building to building and door to door, kicking doors, clearing buildings. We really got boned up on our urban warfare, if you will. We never did find anybody, but every door you kicked down, you didn't know.
We were in Khafji when we got the call: 'We're going to execute.' So we came back down to the Bat Cave, got all our gear together, and went up to King Khalid Military City, KKMC, where our task force was located. We spent a couple of days there, waiting.
One of the things we were waiting for was some special boots we'd ordered. American jungle boots leave a telltale print in the soft loam soil through which we were going to be walking, and we didn't want to leave any tracks like that. Finally, the evening before we were supposed to go in, the brand-new boots arrived. Some of the guys said, 'I'm not going to wear them. They're not broke in.' So I took plastic MRE boxes, cut them to the shape of the boots, and taped them to the bottom of our old boots, so they wouldn't leave a print.
We were scheduled to go to a place about two hundred meters off Highway 7 and near a small river, the Shatt al Gharraf. There were also agricultural fields and canals and ditches. The ditches were dug by hand, so the dirt was piled up on the sides. Our intention was to use them for moving around, so if people were out there, we'd be able to get down the ditches and walk if we had to.
We were going to put in two hide sites. One of them would watch north-bound traffic, the other southbound. Periodically, about every four or six hours, we had to report back to headquarters, but if we saw something significant — Scud launchers or a company of armor or such — we reported it immediately.
It's now February 23, 1991.
From KKMC, we loaded onto two Blackhawk helicopters, four guys on each one.
We had some really great SOAR pilots, the greatest pilots in the world. The SOAR guys had proven themselves time and time again. We knew they would get us in there. More important, I knew they would come and get me.
A guy named Kenny Collier, a chief warrant officer, flew the mission lead on my helicopter. I went up to him and kind of pulled him close. 'Kenny, I have no doubt that you'll get me in there,' I told him. 'But if I need you, I need you to come and get me. Don't leave me in there.' He got a big smile on his face. 'I told you, Dawg, you call, we haul.'
We took off out of KKMC and flew to Rafhah, an air base up on the border, for refueling. We were going about 150 miles across the border into Iraq — a long way for a Blackhawk. The SOAR guys determined that by the time they flew us in, dropped us off, and returned, they'd have about ten minutes of fuel remaining.
We wanted to be actually crossing the border at about eight that evening. We were all hyped up, camouflaged: We're ready, we're going to war, we're going in there. The guys are excited. We had trained our entire career for this, to support our country and do these types of missions. We had rehearsed. We had gathered all the intel. We had done very thorough mission planning.
We crossed the border at about eight — and then for some reason, we got recalled. They said, 'Abort the mission. Return to station.' So we turned around.
To this day, I don't know the reason for that recall, but whatever it was, we hadn't even gotten back yet, when they said, 'No, no, execute, execute.'
We couldn't just turn around, because of the fuel, so we had to get off and refuel the helicopters, all of which put us behind our planning curve. The timing was very tight. If we took too much time on this end, that put us in a potential white-knuckle situation at the other end.
Kenny Collier had been a Special Forces soldier, so he knew the importance of time. They tried to make up some for us. They flew very low and they flew very fast. They may have been twenty feet off the desert floor and just streaming 160 knots or so, going across that desert floor.
I was on the headset with the pilot when I felt the helicopter jump up, and a big thump. I felt her shudder and I didn't know what it was. It scared me half to death.
'What is that, Kenny? What is it?' I asked over the headset. And he was calm as could be, which really impressed me. We'd hit a sand dune and ripped the rear wheel off the back landing gear. 'Oh, don't worry about it,' he said. 'We just hit a sand dune. We're all right.' Which calmed me right down.
Because of the delay, the helicopters lost their GPS satellite coverage for a time.[32] They had to use some sort of backup navigational system.
'I can't guarantee you that I'll put you on the exact spot where you wanted to go,' the pilot told me.
I said, 'Well, Kenny, you get me as close as you possibly can, and we're going to go on with the mission.'
As we approached the target area, he made a few 'false insertions' — that is, he would lift, come up high, and intentionally get picked up on radar, then he would touch down and sit there for ten seconds or so, so if the enemy came out to find out what was going on, they'd find nobody there. We did a couple of those, and then finally, he stayed low and swooped in, and we rolled out. And then they were up and gone.
It was an eerie feeling as they were going away, because you could hear the blades propping quieter and quieter, and you realized that you were one hundred and fifty miles in the enemy's backyard.
One of the questions we'd asked intel was, 'Are there dogs in that area?' They'd told us there weren't. The Arabs don't like dogs. They consider them filthy animals and they don't own them.
However, while this is true for Arabs who live in the city, the country Arabs — the Bedouins and the farmers — have dogs for the same reason our farmers do. They use them for security. So there
Once the helicopters were out of earshot, though, the barking faded, and we realized they were reacting to the sound of the helicopters and not necessarily to our presence.
The first thing we did was to move off maybe a hundred meters and set up a little defensive perimeter and just listen. It's a tactic to take in the night sounds, to let your eyes and ears adjust to your environment. There was nothing but silence, which is what I wanted to hear.
I turned to my weapons sergeant: 'Bring out your GPS. Let's see if we have some coverage now.' We did. We were actually north of the area in which we wanted to be, but not far, maybe a mile or two. However, each individual on my team had a rucksack that weighed in excess of 175 pounds, which is extremely heavy. That included our two hide-site kits, twenty-five pounds for each guy. Every team member had five gallons of water — that's forty pounds. Each guy was carrying radio equipment.
I went on a leader's recon with my weapons sergeant. We found the area we wanted, determined where we would put our hide sites, went back, picked up the team, and brought them into the area. We pulled out our dehandled shovels and started to dig, and the first thing we realized was that though we had rehearsed in Saudi Arabian sandy loam, this soil up here was agriculture soil. It was hard. There was no way we were going to dig a hide site before dawn with just a dehandled shovel.
The other team, under team sergeant Charles Hopkins, moved back a little bit, found some softer soil, and dug down, but when we tried to do it, too, it became apparent we were going to run out of time. Since we had to get under cover, we decided to put our hide site in one of the ditches that crossed the area. We laid our supports and used that ditch as our hole; we camouflaged it with sandbags up the front as best we could; got some vegetation to put on top of it, and brush, too; and did what else we could in the time we had.
We knew traffic going up and down the highway would never be able to see anything out of the ordinary. It blended in.
Now, we thought that the farmers in Iraq operated the way they do in the States. A farmer plants his fields, then goes out once in a while to check his crops to make sure things are going on. But he's not out there every day looking. However, in this part of Iraq we failed to take into consideration the fact that their technology is very far behind ours. The kids don't sit in the house and watch TV and play video games. They don't have TVs and computers. They play out in the fields. We didn't realize that.
So we were inside the hide sites at first light, four of us in each hide. One guy was on watch at a peephole (Sergeant James Weatherford); one guy recorded what was going on; and the other two guys basically rested. I was one of the guys resting. I had my eyes closed; but I was aware of what was going on, and heard Weatherford say, 'Man, there's a lot of activity out there. There's people along the road.'
There was a lot more going on than we had anticipated.
