An Irishman in Baghdad

Christ, what a week. Only reason I know today is Easter Sunday is because my watch tells me it is.

I can also say I now know how I’d react to getting shot at. I get rather miffed. Still not sure if I have a killer instinct or not, explanation to follow.

OK.. So, we have a country that’s in uproar, and we are no longer conducting a change of unit, but full-on combat ops, with a tempo to match.

After my first mission, we get back at about 8pm at which point I am informed that I am going along with the 82nd lads to do an area recon. I also brought all my TCs so that on the way back, we could check out the ground for a mission later in the night.

By the time everything is prepared (Memoranda to write, risk assessments, etc., printer issues) it’s about 1am for me. By 02:30 I’m awake again (So again, lack of sleep), and the entire leadership of the platoon is off to roam around in a HMMWV.

Nothing much happened, we get back, and start prepping for the next mission, which is an area recon. No sleep here either, we leave the gate at about 17:00, with four of my tanks, four AT HMMWVs from the 82nd (with .50 cal, Mk19 instead of TOW, but they kept one of the thermal sights), and the commander’s HMMWV containing the 82nd Company commander, my company commander (doing the right seat ride), their RTO and a driver. As soon as we leave the gate, there’s this loud ‘Boom’. I look over my shoulder, and not three hundred meters there’s what looks like at least an 82mm gone off. We batten down the hatches in pretty good time. Now, the target for this was either our tanks, or a large convoy of container trucks which was waiting to enter the base. There’s this bloody stupid rule that everyone dismounts, gets out, clears their weapons, then gets back in, and enters the base. However, for everyone to get through the clearing point takes for ever, providing a wonderful target.

Anyway, as we progress onwards, we start cracking jokes about now being combat veterans. Riiight.. How little we knew. OK. The mission goes on. For a quiet little part of the war, it’s pretty darned busy. We could see at least five fire fights within ten kilometres of us in our OP as we watch our area (which we think mortars might launch from). The worst of it hit some 1ID guys and resulted in some 15 casualties, I’m told. (Including one Bradley?). Due to the compartmentalization of the battlespace, we weren’t allowed to go charging to the fire fight, though we’d have been there in ten minutes or less in most cases. Finally, however, at about 22:00 we get a change of mission and go get sent to create a checkpoint on the road and try to nab some of the ambushers as they drive back from their ambush. For some reason, we drop the AT platoon, so we’re now down to four tanks, and the command Hummer.

Off we go, and we go careening down the road. We stop at a traffic cone in the middle of the road, apparently there’s an Iraqi police station there. After a little checking to confirm that the guys with the AKs were actually police, we go around the corner and go another.. oh… 400meters, maybe less.

The following will be told twice. The first time is what I saw as it happened, the second is what really happened as after I was discussing things with my lads.
We enter a slightly open section, and there’s a lot of popping. Takes me a fraction of a second to think ‘Hey.. that sounds like there’s another ambush going on. We must be near it, wonder how easy it’ll be to find it?’

The next thing which goes through my mind is.. “Well, would you look at that. Tracers.”

I don’t actually remember figuring out that they’re coming at me. I do remember yelling ‘SCAN RIGHT!!!’ Neither do I remember anything between that point, and looking in the GPSE at a target. Dropping into the hatch, mucking around with the seat, moving forward, doesn’t seem to have happened.

I see the most perfect target I could ever expect to see in my career in the thermal sight. A guy crouched, and running parallel to us, carrying what appears to me to be an RPK. (Initially thought it was an RPG, but I don’t think so).. I call for the platoon to stop (Took me a second, my usual response to an ambush is to drive through it, but hey.. I’m in a sixty-ton tank!), and also yell ‘RPG right!’ on the radio.

“Gunner, coax, troop”. Gunner has already flipped the toggle to ‘coax’

Then a ‘Clunk-thunk-unk’, the sight picture jumps around and I lose sight of the guy. Mutual curses from myself and gunner, he plays with the controls, and I have a target again. The person I’m looking at in the sight has no weapon, both hands are in his pockets, and he’s kind of casually standing around. There’s a built-up area near as well. I cannot be 100% sure it’s the same guy I saw two seconds earlier with the RPwhatever, and so don’t shoot. He strolls around, as if he’s a spectator, than after a minute or two, casually walks off.

We’re left cursing our luck. There was so much fuming going on in the tank, you could probably see steam escaping out the hatches.

OK, this is what really happened.

We drive along, and the enemy open up with an ambush consisting of at least two RPGs and two automatic weapons. Interestingly enough, the ambush is from both sides of the road at the same time. They’re evidently not worried about crossfire, though it does complicate things for us. RPGs fly in front of two of my tanks, one of which detonates on the far side, the other, near as we can tell, did not detonate at all. The tracers were all agreed to be high, possibly they were aiming for TCs. An inspection of the tanks later don’t indicate any hits by even small arms. The actual shooting lasted about three or four seconds, it was over bloody quickly. My lead tank’s loader got off a 16-round burst at one chap, he says he’d be surprised if the guy lived given the range, but I’m not optimistic. Nobody else got off a shot. Indeed, to my knowledge, mine was the only gunner to actually acquire a target. They let off one burst, and went to ground. What we think happened is that they’re not used yet to the concept of a whole bunch of tanks in our area, (Apparently my company has only one less tank along than the entire 1st ID) and thought they had another APC convoy going through (M113s, Brads). They launch their attack without knowing that we were a little stronger than that, but after we stopped, slewed the turrets, and that 240 burst as well, I think they probably all copped on, and decided that discretion was the better form of valour and scarpered.

I yelled to scan, and myself and my loader both dropped like rocks. As for what happened to my tank, it transpired that we traversed back far enough that we hit the inhibitor which prevents the gun from hitting the back deck. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know at the time was that whilst I lost sight of the guy with all the jumping around, the gunner did not (effectively a wider field of vision through the GPS than the GPSE I think) and saw the gentleman in question place the weapon on the ground. I didn’t find out about this until much later. Had I known, we’d have killed him. My gunner thought I knew. Hence my not being sure if I have a killer instinct: I think anyone else in the platoon would have shot him, but I didn’t. Then again, at the time he had the weapon, I had no doubts about commanding ‘fire’ at all.

Terrain involved some irrigation ditches, we couldn’t follow. There was a set of triple concertina wire, followed by the ditches. An attempt by myself to maneuver around the side resulted in the tank pitching forward at a horrible angle, and so we decided not to go forward. Six decides that they’re going to at least get the weapon that the guy dropped, so they get out on foot, have a tank lead and crush the wire, and so the dismount element of two captains and their driver goes out into the zone and starts hunting around for this thing. An hour later, they still haven’t found it. The terrain sucked, it wouldn’t have been too hard for the guy to push the weapon into the mud just under the surface. In the meantime, the tank that was used to crush the wire now has it wrapped around the sprocket, and so is limited in manoeuvrability. It then gets stuck in the ditch, listing at about a 50 degree angle, with the left track wedged in the ‘V’ at the bottom of the concrete ditch. Joy. So now we have to cut the wires, and of course, the sprocket with the wires trapped around it is the one on the threat side. Out hops the E-4 with the wire cutters. Another E-4 joins him, and I figure that I may as well stand out there too and keep ‘em company. I have to take out the bullet-proof plate in the back of my vest to work in the tank, so as I’m standing there holding the flashlight, joking around with the guys, I’m really thinking ‘please don’t shoot me in the back.. please don’t shoot me in the back…’ Considering we’re standing in the open with lights on where the bullets were flying not fifteen minutes earlier, the humour content of our chatting was pretty reasonable. Anyway, we get the wire out, the tank manages to extract itself, and it’s back home. We’re back in the tents by 0500.