Dune Buggies and Mud Don’t Mix

Geared up and strapped in, I sat vibrating in the gunner’s chair of the DPV shortly after nightfall March 20, 2003, as an Air Force MH-53 lifted off the runway in Kuwait. The vehicle had been loaded into the rear of the PAVE-Low aircraft, and we were en route toward the mission we’d spent the past several weeks rehearsing. The waiting was about to come to an end; Operation Iraqi Freedom was underway.

My war was finally here.

I was sweating, and not just with excitement. Not knowing exactly what Saddam might have in store, we’d been ordered to wear full MOPP gear (“Mission Oriented Protective Posture,” or spacesuits to some). The suits protect against chemical attacks, but they’re about as comfortable as rubber pajamas, and the gas mask that comes with them is twice as bad.

“Feet wet!” said someone over the radio.

I checked my guns. They were ready, including the 50. All I had to do was pull back the charging handle and load.

We were pointed straight toward the back of the helicopter. The rear ramp was not all the way up, so I could see out into the night. Suddenly, the black strip I was watching above the ramp speckled with red—the Iraqis had kicked on anti-aircraft radars and weapons that intel had claimed didn’t exist, and the chopper pilots began shooting off decoy flares and chaff to confuse them.

Then came the tracers, streams of bullets arcing across the narrow rectangle of black.

Damn, I thought. We’re going to get shot down before I even get a chance to smoke someone.

Somehow, the Iraqis managed to miss us. The helicopter kept moving, swooping toward land.

“Feet dry!” said someone over the radio. We were now over land.

All hell was breaking loose. We were part of a team tasked to hit Iraqi oil resources before the Iraqis could blow them up or set them on fire as they had during Desert Storm in 1991. SEALs and GROM were hitting gas and oil platforms (GOPLATs) in the Gulf, as well as on-shore oil refinery and port areas.

Twelve of us were tasked to hit farther inland, at the al-Faw oil refinery area. The few extra minutes it took translated into a hell of a lot of gunfire, and by the time the helicopter touched down, we were in the shit.

The ramp dropped and our driver hit the gas. I locked and loaded, ready to fire as we sped down the ramp. The DPV careened onto the soft dirt… and promptly got stuck.

Son of a bitch!

The driver started revving the engine and slapping the transmission back and forth, trying to budge us free. At least we were out of the helicopter—one of the other DPVs got stuck half on and half off the ramp. His 53 jerked up and down, trying desperately to free him—pilots hate like hell to get fired at, and they wanted out.

By this time I could hear the different DPV units checking in over the radio. Just about everybody was stuck in the oil-soaked mud. The intel specialist advising us had claimed that the ground would be hard-packed where we were going to land. Of course, she and her colleagues had also claimed that the Iraqis didn’t have anti-aircraft weapons. Like they say, military intelligence is an oxymoron.

“We’re stuck!” said our chief.

“Yeah, we’re stuck too,” said the lieutenant.

“We’re stuck,” said somebody else.

“Fuck, we got to get out of here.”

“All right, everybody get out of your vehicles and go to your positions,” said the chief.

I undid the five-point harness, grabbed the 60 off the back, and humped in the direction of the fence that blocked off the oil facility. Our job was to secure the gate, and just because we didn’t have wheels to do it with didn’t mean it wasn’t getting done.

I found a pile of rubble in sight of the gate and set up the 60. A guy came up next to me with a Carl Gustav. Technically a recoilless rifle, the weapon fires a bad-ass rocket that can take out a tank or poke a hole in a building. Nothing was getting through that gate without our say-so.

The Iraqis had set up a defensive perimeter outside the refinery. Their only problem was that we had landed inside. We were now between them and the refinery—in other words, behind their positions.

They didn’t like that all that much. They turned around and started firing at us.

As soon as I realized that we weren’t getting gassed, I threw off my gas mask. Returning fire with the 60, I had plenty of targets—too many, in fact. We were heavily outnumbered. But that was not a real problem. We began calling in air support. Within minutes, all sorts of aircraft were overhead: F/A-18s, F-16s, A-10As, even an AC-130 gunship.

The Air Force A-10s, better known as Warthogs, were awesome. They’re slow-moving jets, but that’s intentional—they’re designed to fly low and slow so they can put a maximum amount of gunfire on ground targets. Besides bombs and missiles, they’re equipped with a 30-mm Gatling cannon. Those Gatlings chewed the hell out of the enemy that night. The Iraqis rolled armor out of the city to get us, but they never got close. It got to the point where the Iraqis realized they were fucked and tried to flee.

Big mistake. That just made them easier to see. The planes kept coming, nailing them. They had them zeroed in, and zeroed them out. You’d hear the rounds coming past you in the air—errrrrrrrrr—then you’d hear the echo—erhrhrrhrh, followed closely by secondary explosions and whatever other havoc the bullets caused.

Fuck, I thought to myself, this is great. I fucking love this. It’s nerve-wracking and exciting and I fucking love it.

Gassed

A British unit flew in in the morning. By then, the battle was over. Of course, we couldn’t resist needling them about it.

“Come on in. The fight’s over,” we said. “It’s safe for you.”

I don’t think they thought it was funny, but it was hard to tell. They speak English funny. Exhausted, we moved back inside the gate to a house that had been almost completely destroyed during the firefight. We went into the ruins, dropped down between the rubble, and fell asleep.

A few hours later, I got up. Most of the other guys in my company were stirring as well. We went outside and started checking the perimeter of the oil fields. While we were out, we spotted some of the air defenses the Iraqis didn’t have. But the intel reports didn’t have to be updated—those defenses were now in no shape to bother anyone.

There were dead bodies everywhere. We saw one guy who’d literally had his ass blown off. He’d bled to death, but not before he tried to drag himself away from the planes. You could see the blood trail in the dirt.

While we were sorting things out, I spotted a Toyota pickup in the distance. It drove up on the road and stopped a little more than a mile away.

White civilian pickup trucks were used by the Iraqis as military vehicles throughout the war. Usually they were some version of the Toyota Hilux, the compact pickup built in a variety of styles. (In the States, the Hilux was often called the SR5; the model was eventually discontinued here, though it continued to be sold overseas.) Not sure what was going on, we stared at the truck for a few moments until we heard a whup.

Something went splat a few yards from us. The Iraqis had fired a mortar round from the rear bed. It sank harmlessly into the oily mud.

“Thank God that thing didn’t blow up,” somebody said. “We’d be dead.”

White smoke started pouring out of the hole where the projectile had landed.

“Gas!” yelled someone.

We started running as fast as we could back to the gate. But just before we reached it, the British guards slammed it shut and refused to open up.

“You can’t come in!” one of them yelled. “You’ve just been gassed.”

While Marine Cobras flew in overhead to take care of the mortar trucks, we tried to figure out if we were going to die.

When we were still breathing a few minutes later, we realized the smoke had been just that—smoke. Maybe it was steam from the mud. Whatever. It was all sizzle, no boom, no gas.

Which was a relief.

Shatt al-Arab

With al-Faw secured, we rigged up two of our DPVs and hit the road, driving north to Shatt al-Arab, the river that separates Iran and Iraq as it flows out to the Gulf. Our job was to look for suicide boats and mine layers that might be coming down the river to the Gulf. We found an old border station abandoned by the Iraqis and set up an observation post.

Our ROEs when the war kicked off were pretty simple: If you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and they’re male, shoot ’em. Kill every male you see.

That wasn’t the official language, but that was the idea. Now that we were watching Iran, however, we were under strict orders not to fire, at least not at Iran.

Every night someone on the other side of the river would stand up and take a shot at us. We would dutifully call it in and ask for permission to return fire. The answer was always a very distinct, “NO!” Very loud and clear.

Looking back, this made a lot of sense. Our heaviest weapons were a Carl Gustav and two 60s. The Iranians had plenty of artillery, and they had the position dialed in. It wouldn’t have taken anything for them to hit us. And, in fact, what they were probably trying to do was suck us into a fight so they could kill us.

It did piss us off, though. Somebody shoots at you, you want to shoot back.

After the high of the start of the war, our spirits sagged. We were just sitting around doing nothing. One of the guys had a video camera and we made a video poking fun at it. There wasn’t much else to do. We found a few Iraqi weapons and gathered them in a pile to be blown up. But that was it. The Iraqis weren’t sending boats our way, and the Iranians would only fire a single shot then duck and wait for us to react. About the most entertaining thing we could do was wade into the water and piss in their direction.

For a week we took turns on watch—two guys on, four guys off—monitored the radio and watched the water. Finally, we were relieved by another set of SEALs and headed back to Kuwait.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 679