All of a sudden, we were in a hell of a firefight, but holding our own, desperate for close air support.
We had to set our SATCOM radio back up in the UHF mode so we could talk to the aircraft. We set up the SATCOM dish, then went to put in the whip antenna. We had lost it.
It seems that when things go bad, they go really bad. We were in the midst of a firefight, and we didn't have any way to talk to the aircraft.
But sometimes you get lucky. Sergeant DeGroff just happened to be carrying a PRC-90 survival radio. He pulled it out, turned to Weatherford, my communications sergeant, and said, 'Hey, will this thing work?'
Weatherford looked at it. 'It's a line-of-sight radio,' he said. '1 don't know if it'll work or not. I doubt it. Not unless somebody's in the area to pick it up.'
The air support was out there. We could hear them over our SATCOM; they were calling for us, but we couldn't get them back. So they flew around without finding us.
After a while, one of the sorties took out a nearby bridge over the river because he didn't have anything better to do, and that actually helped us. A lot of civilians had come out for the show, and there were women and children out there, but once things started blowing up and they realized bombs were being dropped, the civilians fled.
About that time, we moved over into what 1 guess you'd call Plan B. We had school-trained snipers on our team, good-quality people; and as the Iraqi troops got up and tried to maneuver, we'd drop them. And we just stayed down in the ditch, which was probably the most secure place we could be. Had we gone up out of it, it would have been the end of things.
For a little while, things got quiet enough for DeGroff to pull out the PRC-90. He made a call over it and picked up an AWACS. And I'll tell you, when that voice came back over it, it was just miraculous. I can't use any other word. It was miraculous that we had a PRC-90 radio — fifties-vintage technology. But it worked, and it saved our skins.
Pretty soon, they got a forward air controller to talk to us, and then they started sending sorties of F-16s. F- 16s are not your ideal close air support platform, but they were the ones that could get there the quickest. So the - 16s got on the Guard net, and we could talk to them directly on the PRC- 90 radio. We used it to call close air support the rest of the day.
We still had a problem: We were in the midst of a firefight. We were taking fire from the flanks. We had to direct the planes in for close air support — there were a pair of them. But they couldn't spot our position.
We didn't bring smoke. We had pin flares, but it was the middle of the day, so pin flares didn't work. We did have signal mirrors, so we did what we could with them. The two F-16s flew over, and we were huddled down there in the ditch, trying to flash them with the signal mirrors.
That's when it came in handy that these guys had just taught close air support to the entire theater.
Buzzsaw said to the F-16 pilots, 'Look, this might sound strange, but I want you to fly from the moon to the sun.' Though it was about one o'clock in the afternoon, the sun and the moon were both out there at the same time. 'When you're above me, I'll tell you. '
So they came around, and that's exactly what they did. One of the aviators picked us up, identified our position, and relayed it to the other. They went through a long conversation about our precise position, but once they'd done that, we were in business.
Meanwhile, some of the Iraqis had gone out there on the highway and were flagging down other vehicles, trying to get more people into the fray. It happened that an entire convoy of military vehicles, mostly deuce-and-a- halfs, was passing about then, and they got them to stop. So when our first strikes came in, they also destroyed the convoy — a lot of secondary explosions came off those deuce-and-a-halfs.
After that, vehicles would come down the highway, and people would try to flag them down, but they'd see bodies burning and wouldn't stop. They'd keep on going. They'd say, 'I'm not going to get involved in that.'
Later, I found out that one of the F-16 flights had picked up a column of armor coming into the area and had taken them out on the road before they came close to us.
However, that still left us with a lot of folks out there on one flank that was real hot, and other folks on the other flank, and I was up directing the fire, shifting back and forth. It was working very effectively, and 1 was very pleased: The guys were doing a tremendous job knocking off targets, keeping calm, saving the ammunition. Nobody stood up, like you see in movies, shooting full automatic from the waist. It was very calculated — lowering the barrel, taking a sight picture, pulling the trigger, and dropping the target.
But still, one of the flanks was very hot. We were really getting a lot of fire off it. We had to call in a close air support mission with cluster bombs. It was going to be close — what we call danger-close, which is anything within a thousand meters. It was maybe two hundred meters — not far at all.
We knew there was a risk — there always is, particularly with cluster bombs — that those cluster bombs would get the friendly forces. And that scared the shit out of me as much as the enemy soldiers did, getting blown up by our own Air Force.
But we called in the close air support on the flank. They came in, and again, it was almost miraculous. It was such an effective strike. The cluster bombs came down — looking like they were going to drop right on top of us — and then the clam shells opened up, and we could hear the bombs from down in the ditch.
When cluster bombs hit, they start
We did the same on the other side.
Then what worried me most was the ditch itself. It wasn't straight. It was twisty. If you tried to look down it, it wasn't like looking down a railroad track. You could only see maybe ten meters before it twisted out of sight.
By that time, I knew they couldn't come in on the flanks unless they started using fire maneuver and maybe brought in heavier support — but if they wanted to, they could come in force down the ditch and overrun us in really quick time.
Another air strike was coming in, and we called it right down this ditch. As soon as they lifted, my intel sergeant, Sergeant Robbie Gardner, and I went shoulder to shoulder (that was about the width of the ditch) back down the ditch, hoping to catch them by surprise. And we did.
We went maybe fifty meters and came up on the Iraqi point element coming up the ditch, but they weren't going anywhere just then, because the strike had got them down; and their guns were lying by their sides.
We came around, at the ready, and then we were face-to-face. Before they could pick up their guns, we were able to eliminate them.
We then walked all the way back down to the place where we had loaded up our rucksacks, and we found bodies all through the ditch. I recall coming up on one guy in particular. His leg was mangled and blown off, and he was about dead, but he was still breathing heavily. We got close to him and moved the gun away. He took his last breath, and that was it, he was gone. It was profound. It didn't strike me so much then as later, when I looked back.
We went all the way down to where we'd blown the rucksacks because it was getting into evening now and it gets cold in the desert. We dragged out some Gore-Tex jackets and any kind of chow that we could find. Although the jackets had been blown up by cluster bombs and our own explosion, it would still provide some warmth. We grabbed some stuff, moved back up into our fighting position, and hooked back up with the guys. By this time, the firefight had become less intense.
There was a kind of rhythm. A sortie would come in and then leave, and there'd be a lull when we didn't have air cover. At that point, the fireworks would pick up. Once a squad-size element — maybe five or six people — stood up and actually charged us, giving out this crazy battle cry: 'Hey tetetetetetete.' It was just suicidal for them, because we were able to pick them off as they were coming in.
The Iraqis were actually pretty game early on, but as we got into the evening and the F-16s had hit them a few times, I think we destroyed their morale. They'd thought this was going to be easy pickings, this air crew out there, and all of a sudden they ran into heavy resistance. There're the M- 203s. There're expert marksmen. And there's close air support, with F-16s coming in. And so the later it got, the more the battle died down.
After nightfall, I put on my night-vision goggles, looked out into the battle area, and didn't see any movement whatsoever.
Then we got word that our exfiltration was twelve minutes out.
I couldn't help but think of Vietnam then. One lesson we'd been taught was that the North Vietnamese,
