About nine o'clock in the morning, we started hearing children's voices. And Weatherford said, 'There's kids out there. They're out there playing.'
They got closer and closer, and as they started getting louder, I got concerned. And then all of a sudden, the sounds stopped. It got quiet. The children came up; and they actually looked into the peephole where Weatherford was on watch. They looked inside and they saw this guy all camouflaged up, looking back at them, and they gave a little scream and jumped back.
At the same time, two of my soldiers came out of the back side of the canal, carrying silenced MP-5 submachine guns and silenced pistols. The kids saw them and took off.
'Chief, what do we do?' my guys asked. 'What do we do?'
Now, there's no doubt in my mind that if I had told them, 'Don't let those kids get away. Shoot them,' they would have done it. And we'd been cleared to do that, if any civilian came in and compromised the mission.
Two of them were girls, maybe seven or eight years old, and one was a boy, younger. It was an instant decision. 'No, don't shoot them,' I said.
I was not going to shoot children.
Several things probably went into that. I have a Christian background. I had children of my own about that age. It just wasn't in me to shoot children. Whatever happened to us, I was willing to accept that. If they were going to bring in forces, I could defend myself. We had weapons, and I knew we could bring in close air support and that we could get out of there. But I wasn't going to shoot children.
The kids ran off toward a little village not too far away. We brought up our SATCOM radio and called for immediate extraction. We said, 'Hey, we've been seen. We got caught. We need to get out of here. Our positions have been compromised.'
While our guys were working on the exfiltration, nobody from the village came back to investigate. I had no idea if the kids had told somebody about us — or if maybe they thought they had seen a boogey man. But after they ran off, nobody came to check us out. At that point, we determined that even though the hide positions were compromised, maybe the mission itself wasn't.
So we moved back up this canal to another area, and set up again. When nobody came, we canceled the emergency exit.
'Look,' I said, 'I feel pretty secure. Nobody's come. We moved out of the area. We're going to continue with the mission. At nightfall, we're going to find another area and get in and continue on.'
All day, we continued to watch, to monitor the highway, to report the traffic. At 1200, we sent back information based on what we'd seen.
Shortly afterward, I was lying on a mound of dirt, watching the road with some binocs, and I caught something out of my peripheral vision back to the side. I looked back and there were two kids, but this time they had an adult with them. I slid back into the ditch real quick, but I knew in my heart that they'd seen me. Even so, I was hoping, well, maybe they didn't. And I told the guys, 'Look, I think we just got… somebody's just seen me.' And Buzzsaw (Robert) DeGroff scurried up on the side and checked things out. By that time, the folks were moving toward us. 'Yes,' Buzzsaw whispered, 'here they come.'
I came out of the hide to talk to them. The adult had on a Palestiniantype checkered headdress, and they were all looking at me; and so I gave them my best
Again, the thought of killing these people — that wasn't going to happen. They were unarmed, they were civilians, there were two kids.
Then they took off real fast, moving backward. This time, we weren't as lucky as before. It was just a matter of twenty minutes or so when people started coming.
All of a sudden, these teenagers started approaching, a gang of them, maybe fifteen or twenty getting close to us. They were just teenage kids and were ignorant of what was going on. So I spoke to them in Arabic. I told them to stop, to get away, to leave us alone. And finally I held up my gun, and when they saw that, they scattered.
I decided to move out.
By this time, other civilians were coming, a lot of them, and pulling up on the road were five vehicles — three deuce-and-a-half military transport — type trucks, a Toyota Land Cruiser, which served as a command-type vehicle, and a bus. The next thing we knew, an Iraqi company was unloading from them, probably a hundred-plus people. Pretty soon, all of them were out there on the road, talking.
At this time, we were all looking at each other: 'Hey, we're in deep shit.'
We called for immediate exfiltration, but they said, 'Well, it's going to be a while before we can get extra birds in there. We're going to line up close air support for you.'
I said great.
It was time to implement our emergency destruction plan — to make a pile of all the stuff we couldn't take with us and get rid of it. The engineer already had a block of C-4 made up with a one-minute time fuse on it. He reached in, pulled out the igniter, and we put it down. 1 saved one radio from the pile, an LST-5, because it was a SATCOM radio, but it also did double duty as a UHF radio for talking to aircraft. You screwed a whip antenna about the size of an ink pen into the top of it and it went to UHF. I could call close air support on it.
All the other equipment went into the rucksacks.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi army guys were starting to maneuver on us — coming up this side and that sidc — and some civilians had armed themselves, farmers with their hunting rifles and such. If somebody came into your backyard, you'd go out to defend it. That's what they were doing.
At this point, the ground war had started, but we didn't know it. We hadn't been told when we went in, 'Hey, the ground war is going to start at midnight.'
But the Iraqis did know it, and that's what must have gotten them so excited.
They were also probably overconfident. They didn't realize what they were up against. They probably thought we were a downed air crew — easy pickings — and they could just come out there and grab us.
Anyhow, we set the charge on all our sensitive and classified equipment, and then threw the rest of our rucksacks on top of that to lighten the load. All we had on was load-bearing equipment — just the nylon straps on which you clip your ammo pouches, your canteens, and so forth. I stuffed an MRE into my pocket and had a night- vision device hanging around my neck. We kept a single GPS system that contained our egress route; all our way points were in it.
Then we pulled the time fuse on the C-4 and ran as quickly as we could back up one of the canals. Suddenly, we hit an area where the canal got shallow, and there was a turn. We were basically stuck in this elbow in the canal.
When the charge went off, the Iraqis were less than a minute behind us, and close air support was twenty minutes out. I knew we were in some deep shit. A company-sized element was maneuvering on us, trying to outflank us.
As soon as the charge went off, we came under heavy fire. We waited. We held our fire.
It wasn't easy, though. The most accurate fire didn't come from the soldiers. The Bedouins were hunters, and they were good…. I mean, kicking the dirt around our heads.
As the soldiers came in, they moved in groups of four or five, walking upright, looking and holding their guns up to the ready. They had on low-quarter shoes, office shoes. These were not front-line troops, combat soldiers; they were office workers. They'd been told to grab their guns and go out and get us.
A U.S. infantry squad would have kept a low profile, doing fire-maneuver and bounding and going off to position, but these guys were just standing upright. That was to our benefit.
Buzzsaw said, 'Do we fire? Do we fire?'
Finally, I said, 'Yes, open fire.'
Nobody did anything for a while, because everybody was sort of reluctant to get it going. They knew that once we started shooting, we were in deep trouble. So I gave it again: 'Fire.'
Buzzsaw opened up with his 203 (a 40mm grenade launcher attached to an M-16). The other 203s opened up. The grenades went out and landed among the Iraqis. All of a sudden, a guy'd be out there with tattered clothing staggering around. The rest of them had dropped. You wondered what in the world was going on.
My guess is that in that opening volley, we eliminated probably forty of them.
