Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

come over and do that?'

This was unusual: taking charge of a fight for someone else in his area of operations. But Franks called Brookshire, and he OK'd it. It was an unselfish thing for Bradin to do. He was thinking only of what was best for the mission and the soldiers.

It took five minutes at top speed to reach Fox Troop. Then he flew over the area, watching the firing back and forth at close quarters (no more than fifty to one hundred meters), getting a sense of the engagement. The NVA were firing at his Loach, too, but he accepted that. It wasn't the first time. Meanwhile, he did what he needed to do to help: he brought in artillery and attack helicopters to seal off the area, while the troop continued the fight on the ground. He switched to the troop radio frequency and immediately heard the sharp exchanges so characteristic of commanders in a stiff fight. Meanwhile, Bradin had sent another cavalry unit, Troop B, to join the fight.

Things were going well until a call came from Barbeau saying that they had some casualties.

'OK,' Franks told him, 'evacuate your wounded, establish an LZ, and finish the fight. I'll call a medevac in.' In other words, his intent was for a security element to go out with the wounded, nothing more than that.

But the troop had had more casualties and wounded than Franks knew — four soldiers KIA and twenty wounded, almost 50 percent of what they had gone in with — and instead Barbeau pulled the whole troop out of the engagement area. That made sense, but…

That lets Troop B in there and the fight not finished, Franks thought. They had the NVA trapped, right where they wanted them, had paid a big price, and now needed to finish them. Plus, Franks wanted Troop F to own the area for which they had fought so well, and not to be out of there as though the NVA had run them out.

So Franks landed his Loach and said to the commander, 'You, me, and this cavalry troop, we're going back in there. Leave some security here to evacuate the wounded, then mount up and let's go.' And then he got into the commander's track with Barbeau and they moved back up and secured the area with Troop B and made sure the NVA weren't capable of attacking again.

He was taking a chance on Troop F at that moment, but he knew them as a unit and how tough they were. Barbeau and Troop F were all heroes that day. Hurt as they were, they went back in and finished the battle. The NVA never again threatened Bu Dop until after the Blackhorse left.

Know the Enemy

This is not just knowledge learned from reports and briefings. This is knowledge gained from action, from contact with the enemy. It's fingertips-to-gut knowledge. Once you have this kind of knowledge, you begin to see vulnerabilities in the enemy, and then you can take the fight to the enemy and hit him hard.

Brookshire, Franks, and 2nd Squadron came to know the NVA well, in day-in, day-out actions. They respected them, and so did everyone else in the Blackhorse.

The NVA were tough, well-drilled, well-armed light infantry. That is to say, their usual armament was individual weapons — AK-47s, machine guns, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades, something like World War II bazookas), and small mortars. On occasion they used heavier 107-mm and 122-mm rockets, but usually only when staging an attack on a fixed site, such as a firebase. They were tightly disciplined in their individual actions, movements, and use of fire, and they were highly motivated, rarely surrendering or leaving dead or wounded. When you captured them, NVA prisoners would talk, but they knew only what they themselves were supposed to do, and not much more. Nevertheless, interrogation of prisoners often obtained vital information, especially if it could be done right now, as soon as they were taken. Because NVA communications were poor, when they left a base camp to move out on an operation, they had a hard time making adjustments. They did what they'd been ordered to do, come hell or high water. Though short-term adjustments came hard, over the longer term they adapted both their strategies and their tactics to suit changing situations. They were smart and they adapted. So did 2nd Squadron.

The NVA were elusive infantry who had a remarkable ability to move around without being detected. Over time the squadron credited them with the capability, perhaps too much, to operate at night.

This was not true, as they discovered in War Zone C.

After 2nd Squadron completed the job of opening the road to Bu Dop in early February, they were moved to War Zone C on an interdiction mission. War Zone C, 100 kilometers to the north and west of Saigon and south of an area of Cambodia called the Fishhook, was essentially uninhabited — no commerce, no civilians, only the NVA and the Blackhorse. There, the mission was not to keep roads open but to keep NVA regulars and supplies away from the air base at Bien Hoa, Loc Ninh, and the populated area around Saigon. The squadron had that mission until the invasion of Cambodia in May 1970.

Though Agent Orange had been heavily used in War Zone C, the effects were intermittent. There were bare patches that left the jungle looking as if it had been hit by winter, and there were large areas of dense rain forest. But on the whole, despite the defoliants, the forests of War Zone C were higher and denser than what the squadron had experienced up to then — triple canopy rather than single canopy. The NVA were transporting their people and supplies through this labyrinth on bicycles along a network of jungle trails and often using flashlights to do it at night.

Time and again after fights and B-52 strikes, American soldiers discovered flashlights on dead and captured NVA. Nobody made very much of this until, all of a sudden, it hit someone that they carried flashlights because they couldn't see at night, not nearly as well as Americans. Because of their diet — fish and rice, few fresh vegetables — they were practically blind in the dark. At night in thick jungle, they could hardly see the trails with their flashlights, much less navigate. The only reason they operated at night was that operating during the day was even more dangerous. In other words, the NVA didn't own the night. They were vulnerable.

When that point grew clear, one of the officers had an inspiration. His name was Captain Sewall Menzel, and he came up with a way to lay an ambush for the NVA without exposing American troops. When the North Vietnamese came down a trail, one of them would hit a trip wire; behind him, preset claymore mines and other weapons would go off, killing nearly everyone on the trail. They had tried it earlier with some success. It would work much better in War Zone C.

Soon, 2nd Squadron troops were setting 'trap lines,' as they called them, along assigned trails. Each of the cavalry troops had an assigned area and their 'trap lines' to set and check daily. Before long, these automatic ambushes had succeeded in cutting way back on the amount of men and supplies coming through.

When you really know the enemy, you can see his weaknesses and hit him hard.

Prepare Soldiers to Fight

Doing this has both immediate and long-term aspects.

Long-term preparation for combat is absolutely the most crucial component of keeping soldiers at a combat edge. The word for long-term preparation is training. Franks later liked to quote Rommel, who said, 'The best form of welfare for the troops is first-class training.'

If you don't have much experience with today's Army, there's a good chance you have misconceptions about how soldiers spend their working life. The tendency is to think of Army life as dull but predictable: you have to work your way, as best you can, around a large, unresponsive bureaucracy. In truth, there's more than a little bit of all that, but none of this is the true Army.

Soldiers and leaders in the U.S. Army spend the better part of their lives training for war, and training hard. American soldiers train like Olympic athletes — but with this difference: they train their bodies to perform at the highest pitch, but they also train their minds to work at the same high pitch. In combat, the mental edge is as important as the physical. You also have to know how to handle your weapons. You have to know how to run and maintain your vehicles. And you have to know how to do all that in consort with other vehicles… in a team, with other teams. And that means you have to think, not only about what's going on now, in your own immediate situation, but also in relation to several other situations that depend on you. And at the same time, you have to think about how each of these situations is changing, and likely to change, over the course of the next few minutes, or hours… or for longer periods for higher commanders. Finally, you have to be able to predict or judge or intuit or guess how your enemy is going to be acting and reacting to all these situations, then decide on a course of action that gives your units the edge they need.

This kind of thinking is thinking at a very high level.

Fred Franks has always had a passion for units skilled in combat fundamentals, a carryover from playing lots