The Crossing of the Berm: Before the Berm.
I am writing what I hope to be a series of articles talking about Operation Iraqi Freedom, from my view point. The first article is about events leading up to crossing the berm. It actually started out as a letter to a high school friend to catch him up on what had been happening since I’d last talked to him 4 years (or more) ago. But as I started getting into 2003, the deployment and the war my mind started going into hyperdrive and I ended up with an article about detailed events transpiring before the invasion. I went through and edited it a bit to bring it more in context with the blog. I plan on pulling previous posts I had on a yahoo group about the war and putting them into this article, also.
This post starts out at about 2000, when I was an Army recruiter and talks about the changes that happened from that point on.
I have always had a lot of fun with computers and created my first homepage on Angelfire.com and I also did one for a paintball team that I played on while I was stationed at Ft. Hood, Texas. (Somehow its main page and two pictures still survive just under the radar of extinction at: http://www.angelfire.com/tx2/dnr/.) Web building was always fun, but I was new to learning the codes and it took more time than I could give to do it. There were a lot of different things that I wanted to add, but never had much of a chance to work on it. When I was in Ohio I was not doing my regular Army job. Instead somebody at DA (Department of the Army) determined that I should be a recruiter. I kept my head above water, didn’t forge many signatures and longed for the day that would be reassigned and posted back into a real Army unit. (The signature thing is a joke, by the way!)
I did get noted and awarded for three things while I was recruiting. The first was my caring of (soon-to-be) soldiers. I had a low DEP loss rate, which meant that if a young person signed up, they didn’t back down before they shipped out to basic training. In other words, they didn’t get buyers remorse.
The second thing is that I was pretty good with computers which were just starting to be fielded to the recruiters and I had a great grasp of the internet. It got me a position e-mailing tons of college and high school students and allowed me to take a 4 month hiatus from the regular recruiting job to go with a team installing new software on every Ohio Army Recruiters laptop.
All the time loading computers combined with injuries that I received while, of all things, recruiting made me balloon out a bit. Faced with possibly being ejected from the Army because I did not meet their weight standards, I went on an exercise program designed to make me stronger than before. That was the third thing I was noted for, becoming a regular Forrest Gump. I was the fastest runner in the recruiting company and started doing short and medium distance competitive runs. (I’ve lost most of that ability and gained some of that weight back by now. The weak mindset side of me blames it on the multiple deployments I have faced over the last 4 years, but I know it is just that I am enjoying “see” food.)
Wow, this thing is turning into a book! I hope that I am about to get into a new chapter soon.
Finally, I got my orders to leave recruiting and Ohio. Leaving Ohio was sad because we lived in a great house and had good neighbors. Down the street was an elderly couple who acted like a third set of grandparents to our first daughter. My wife had been able to continue with college in a town not to far away. We could go to a great venue of places and enjoyed going to Amish country for long day trips. We had really gotten used to the area. In May of 2001, we packed up our bags and moved to Fort Benning, GA (because that is what the Army told us to do.) It wasn’t my first pick but it wasn’t recruiting. In no time at all, I was getting back into doing my real Army job and training up to go to Kosovo. After a few training events out in the field areas of Ft. Benning, we deployed to Ft. Polk, LA to do a Mission Readiness Exercise in September of 2001.
The events of 9-11 happened while we were in our tents preparing to go out for a mission that morning. Needless to say, it took a while for the wheels to get turning again for our training. In late October of 2001 we deployed to the Balkins, and into Kosovo for peace keeping operations. Based out of Camp Monteith, we spent the winter patrolling the villages in the snow covered mountains along the Serbian-Kosovo boarder. In February I took “leave under emergency conditions” from Kosovo in which the travel to get back to the States was like the movie “Trains, Planes and Automobiles”; except with Hummers and helicopters! At 11 PM on a day in early February, 2002 I made it to St. Louis where my wife was staying with her parents. The next morning we went to the hospital and our second daughter was born.
I returned to Kosovo later that month and was thrown immediately back into the action the morning after my return for a large operation. The unit redeployed to Ft. Benning in May 2002. I took leave, brought my family back down to GA and moved from an apartment 30 minutes away from work to housing on the base. The drive was now only 5 or so minutes and I didn’t have to go through a military checkpoint everyday to come into work. If anyone needs a good reason that we should be at war against the “religious extremists” then here is one. We all have to wait in longer lines to do the simplest of things.
It was clear to us upon our return from Kosovo what our next probable actions were going to be. We retrained back up from peace keeping operations back into war-fighter mode. It was obvious to most of us who had been in long enough to know that the political climate was aligned to complete the job we could/should have finished in 1991.
October 2002 found us training up in Ft. Stewart in an exercise designed to bring the 3rd Infantry Division to the same level of readiness. The war drums in Washington were beating and all questions of the deployment were fading from what if to when. I prepared my wife as well as I could for the upcoming deployment, reassuring her and letting her know that worrying about the “what-ifs” weren’t going to help. As we spent Christmas with the girls, I pushed aside any fears of what could happen as we needed to make the season special for them.
In Kosovo I had been a squad leader in charge of a 7 man infantry squad. Now I was a section leader and a Bradley commander. I was in charge of my Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV), the crew, and the crew and maintenance of my platoon sergeants Bradley. It was the ideal position for me; a first class seat to a fast paced ride that I felt I had spent my entire career preparing for. I’d had numerous rotations to the National Training Center in the high dessert of southern California and three previous deployments to the Middle East. I’d spent 3 years working with Bradley’s at Ft. Hood; having been a distinguished Bradley gunner and promoted to a BFV commander ahead of my peers. My new crew that I worked with through late 2002 was an even better crew than my previous one. We were at the top of our game, and we knew it. That was the mind set of the Apache One-Three (A-13) crew when we got ready to go.
The night before I left in early January, 2002 my wife asked me how long it would be before she saw me again. I told her that she wouldn’t see me until we headed up north from Kuwait. I expected I would be gone for about 6-9 months. The next day we left Ft. Benning and two days later we were unloading bags at Camp PA in the Kuwaiti dessert. We were one of just a hand full of units that were given brand new equipment. My new Bradley was pristine. During a two week training cycle in February we proved what we already knew; that we were ready. Not just us, but our whole company. We excelled where the other units just did Ok. Again, I say that we were just that sure of ourselves. There should be no mistake; the Apache company of January through June 2002 was that damn good! In retrospect, that could have had something to do with our low casualty rate. We were traded out to another battalion, in another brigade and we were given the honor of leading that battalion across the dessert.
On February 28th, I was part of an advanced party that left Camp PA and headed out into the dessert. We would camp out in there until word came for us to move closer to the boarder. During this time we did some last minute train-up classes, and we loaded up with water, MRE’s and ammunition that we would need for the trip north. I looking at the pictures from the invasion, it was said that we looked like a bunch of gypsy wagons. But when you consider what we had to do a bunch of dusty water bottle boxes on the back of a track should be the least of anyones worries. The good think was, that the chain of command knew it, too. We didn’t have anyone coming by and saying things like, you can’t take it if you can’t hide it away. It was the “big boy club” and the concern was for us to have what we needed when we got there. I spent some of the best days of my life out in the dessert prepping and crossing the berm doing. It was a time when the Army really worked.
We only had an old handheld radio to hear the President’s ultimatum in March. The next afternoon we moved into a position within 5 kilometers (klicks) from the boarder. That night I worked on the artwork for the side of our Bradley. On the side of the Combat Identification Panel our track, A-13 was christened. Just after sundown she became, “Arabian Nightmare.”
On March 19th, we moved up to the boarder. The last time I had seen it was in 1996. Then, it was just a large earthen berm with a deep ditch on the Iraqi side. Now the berm seemed larger and just before the berm was an electric fence. It had been placed there to prevent nomads and Iraqi special operations from crossing over. You’ve got to remember one thing when I tell you all this; the berm stretched from horizon to horizon. The Iraqi-Kuwaiti boarder was literally a line drawn in the sand. The Kuwaiti government had paid a lot of money to build the fence. It was no small feat that they were being asked to put tank sized holes in the fence all along the boarder. From my turret I could look deep into the Iraqi dessert. There was nothing moving. I scanned the ground looking for mines, but could not find any. It was the only thing that I was really afraid of; a hidden, well-placed mine that could potentially immobilize my Bradley…or worse.
The engineers drove up after we had secured the boarder and a flatbed truck hauled a large D9 dozer. The engineer leader talked to us for a bit and told us about the Pakistani contractor that was the operator of the giant earth mover. He said that he wouldn’t do the job unless there were Americans out here protecting him. He did do his job though, and plowed two large holes through the berm putting the spoils of his work into the tank ditch. More or less, he busted down two 4 meter high hills and made two bridges for us.
When the contractor was done at about mid day, we pulled back about 1 klick away where we could still watch the boarder. At around 4 PM we drove back to a supply area to pick up food and both my gunner and I received packages. We drove back to our positions and we shared and devoured the food in the packages. It’s not just the crew of the Bradley that rides in the vehicle. It is a dismounted infantry squad the rides in the back, also. At the start of the war I had 5 guys riding in the back, the gunner and the driver, plus myself. We were prepared at any moment to be attacked and at the same time, prepared to attack.
Suddenly we got a radio message that we needed to go back about another klick. We were to far forward, they said. We looked at each other bewildered wondering what they could be talking about as we loaded up and headed back. When we got there, the executive officer (XO) told us to start putting on our chemical protective over-garments and meet him by his track. We quickly learned that it was game on and that the Iraqis had fired scud missiles into Kuwait. About an hour after sundown the sounds of thunder shattered the silence of the night. Behind us, great flashes of light could be seen. The Artillery started firing behind us and we could see the projectiles streaking through the air over our heads and over the boarder to distant targets inside Iraq.
That night, we rode forward into the darkness, deep into the dessert. The first three days were like a giant leap frog game across the map. Units stopping and going as other moved forward then got passed again. On the fourth day we started securing an area west of An Najaf, still south of the Karbala gap. While operating and clearing the area of enemy, “The Storm” struck us. The Apocalyptic storm that was almost as great as anything that had been written in The Old Testament. It was at night when it fully hit us, and with the use of night vision I could only see one meter in front of the track. The only way we were able to find our way back to friendly tracks was by “blind luck!” We “circled our wagons” and looked out into the darkness that was consuming us. In the morning, we could see farther out, but everything was tinted orange. There was that much dust and sand in the air.