Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (37 page)

The other two platoons also saw action during those first hours of April 1. The twenty-seven men of C Company's 3rd Platoon took their objective, the hydroelectric power station on the dam's southwest side, after a brief fight in which the only Ranger casualty was a vehicle mechanic with a gunshot wound to his toe. B Company's 1st Platoon was the last in the order of movement. Its mission was to establish a blocking position on a hilltop on the southwestern approach to the dam. The platoon's soldiers were surprised to find an entire military facility that hadn't appeared on their maps. Consisting of a dozen buildings, it appeared to be an antiaircraft training headquarters. Judging by the half-cooked eggs on a stove, its soldiers had abandoned it at the first sound of gunfire. But 1st Platoon had little time to investigate. Enemy mortar fire was soon falling on the hilltop as scores of fighters poured out of Haditha village to the south, occupying prepared positions from which they began firing at the Rangers. In response 1st Platoon used its ground mobility vehicles' heavy machine guns and Mark 19 40mm grenade launchers to keep the Iraqi fighters' heads down while calling in close air support from two AH-6s. The Little Bird gunships rained .50 cal, minigun, and rocket fire on the Iraqis, destroying the mortar sites, killing an unknown number of Iraqi fighters, and igniting a natural gas pipeline that burned for several days. As they had during the first missions in Afghanistan, the Little Bird pilots also engaged the enemy from the cockpit with their M4 rifles. After a lethal half hour, the vicious combination of AH-6 and Ranger fire broke the Iraqi counterattack as the sun was rising.

Believing the Little Birds had taken care of the mortars that had been firing at them, 1st Platoon's Rangers were surprised to be taken under mortar fire again shortly thereafter. Then they noticed telltale puffs of white smoke coming from a small island about 2,000 meters away in the massive lake to the dam's north. A single Javelin antitank missile ended that threat.

That night, the Rangers cleared the wing of offices on the dam's east side, but at dawn April 2 they had to repulse a determined attack by several groups of roughly a dozen men each. Iraqi mortars resumed their harassment of the Ranger positions, along with the first of more than 350 heavy artillery rounds the Rangers would endure over the next several days. Later that evening an Iraqi force used dead space and RPGs to pin 2nd Platoon down, before A-10 attack aircraft again came to the Rangers' aid with a couple of well-placed 1,000-pound bombs. The artillery fire peaked April 3 with a barrage that seriously wounded a Ranger specialist, who was soon evacuated to H-1 on a Task Force Brown Chinook that landed on the dam to pick him up in the midst of the bombardment. He was one of four Rangers wounded during the battle. But the worst fighting at Haditha Dam was over. Team Tank's April 6 arrival sealed the victory, allowing the Rangers to turn their attention to making sure the dam continued to function.
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No Rangers were killed at the dam, but their A Company colleagues manning a checkpoint eleven miles to the southwest were not so lucky. On April 3, a man drove a car up to the checkpoint and stopped. A pregnant woman got out and yelled that she needed help. It was a trick. As several Rangers stepped forward, the car exploded, killing Captain Russ Rippetoe, the company's fire support officer; Staff Sergeant Nino Livaudais, a squad leader; and Specialist Ryan Long, a rifleman. Two other Rangers were badly wounded. The woman and the driver also died, making the attack one of the first suicide bombings of the Iraq War.
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*   *   *

Meanwhile, in the week since the cancellation of the Baghdad airport mission, Dailey had been scrambling, looking for new set-piece missions for his task force. He had retained his interest in tactical missions that he believed would have a disproportionate effect on the enemy's will to fight. But as in the opening stages of the Afghan war, this led him to order assaults on targets suspected to be empty, so the raids could be filmed for propaganda purposes. Such a mission was planned for the night of April 2, when Dailey intended to launch a Gold Team air assault against an unoccupied palace that had belonged to Saddam Hussein. But this time his prioritization of such missions would be shown up in the worst possible light.

As Task Force Green maneuvered north from Haditha, it had attracted the attention of about 100 Fedayeen acting as a quick reaction element for the regime's forces in Tikrit and Baiji. On April 2, as TF Green hunkered down in a sand-dune-encircled hide site, the Fedayeen attacked, driving toward Coultrup's small force in SUVs and pickup trucks supported by mortar fire. The Delta operators destroyed the first two SUVs with Javelin missiles, then took cover behind a ridge as the Fedayeen called up reinforcements. A vicious firefight ensued in which two Delta operators were wounded: one was hit by a bullet that broke his jaw; the other—Master Sergeant George “Andy” Fernandez, who had only joined Delta in November—was struck just under his body armor. Fernandez was critically wounded and bleeding heavily. Coultrup called Arar, urgently requesting a medevac flight.

Back in the joint operations center full of squawking radios and wall-mounted plasma screens, Blaber and Delta Command Sergeant Major Iggy Balderas were in constant contact with the C Squadron commander. Task Force Brown had Chinooks on alert and ready to fly the mission. Balderas immediately asked them to conduct the medevac. He didn't really have to request their assistance. “The pilots were begging to fly it,” said a Delta source. “They knew someone was dying.” But the 160th's strict crew rest regulations meant that if the Chinooks flew the medevac, they would be unavailable for that night's raid, so Dailey would not allow them to fly to the aid of Fernandez. Instead, to the intense frustration of the Delta men, other crews were woken after only three hours' sleep, and other helicopters prepped for the mission. The U.S. military often described the first sixty minutes after a soldier was seriously wounded as “the golden hour,” meaning that if the military could get that soldier to trauma care during that period, his chances of survival exponentially improved. It took the backup crews forty-five minutes to launch.

The flight that finally took off from Arar included two MH-60K Black Hawks for the medevac mission and two direct action penetrators to protect them and provide fire support to the beleaguered ground force. Pushing their aircraft to the limit, the pilots flew most of the ninety-minute flight at fifty feet above the desert. When they arrived over Task Force Green's position, the pilot of the trail DAP was surprised to see Delta operators on the defensive, taking cover behind the ridge. The DAPs spent the next fifty-five minutes hammering the Fedayeen with their chain guns and rockets. Shortly after the helicopters showed up, two A-10s appeared on the scene. One dropped a 500-pound air-burst bomb on a group of Fedayeen in a ravine. By the time the DAPs' fuel levels compelled them to leave, virtually all the militants were dead.

The Kilos had landed as close to the Delta operators as possible, but Coultrup told the pilots to reposition the aircraft at a safer landing zone. As soon as they did, the operators drove their casualties over. The Task Force Green member shot in the face came aboard one helicopter, but the crews were dismayed to see operators also carrying a stretcher on which lay a body covered with an American flag. Fernandez had bled to death. He was the first Delta operator killed in action since Mogadishu.

That night the Black Hawks that Dailey had kept at Arar flew the SEALs on the raid against the empty palace. A combat camera crew filmed the mission and the tape was flown to a psychological operations unit in Kuwait. It was never used.
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*   *   *

Over the course of several days in the first week of April, Blaber's expanded task force coalesced at Grizzly, an ideal home for a band of marauders operating behind enemy lines. A collection of one-story modern buildings at the base of a deep wadi but just a few hundred meters from the highway connecting Haditha and Baiji, it had been a secret weapons testing facility prior to the U.S. invasion. The special operators had done their homework and knew from Iraqi contacts that the site was a restricted area. “That was part of what would make it so perfect for us,” a Delta source said. “Iraqis were used to not going out there.” The force gathering at Grizzly included Delta's B and C squadrons; 1st Ranger Battalion; Team Tank; and a pair each of AH-6 and MH-6 Little Birds. As soon as Blaber alighted from the Echo Squadron plane that landed on the road in the middle of the night, he took personal charge of the cohort and gave it a new name, borrowed from the teenage gang that fought the invading Soviet military in the movie
Red Dawn
: Task Force Wolverine.
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Resting up during the day, the Wolverines would sally forth at night to reconnoiter, harass, and destroy. But not long after Blaber arrived, they endured two harrowing events during an otherwise successful attack on the huge K-2 airfield near Baiji the night of April 8/9.

In the middle of the assault, a Ranger Reconnaissance Detachment Humvee darted in front of the tanks without warning. Under fire, a tank crew mistook the Humvee for an enemy vehicle and destroyed it with a 120mm main gun round, killing the detachment's 24th STS combat controller, Staff Sergeant Scott Sather. He was the first airman to die in the Iraq War.
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Shortly thereafter, Celeen, the Team Tank commander, was maneuvering through a wheat field in support of the attack when his tank dropped into a forty-foot hole, flipping as it fell to land on its turret. Relatively unscathed except for the loader, who almost lost a hand, the four-man crew was nonetheless in a nightmarishly claustrophobic plight: every way out of the tank was blocked by the sandy earth. While Celeen and his gunner provided first aid to the loader, driver Private First Class Christopher Bake struggled out of his hatch and used his hands to dig his way through the sand. He eventually emerged, to the relief of other Team Tank soldiers who had arrived to guard the site. Celeen and the gunner passed the injured loader through Bake's tunnel and then used it to escape. The tank was declared a total loss.
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*   *   *

A week of successful marauding north of Baghdad gave Blaber and Coultrup confidence that they could conduct a show of force mission on the outskirts of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's fiercely loyal hometown. On the evening of April 11, Blaber gathered the 100 or so men at Grizzly who would be going out that night. He reminded them that their mission was not to seize terrain or destroy a specific objective, but rather it was to fool the Iraqi forces in Tikrit into believing that a large U.S. armored formation surrounded them. Blaber had no intention of getting sucked into a fight in the town itself. “We want to get close enough to the enemy that they can see us, but we don't want to get decisively engaged,” he told them, according to his book,
The Mission, the Men, and Me
. “Keep your back to the desert at all times.”

The Wolverines emerged from their lair into a cold, moonless night. Leading the way across the desert were a dozen Pinzgauers and SUVs. The vehicles approached Highway 1, the eight-lane freeway that separated Tikrit from the desert, and crept under a massive cloverleaf intersection. At a given code word, the five Team Tank M1A1s still in working order after ten grueling days of desert warfare moved forward and took up positions on the cloverleaf ramps overlooking the town. At the sight of the tanks, Tikrit burst into angry life, muzzle flashes of all calibers lighting up the night. The Wolverines replied in kind. The tanks' main guns were far more powerful and accurate than anything the Iraqis might throw at them, but there were many more Saddam loyalists in Tikrit than there were Wolverines in Iraq, let alone on the cloverleaf. The volume of Iraqi fire grew steadily.

Wire had become wrapped around the treads of one of Celeen's tanks, preventing it from moving. Five Delta operators ran out from their cover, each heading for a different tank to help select targets, steady the crews' nerves, and, in the case of the immobilized tank, try to untangle the wire. Monitoring the battle from Grizzly, Blaber directed Task Force Brown gunships about 100 miles away to move to Coultrup's location. The C Squadron commander reported an estimated 500 enemy gunmen armed with heavy weapons and RPGs. He could see rooftop bunkers and dug-in fighting positions in the barricaded streets. It was as if the Tikritis were just daring the Wolverines to come and fight them on their home turf. Coultrup, the Mogadishu veteran who knew firsthand what can happen to a JSOC task force outnumbered and cut off in an urban fight, recommended pulling back as soon as he could get his entangled tank moving. Blaber agreed and told him to withdraw to Grizzly as soon as possible.

Suddenly, Dailey came on the radio. He was still at Arar, but had been monitoring the Wolverine radio traffic. “Negative, negative, negative,” he said, in a transmission monitored by every member of Task Force Wolverine, including those fighting for their lives at that moment. “You are not to pull out of that city. I want you to keep moving forward into the city and destroy the enemy.” Blaber would later speculate that Dailey wanted his troops to engage in a “thunder run” through Tikrit similar to those that 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade had made through Baghdad in the previous several days. After reminding the JSOC commander that the Wolverines were on a “show of force” mission and repeating the gravity of the situation they were already in, Blaber told Dailey he'd already ordered Coultrup to pull back into the desert.

The JSOC commander was silent, but moments later Blaber's secure satellite phone rang. It was Votel, the Ranger Regiment commander and Dailey's second in command at Arar, trying to persuade Blaber to change his mind. Blaber just repeated the arguments he'd made to Dailey and hung up. Votel called back, this time with a warning, clearly based on his knowledge of how Dailey was thinking. “If you don't … move through that city, your … future as a commander might be affected,” he told Blaber. The acting Delta commander was unmoved. “Pull back to the desert as ordered,” he told Coultrup. In a second Dailey was on the radio again. “What did you say?” he yelled, furious. “You listen to me, I told you to—” At that point, Dailey's radio shorted out. The general ripped off his headset, flung it down, and stomped out of the JOC.