Hillah, Iraq.
Being an assaulter in a helicopter borne assault is a lot like being in a Harley biker gang. Both are loud and vibrate tremendously, and if you hear that noise after dark, there is probably trouble on its way somewhere. Tonight we took over a town. Not a few houses, not blocked the road going into town. We took over the whole town. The plan was to place a blocking force to catch squirters on the west end of a canal that parallels the south side of town, and another blocking force on the north east side of town to cover the east and the north. The helo borne assaulters were to land on the west side of town. We had a single helicopter gunship to provide overwatch protection. Once the town was secured, the ground forces would come in to work east to west, and the helo assaulters would work west to east. We were going after a dozen bad guys from the same tribe, all accused of making the usual weapons of instability and destruction. We had to take the whole town because everybody in it belonged to the same family, and the town was more like an extended commune, and the guys we wanted could be anywhere. The palm groves and houses streamed by the rear ramp where the 50 caliber machine gunner was strapped in. I drank peach iced tea from a bottle. We again flew low and fast, running down rivers and hopping over tree lines until we heard the code word that the ground assault element was in place.
“Bluto, Bluto, Bluto.”
“Roger”, and we streaked north to assault the town, houses flying by just a hundred feet below us. Five minutes out, we broadcast our codeword for the ground assault element to begin moving in:
“Otter, Otter, Otter.”
“Roger, moving out.”
With the one minute warning, we all stood up, holding on to the safety rope as the pilot banked sharply, then pitched up to break the rate of decent. I briefly saw palm trees before the dust covered everything. Learning from the last helo mission, I brought my goggles, which kept a lot of the dust out of my eyes. We walked off the helo, formed into an assault formation, then I took a knee, rifle at the ready, as the helos departed for a nearby American camp to refuel and wait. Through my Night Optical Devices, I could see sleepy people arising from their beds outside their houses or on the roofs of their houses. We had achieved complete surprise. The element of surprise is a warm security blanket. Sweat ran down my spine, and my ears rang in the quiet.
The assault formations moved out briskly towards the house that we had identified as a good potential command post. And we promptly fell into a ditch. With NODS, one can see far away quite well, but you have limited depth perception, and not much peripheral vision, which is fine because anything up close is out of focus anyway. Quickly recovering, we assaulted up to the house. I marked our location with a chem light for the ground forces, while the Green Berets and SWAT blew open the gate then rushed in to secure the house. The high walls surrounding the house created a courtyard of sorts. A family was sleeping on blankets in the yard. The males were quickly flex cuffed and put against a wall next to the chicken coops. The women and children were invited inside their house, where an Iraqi SWAT watched over them. A couple of goats wandered around the yard, rooting through the trash.
The house had no running water or electricity. Through my NODs, I could see a water cistern, placed right next to a sewage cistern. Nobody in Persia has made anything decently waterproof since the days of clay, and the water and sewage had turned the dirt of the courtyard to mud. Very stinky mud. We found a relatively dry place to set up our command post. The Captain laid out his battle maps, and I stood by to control the air battle. We also had two other radio operators to control the two ground elements. Once the command post was operational, he broadcast the codeword to begin assaulting the town:
“Flounder, Flounder, Flounder.”
And the SF guys began methodically taking down the town, house by house. I heard doors being knocked down, and gates being blown open. The radio was alive with combat reports. The first couple of streets were easily taken, as the locals still had no idea what was going on. Towards the middle of town, some of the males began to resist SWAT and the Special Forces. As a rule, it is not a good idea to swing at the group of guys pointing rifles in your direction. In this case, the good guys are a pretty cool set, and the resistors were not shot for their efforts. However, they did receive quite a beating as they continued to resist despite overwhelming odds. The courtyard was busy as elements of the assault forces escorted detainees back to the command post for positive identification by our informant. Detainees were all flex cuffed when they arrived, whereupon they were lined up facing the wall and subsequently made to kneel. I focused on the working the helicopters to provide airborne surveillance.
The batch of detainees from the middle of town were brought in, and the town was ours. We broadcast the codeword for securing the town:
“Stork, Stork, Stork.”
This last batch had resisted heroically, but ultimately their pain was in vain as we had won the battle before they were even awake. This final group was particularly battered. I turned as a detainee moaned, trying to blink mace out of his eyes. Two others clutched their sides, their ribs probably broken. Another man’s head leaked blood onto his nightshirt, and he kept leaning forward to spit out blood and fragments of teeth. He turned to ask the interpreter if SWAT might go back to look for his teeth in the yard. “Fuck you,”, said one of the SF guys. The man with the bloodstained shirt obviously did not speak English, but some things don’t require translation. The Iraqi interpreter walked over, turned the bleeding man to face the wall, pushed his head to the wall, then sat on the man’s hunched back to smoke a cigarette. The maced detainee passively watched the SF guy, the slightest traces of hate in his eyes. What he could not see was the invisible laser aiming dot focused right between his eyes. I turned back to running the air battle.
Some people escaped over the canal to the south of town, and I pushed the helicopter to the FAC in the assault force pursuing them. I listened as the helos talked the assaulters onto where the squirters were hiding. These escapees were also delivered to the growing crowd of detainees in the courtyard.
Soon, all the males of the town were flex cuffed in the courtyard. SWAT began interrogating them. The SWAT officers preferred old regime tactics. I hunkered down to watch the interrogations, trying to ignore the smell of livestock and raw sewage. Questions asked, replies muttered, voices raised with flash lights shined into eyes, and occasionally a beating until an answer was produced.
The Team Sergeant came over to the four detainees. Through the interpreter, he berated them for their cowardly use of IEDs. “You are not a man! You are less than a man! You kill innocents. Do you want to fight? Do you? I will give you a pistol, and we can settle this right now. We will go out in the street to have a fair fight!”
They just moaned, bled, and said nothing.
We had captured seven of our targets. Unfortunately, the top three primary targets were in a mosque located a couple of kilometers north. The ground assault element mounted up their vehicles to push north, and I sent a helo with them to provide protection and guidance. It was hard for the ground element to find the mosque. This area of Iraq is just fields and canals, poorly mapped if they are mapped at all. The helos tried to guide the assaulters onto what was supposed to be the mosque, but proved otherwise. While the informant was trying to determine where it was, I sent the gunship helo to the American Camp for fuel, recalling one of the troop transports for protection. We began to run out of time, so we recalled the ground element while I broadcast the codewords for helicopter exfiltration.
“Pinto, Pinto, Pinto.”
“Roger, on the way.”
The detainees who were not bad guys were released, and the bad guys were loaded onto the vehicles of the ground assault elements. We patrolled our way back out to the helo landing zone to await our ride. The helos swooped in, and I could barely see the assaulter in front of me as I walked through the storm of dust to get on board.
The helos were all fueled up, so they left quickly after they dropped us off. I was pleased to note that we had woken up a lot of the Polish Contingent when we returned. The codeword for the mission’s completion was broadcast to headquarters:
“Neidermeyer. I say again, Neidermeyer.”
The mission was a success in my mind because we captured seven bad guys. We had also have really figured out how to operate with the helicopter squadrons. They like working with us, and we them, and we are already discussing upcoming operations. They said it was okay if we bring our ATVs on the helicopters next time. Assuming that the mission doesn’t get canceled by a staff guy somewhere. Five combat controls.