Hillah, Iraq.
Even on the planning board, the operation looked pretty complicated. Since I am a Subject Matter Expert (calling air strikes) attached to the unit that is supporting the unit that supports the strikers, I have to be somewhat careful in how I voice my concerns. Besides, I am not an expert in kicking down doors or arresting people. But still, I didn’t see how we were going to take down ten houses with three teams, with only one informant to positively ID the houses. These houses are pretty typical of what you might expect in the third world: lots of mud/brick houses in a warren of alleyways, with no numbers or street names. So, you really have to make sure you are at the right house by having the informant actually touch the door.
The whole operation reminded me of one of those logic puzzles with boats, foxes, chickens, and river crossings. The informant had to go to every house. You couldn’t take the whole strike force to every house because that would be obvious, and in some places impossible due to the narrow streets. The SWAT guys can’t be left alone due to an alarming inclination to drive around fast shooting machine guns when left unsupervised. So…how to lead twelve vehicles in a sweep of a neighborhood three times to hit ten houses? Hey, man, I call air. There are enough experts in this room.
The final plan was to have a lead vehicle with the informant drive a route, dropping off strike teams as the houses were positively identified, and loopingthrough the neighborhood three times, with the final arrest being the local police chief colonel who is accused of taking bribes. Thinking that this is as good a plan as any, I went to gear up.
FAC Pack with air strike maps, gloves, ball cap with clip on lights, Gatorade, Hadji scarf. And guns. With lots of ammo. And tracers. Mostly because I like tracers.
Someone realized that arresting a colonel takes authorization from the American general in charge of Iraq. We got working on that problem.
I was reassigned from the Anglico humvees to the assault force leader’s humvee because the captain wanted the air on call with him. Suits me just fine. I managed to get into the humvee without maiming myself with the BHBK, and the Justice League headed out to fight crime.
The plan lasted right up until we left the camp. The SWAT chief remembered that the SWAT guys needed a piece of gear from another camp on the other side of town, so we changed our ingress route to the town. While loading up the gear, the captain’s satcom went out, so I became the liaison with the base and the controlling authority. On the way to the objective, we got the authorization to arrest the colonel. As we got closer to the target town, more and more police appeared on the road. They had the road sealed off and were directing our convoy through. So much for our secret mission. Keep in mind that these police are the same ones who work for the colonel we were on our way to arrest. But, surely they wouldn’t have told him.
We rolled up to the first objective just fine. The informant hopped out and identified the house for the first assault team, and then hopped back into our humvee. I could hear the breaching charges blowing down the door as we sped towards the second objective.
Or so we thought. The informant got a bit confused about where he was, and where he was going. Keep in mind that Arabs don’t have the best sense of direction, and really suck at it after dark. I had my map out, and we were blocks away from our target. I was confused, the informant was confused, and the convoy sort of ground to a halt as we tried to figure where to go. And I really wanted all those damn dogs to stop barking.
Turned around, we went finally found the second target. Out hopped the strikers, and more booms as we headed off to the third target. Now the informant was lost again, but he managed to find the third house. They kicked down the door, and the nice family inside informed them that the guy we were looking for was two houses down. We rolled down the street quickly and kicked in another door with another team while the other team ran to catch up. As pretty much everybody was off the humvee, I had to get out to provide security with my rifle. Yeah….
Except this was the wrong house too. So we kicked down another door. And another. And another. I got so tired of getting in and out of the humvee that I just started hanging on the running board as we went house to house. Finally, we had done the Hadji 5K, and opted to just go to the colonel’s house.Except the informant told us that his house was really out on the main road. How far? Oh, just a kilometer or two. After seven kilometers, the informant admitted that he was really confused, but it wasn’t his fault as he was just a local cop who had taken all the info from the real informant who didn’t want to ride with the Americans. So, we had spent the evening being led around by a local cop with second hand knowledge and a terrible sense of direction who worked for the guy we were trying to arrest. What could possibly have gone wrong?
At one point, we considered asking one of the cops along the road where their boss lived, and we figured they might even show us where. But, it would probably be bad to bring the guy’s personal army along with us when we went to arrest him, as it could lead to a rather awkward moment. Ultimately just gave up on the colonel.
Despite all that, we managed to arrest five of the top six guys we were after, and confiscated a bunch of rifles and weapons.
Overall, the mission was a success because we managed to arrest a bunch of bad guys. But it was frustrating because we had the same success by planning and rehearsing for nearly ten hours as we had planning for an hour or two. Essentially, the mission is really only as good as the intelligence you get. And this time we had crummy information.