roll through a twenty-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep ditch dug at the border. Then we’d be in Iraq.
On the way back from our briefing we stopped and picked up a crate full of grenades.
“Four of us in the back of the LAV,” I wrote, “so we wedged the crate of grenades behind me on the seat, and I’m leaning up against it for the ride back to our staging area.”
We were reminded once we started broadcasting again not to give any specific locations, including where we are or where we’re going, why we’re going, or what’s going to happen, and the captain warned us that first contact with the enemy would likely come at our position (and he was right), telling us to expect artillery and small-arms fire.
We made our way to the northern berm to protect bulldozers preparing to cut through fencing, and we saw Iraq with our own eyes for the first time. I did a standup from the back of the LAV on the way there as part of our video journal, which wound up in Christian’s “Embed” documentary:
It’s Wednesday morning and we’re now rolling toward the border. Just a moment ago we had to jump in the back of the vehicle and close the hatches to cries of “lightning, lightning, lightning” because of missiles fired toward Kuwait. The start of war could be moved up because of this latest offensive action by the Iraqis.
At 3:30 p.m. that day, I wrote:
We’ve reached the first electrified fence, about one click [kilometer] from the border. We can see with binoculars a bus and about a dozen Iraqis milling about. Scouts report they’re waving white flags. We can’t handle any surrenders…Kuwaiti soldiers will be responsible for them at this location…and we can’t tell if they’re soldiers or civilians yet.
A bit later, I wrote:
Game-day for real? H-hour is supposed to come tonight, right over our heads. One of the first targets in the war is right in front of us: Safwan Hill. It’ll be pounded by air assets, including fighter jets and Cobras along with ground artillery. We should be just a click and a half away, between the berms at the border. Another sandstorm today, blowing while we waited for the order to move up. Christian and I fell asleep on the sand, getting some shelter from the tires of the LAV. I woke up with enough sand in my ears that it literally poured out when I turned my head to the side. Meanwhile Timmons just named our LAV “The Gypsy Wagon” and we picked up a Brit who’d be riding with us across the border, Flight Lieutenant Mick Morley, who turned out to be entertaining as hell.
We moved back from the border and settled in for the night. I rolled out my mat on the hard desert sand and slept on top of it in my sleeping bag, and we were up again at 5 a.m., traveling back and forth between the fence and other positions. We got resupplied with food and water and then went to the Brit’s camp so that Captain Custis could re-coordinate the liaison movements with the Royal Air Force (RAF) regiment. We got word that the air war began overnight which was disappointing for us since nothing was really happening yet where we were, and we remained under orders not to broadcast or make any phone calls.
The next morning was more of the same. Rolling near the berms, meeting up with other platoons, coordinating plans, frustrations with radios, constantly scanning the horizon for trouble.
We knew this thing was about to kick off, which made every minute and every hour seem interminable.
The new battle plan was set for that evening, with our guys deploying along the northern berm while the air assault on Safwan unfolded. Then they’d be tasked with clearing any Iraqi barracks or other targets of interest that the air power wasn’t able to neutralize. When a scud missile was fired toward Kuwait, we went into our full gas mask drill, and when a second scud was launched, we went to MOPP Level 4, which meant not just our suits and mask and boots, but also our hoods on and secured tight, and we then had to sit in the cramped space of the vehicle with virtually no air flow, sweating profusely. I wasn’t completely claustrophobic, but when they told us we’d have to put our gloves on for a complete seal, I started to lose it, and that’s when we were given the all-clear.
I wrote, “I want to go to war already! Enough of this BS. Tired of sitting and waiting and so are the Marines.”
We didn’t have to wait much longer.
It came without warning. We’d been sitting for a while near the border, and Christian and I had been lulled into a false sense of security, not fully paying attention since there wasn’t much going on. And out of nowhere we were rocked by the incredibly loud and jarring “BOOM BOOM BOOM” of our chain gun.
Sergeant Gwaltney was firing what are believed to be the very first ground shots of the war. Captain Custis spotted what he called “hostile activity” at one of the border guard posts and made the snap decision to take them out.
It was one of the Iraqis’ objectives, and he wasn’t going to wait for them to initiate contact. Gwaltney triple-fired repeatedly, and other LAV-25s joined in. Christian poked out of the back hatch when he could, capturing some of the action on his camera, and then we took off in a hurry, flying down the dirt road to meet up with other companies, and I got the green light to call in and report on the historic first shots fired by Marines.
Along the way we saw Iraqi soldiers fleeing another post to avoid certain death.
Meanwhile, the captain’s prediction proved true, with Iraqi artillery landing dangerously close at one point, flying right over our heads, hitting maybe a hundred yards or so past our position. It was close enough that Christian and I heard it, felt it, and freaked out maybe a little. Marines near us returned artillery fire, and it was clear we were now at war, or at least on the brink, and experiencing it from the actual front lines.
WAR BEGINS
That night was the full-on assault on Safwan Hill, and we watched it unfold from our front row perch at the top of the berm. Located just three kilometers north of Iraq’s southern border, Safwan was the highest peak in southern Iraq and provided the Iraqis a continuous line of sight into the Kuwaiti desert. The Iraqis had built several observation posts there, along with a signal intelligence gathering facility, which they might have used to calibrate our position for the mortars fired in our direction a couple days earlier. Coalition forces lit up Safwan in spectacular fashion, like Fourth of July fireworks on steroids, with Cobras armed with Hellfire missiles, TOW missiles, Sidewinder missiles, 2.75-inch rockets (for personnel and soft targets), and five-inch rockets, along with twenty-millimeter three-barrel cannons capable of firing 650 rounds per minute. The Cobras were joined by fighter jets and bomber aircraft carrying more powerful and dangerous munitions, including napalm and a massive two-thousand-pound bomb.
It was an amazing scene that lasted for what seemed like hours. At some point I called in to report on what we were witnessing, lying just below the crown of the southern hillside of the berm so I could see over the top.
After the assault was over, we pulled back to get some rest, and the next morning we crossed the berm into Iraq for the first time.
Our first stop was the border post our guys destroyed a couple days earlier. The place was absolutely leveled, but a rickety flagpole was still standing, with an Iraqi flag at the top. Sergeant Timmons hopped out, climbed up the pole, and snatched the flag. Our first souvenir.
Then we headed toward the Rumaila oil fields, where the Iraqis had set fires, either to try to interfere with U.S. military operations or to prevent America from getting its hands on the Iraqis’ most valuable resource. We got so close to the burning rigs, we could feel the heat and were breathing the smoke, so we put on protective masks the Marines had given us in anticipation of this event.
As we made our way north, I wrote a story about what we saw, using a standup open I’d shot earlier, showing the vast environmental impact of the Rumaila fires and smoke, filling the horizon in every direction as far as we could see:
We have an amazing vantage point of these oil fires, you see on the horizon there where the smoke starts, and then just walk with me as we pan the horizon there [I began walking in a big circle around Christian, who stayed in one place and panned the camera to follow me].
…thick black smoke like a blanket all the way as far as you can see across the horizon [pointing], you can see flames off on the horizon of another fire burning, it just keeps going past all those light armored vehicles there [the LAVs are in the foreground close to us, the smoke is miles away] and if you want to come back this way, believe it or not there’s another source of smoke over here that goes in this direction [I’m now walking the other way and Christian is panning with me to the right] and again, blankets the horizon as far as the eye can see.
We passed more than a dozen oil fires as we traveled north, some of them with flames several stories high, and saw hundreds of camels, most in large packs but one young one all alone.
We passed empty guard posts built on overpasses and men dressed like farmers who the Marines suspected were soldiers who shed their uniforms.
And we got a flat tire and watched our guys change it with lightning speed.
I did a standup on camera about it that didn’t make air but did make it into Christian’s “Embed” documentary. I’m standing, poked through the back of the LAV, with my sunglasses and yellow helmet on, looking hot, disheveled, and exhausted, saying: “We’re on the road toward the Euphrates River and we may have a flat tire, which is a problem because we called Triple-A and they said it’s gonna take them at least six weeks to get here—so we’re not sure what we’re gonna do next.”
The tire change took twelve minutes, and we hit the hardball again.
We passed Iraqis walking along the highway, and clearly some of them were soldiers, with military pants and boots under their robes. I was surprised the Marines were leaving them alone and was told they weren’t concerned with anyone who wasn’t shooting at them or actively opposing them. The military objectives were ahead of us, and they’d only pause and shoot to clear out obstacles along the way.
Christian and I recorded anything and everything of interest, including the guys walking on the road, the camels, the sheep and their herders in the fields, the traffic jams of military vehicles, the attack helicopters buzzing overhead. We’d feed material or file stories when we could, when our company would pull over to discuss plans or pause for resupply of fuel, food, and water.
My next standup was a bit cryptic:
The 3rd LAR is on the move. We will be hitting the road north to once again serve as the eyes and ears of the 1st Marine Division in a critical mission focused on strategic positions. Because of the sensitivity and importance of this mission and because of our proximity to enemy forces, I will not be able to file reports for probably the next eighteen hours.
On March 23, my dad’s birthday, we were up at 5:30 in the morning, and I shaved for the first time in days. We hit the road early for a trip north across the Euphrates and beyond, joined by the 1st and 2nd LAR and the 18th Army brigade and other assets.
“Nothing but U.S. Military on the highway,” I wrote in my notebook,
and today we’re supposed to take the lead. Alpha and Bravo companies are heading to another river crossing providing security and recon to insure follow on forces can move safely towards Baghdad. They won’t let us transmit or even do phoners [a live shot on the air over the phone, without video]. Everyone is expecting trouble or some kind of resistance. Passed a graveyard of smashed up shells of vehicles on the side of the road, plus several spaced out in the median of the highway, every 50 feet or so. MRE boxes, bags and empty water bottles litter the shoulder of the road.
Then I wrote down a conversation I overheard between Custis and Gwaltney, the gunner.
Capt: “Hey, you know your weapon’s on ‘fire,’ right?”
Gunner: “How’d it get like THAT?” And he starts laughing.
We passed a destroyed Humvee where two U.S. soldiers were killed by an RPG and stopped near an airfield taken over by coalition forces and renamed Air Jackson. We watched massive C-130s take off, and helicopters circle overhead.
At some point some Special Ops guys stopped us, asking for help. They’d been worried about an ambush from mortar fire from a building off in a field and were outgunned, so a platoon from Delta Company went in, found an anti-aircraft weapon and one thousand rounds of ammo and some mortar pits and detained a bunch of guys. We hung around for an hour or so providing security.
I believe this was also the day that my man Christian took his first dump in twelve days.
It was the strangest thing. I had no problem going. I was very regular, squatting on a shovel or an empty ammo box every day. Other guys might have had issues from time to time, but longer than two or three days was unusual. Christian hadn’t pooped since before we left Ripper and confessed to it after about a week. It then became a daily topic of conversation and word quickly spread. Marines kept giving him their home-brewed remedies. Extra coffee. Extra hot chocolate. Tabasco sauce, which came in the MREs in tiny bottles. It became a running joke among our crew and even with other companies and platoons, and the efforts to get him cleaned out ramped up, with no success. Christian was setting records in an unlikely category and becoming a legend.
And then, nature finally called. It was midday and we were paused for a bit, parked somewhere in the sand, and he told me he felt something brewing, so I grabbed his camera and recorded him reaching for a couple of half-used rolls of toilet paper stashed in the back of the LAV, then watched as he grabbed the empty ammo crate we shared as a toilet seat and headed off to a spot behind the closest dune.
A few minutes later, he returned with a grin.
“We had an effort. Not the herculean, all-clean effort I expected—but it’s a solid start.”
The drought was over. His bowels were back in action, and he began taking care of business on the reg like the rest of us.
As so often happens, the laughs would be short lived. We’d crossed the Euphrates earlier that day, so we were now in Mesopotamia, the historic region between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. “The crossing,” I wrote, “was anticlimactic. Heard so much about it, thought it would be heavily defended but just a small pocket of resistance. Marines had already secured the bridge we crossed, and the river itself was more like a stream, not very wide and not very impressive.”
The LAVs were parked along the roadside every two hundred meters or so, with their turrets pointed across the desert farmland, and I wrote, “all quiet so far.”
Colonel Clardy called his company commanders together and told them we weren’t done for the day. We’d be making a run to the Tigris, despite the approaching darkness. I did a standup, looking rough and tired:
We just had a roadside briefing with the Lieutenant Colonel, who told us he senses an opportunity and wants to push forward and seize the bridge at the Tigris River, and push across and secure the road there and hold it for follow on forces. He said we still can’t broadcast though, and I asked why, and he said because we’ll be all alone up there and if the enemy finds out where we are, they’ll gas us.
There was no complaining. The Marines were tired, but this was their job and there would be time for rest later. That night was our first major contact with the enemy, when we drove right into an ambush.
AMBUSHED
It was the scariest and hairiest experience of the entire war, caught up in a full-on firefight that lasted close to an hour. The sun had gone down. It was unusual for us to be traveling at night, but we were with the entire battalion, with roughly 250 vehicles and one thousand men. We were somewhere near the rear of the convoy when we started hearing shots, and our vehicle rolled to a stop.
It was strange and eerie and incredibly unsettling, hearing the shouting and gunfire creep closer and closer to our position, until all of a sudden it was a full-on firefight, with every Marine engaged and every gun blazing on our rig.
The opposition was at brigade strength, many of them moving on foot, popping up and down like whack-a-moles from behind sand dunes to fire on the Marines. Christian and I couldn’t see them, but we later learned there were hundreds of enemy fighters, some as far as two thousand meters away, others advancing within thirty feet. One Marine told me he saw seven Iraqi tanks and saw one of them taken out by an air strike.
Sergeant Gwaltney barely let up on his chain gun, and our machine gun was getting heavy use, too. Christian and I stayed crouched in the back for most of it, but he occasionally popped up with the camera to try to record footage, which was difficult because it was so dark. He managed to capture some tracer rounds, and you can hear the captain yelling. I also popped out to get a look but was primarily focused on trying to get permission to go live on our hand-held satellite phone.
“STAY DOWN!” He yelled over the constant weapons firing. Cannons, machine guns, more machine guns, more chain guns, tracer rounds lighting up the sky, explosions in the distance, more gunfire, on and on and on.
Once I’d gotten over the shock of what was happening, I realized I needed to call New York and get on the air, but because of embed rules, I wasn’t supposed to report live without letting the captain know first, but getting the captain’s attention was nearly impossible, because he was shooting at enemy fighters.
