Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (36 page)

Back at Al Qadisiyah, the assaulters combed the research facility for forty-five minutes, looking in vain for WMD. The Little Birds and DAPs circled overhead, the MH-6s' snipers picking off individual targets while the other aircraft used chain gun and rocket fire to destroy threatening vehicles. After less than an hour on the objective, the assault force and the Rangers departed on the Chinooks and Black Hawks, returning to Arar after stopping to refuel at Roadrunner.
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The next night, March 27, it was 1st Ranger Battalion's A Company's turn to conduct a parachute assault. This time, the objective was the military airfield known as H-1, or, to the Rangers, Objective Serpent. Three C-17s' worth of Rangers dropped onto the target, but, other than antiaircraft fire that forced the transport pilots to take evasive action en route the Rangers met no opposition. They did, however, suffer almost a dozen injured landing on the rocky ground.
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The airfield was now available to stage other missions across western Iraq. Blaber just happened to have one in mind.

The acting Delta commander's analysis told him the Iraqi defense of Baghdad hinged on four critical locations where, according to U.S. intelligence maps, Saddam had concentrated his forces: Haditha; the area around his hometown of Tikrit, ninety-five miles northwest of Baghdad, and the neighboring town of Baiji thirty miles farther up Highway 1; Ramadi, about sixty miles west of Baghdad; and Baghdad's southern approaches. He likened these to four fence posts, and said that pulling down one post would cause the fence to collapse. Blaber thought the northwestern fence post—Haditha Dam—was the most vulnerable to attack by his forces. It was isolated and surrounded by flat, empty terrain. If Task Force Green could rip that post out, he thought, the Iraqis would believe they were surrounded and the other posts would collapse. “Let me take the fence posts down,” he told Kearney, Task Force 20's operations director. “If I can pull down this corner post I can pull the whole thing apart.” Kearney agreed.
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But before Task Force 20 could focus on Haditha, it had a high-profile rescue to conduct. Iraqi forces had captured six U.S. soldiers when they ambushed the 507th Maintenance Company's small, disoriented convoy in Nasiriyah March 23. (Eleven U.S. soldiers died in the firefight.) One of the six soldiers captured was Private First Class Jessica Lynch, a nineteen-year-old from West Virginia. The Iraqis held her separately from the others. In late March, an Iraqi lawyer informed Marine elements and a Special Forces A-team in Nasiriyah that Lynch was being held in the city's main hospital, where his wife was a nurse. Once the lawyer presented photographs proving this, Task Force 20 went into high gear planning a rescue. A joint operations center was established at Tallil air base, about twelve miles southwest of Nasiriyah. The task force expected a heavy fight as the headquarters of the local Saddam Fedayeen, a militia fiercely loyal to Hussein, was in the hospital basement. For two days staff worked around the clock to put together a plan that involved Rangers, Marines, Task Force Brown, Team 6, Delta, and the Army of Northern Virginia. The rescue force would total 488 personnel. Two Ranger colonels were running the show: Frank Kearney, JSOC's operations officer, who was in charge of planning the rescue, and Joe Votel, the regiment commander, who led the mission. Team 6's Gold Team had the lead role. The task force persuaded the Iraqi lawyer to return to the hospital and covertly film the route from the facility's main front door up the stairs to Lynch's room. He dropped that film off with Marines, who passed it back to Task Force 20. The SEALs assigned to go straight to her room studied the video intently so they knew every step they'd have to take once inside the hospital.

At 1
A.M.
April 1, the first phase of the rescue began with Marines launching a diversionary attack south of the Euphrates, which dissects Nasiriyah. (The hospital was on the north side of the river.) The Marines also cut the city's power. The hospital's generators quickly switched on, making the building easily visible in the surrounding darkness. Then the assault force flew in. First came four Little Bird gunships, which encountered no Iraqi opposition but plenty of friendly fire from the Marine diversion. Then a pair of MH-6s with three Gold Team assaulters on each pod landed inside the hospital compound, right in front of the main door. The assaulters stormed into the hospital, with one thought: get to Lynch's room before any harm could befall her. An MH-60K Black Hawk inserted Gold Team snipers on the roof. Another landed with a medical team. There weren't enough TF Brown helicopters for all the missions, so Marine CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters flew in the Rangers—2nd Battalion, augmented by A Company, 1st Battalion—whose mission was to isolate and secure the objective. The Marines deposited the Rangers some distance from the hospital, forcing them to move on foot to their positions, a movement they referred to as the “Mogadishu Mile” in reference to the grueling run Rangers and Delta operators made at the end of the October 1993 battle in Somalia. A combined ground assault force that included Gold Team operators in six-wheel-drive Pandur armored vehicles, Ranger GMVs, and Marine tanks approached from the north. Overhead, an AC-130 circled.

The expected resistance failed to materialize because the Fedayeen had vacated their positions shortly before the raid. But not knowing this, the Team 6 operators were taking no chances. When they burst into Lynch's room she screamed from fright because SEALs were blasting locks off other doors in the corridor with shotguns to make sure no Fedayeen were hiding behind them. “She's freaking out because she thinks we're there to kill her,” said a Team 6 operator. To calm her, the SEAL element leader removed his U.S. flag Velcro patch and gave it to her. “We're Americans,” he said. “We're here to take you home.”

When the assaulters made the radio call with the code word that meant they had found Lynch safe and sound, a cheer went up in the JOC. The operators quickly got Lynch on the waiting Black Hawk, which flew her straight to Tallil, from where a plane took her to Kuwait.

Back at the hospital, workers led the operators to the morgue, where they found the bodies of two of Lynch's less fortunate colleagues. Locals said more Americans were buried in shallow graves in the soccer field next to the hospital. The Rangers investigated and found this to be true. “It was basically just dirt thrown over them, limbs still sticking up out of the ground,” said a Task Force 20 planner. With no shovels, the Rangers had to dig the corpses out with their hands, a process that lengthened the mission far beyond what planners had anticipated. By daylight they had uncovered a total of nine bodies, all victims of the ambush of the 507th. (Marines rescued the remaining prisoners April 13 in Samarra.) The Rangers put the bodies on their vehicles and returned to Tallil. “The Rangers came back from that just beat down hard,” said the planner. “That was a tough one for them.”
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*   *   *

While the Task Force 20 staff wrestled with the Lynch rescue, Task Force Green was at H-1, preparing to assault the Haditha Dam about fifty-five miles to the northeast. The tactical approach would be a reprise of that used by Juliet Team in Anaconda: a night movement on all-terrain vehicles. The force was extraordinarily small considering the size of the enemy force guarding the target—just nine ATVs, each carrying no more than two operators.
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Defending the dam were four Iraqi armor companies with roughly forty-four T-55 tanks and BMP-1 armored personnel carriers, an infantry company of about 120 troops, an estimated fourteen South African GHN-45 155mm howitzers, numerous mortars, several truck-mounted Roland air defense missile launchers, and scores of antiaircraft guns. Another 6,000 Iraqi troops were less than twenty miles away.
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It was a target straight out of a JRX scenario, except in the JRX it would be half of JSOC assaulting the objective. Coultrup was sending fewer than twenty operators.

But the assault force's small size proved an asset, as did the ATVs' super-quiet mufflers and their drivers' night vision goggles, which enabled the Delta operators to penetrate the Iraqi lines unheard and unseen. As Blaber monitored their progress using Blue Force Tracker, a system that used GPS signals sent from the ATVs to create an icon for each vehicle on his computer screen, the operators used laser designators to mark targets for the attack jets overhead. As had been the case in Afghanistan, the use of special operators to “lase” targets for U.S. airpower proved a powerful combination. A mix of laser-guided bombs and satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs destroyed twenty-three armored vehicles, seventeen ZSU 23mm air defense guns, plus a collection of trucks and some buildings. The operators withdrew as quietly as they had arrived, and then returned for a similar performance the following night.

As successful as Green's forays had been, however, Blaber was now thinking bigger. The Delta officer realized the little task force lacked the manpower to seize and hold the dam, so he asked for a Ranger battalion to take over at Haditha. But Blaber wanted more than that, much more. He envisioned a force that in addition to sealing the escape routes to Syria and Jordan could rampage up and down Highway 1 north of Baghdad in an effort to convince the Iraqis that a large armored force was approaching the capital from the northwest. Blaber suggested the force could also start to build a human intelligence network in Iraq, a recognition that the Coalition's intelligence picture was sorely lacking. He knew his small band of marauders would need to grow in order to fulfill his vision, so in addition to the Ranger battalion he requested another Delta squadron to deploy with Pinzgauers to join Task Force Green. Then he added the kicker: he wanted a tank company as well.
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The request was extremely unorthodox. With the exception of the Panama invasion in 1989, since World War II special operators had rarely worked closely with armored forces.
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Kearney, Dailey's director of operations, was in favor, and even Dailey was “partially amenable,” according to one party to the discussions, because he was under pressure to demonstrate some value from his highly resourced task force. Blaber played two of his aces: the persuasive talents of his trusted sidekick from Anaconda, Jim Reese, who was a liaison in the Kuwait headquarters of Army Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the conventional ground force commander; and the high regard in which Tommy Franks had held Blaber since Anaconda. “Dailey was against it, everyone was against it, but Jimmy got McKiernan and McKiernan only had to say one thing to Franks and he was all over it,” said a Delta source. Frustrated with his conventional commanders, whose attack had temporarily stalled, the CENTCOM commander was eager to reward initiative and had enthused over TF Green's Haditha raids. Sure enough, Blaber got everything he asked for. Delta's B squadron scrambled at Fort Bragg and, within hours, was on two C-17s winging its way direct to a desert landing strip in Iraq.

Meanwhile, on March 31 in Samawah in south-central Iraq, Captain Shane Celeen, commander of C Company, 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment, from Fort Riley, Kansas, received an order he was not expecting. He was to leave a platoon with the infantry battalion task force to which he was attached, load his remaining tanks on transporters, and move with all due haste south to Tallil Air Base, from where C-17s would fly his tanks north to H-1. There he was to link up with Task Force Green. When the promised transporters failed to show, Celeen ordered his company to move out under its own power. Five hours later, they reached Tallil. Celeen flew up to H-1 first to brief the special operators on his company's capabilities and requirements. Because a C-17 can only carry one M1A1 Abrams tank, it took fifteen sorties over three days to deliver Celeen's ten tanks, three M113 armored personnel carriers, five trucks, one Humvee, and one fire support vehicle. Once at H-1, they acquired a new name: Team Tank. Within two hours, they were on the road again, en route to Mission Support Site Grizzly, the temporary home between Haditha and Tikrit where Blaber's expanded task force was assembling.
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As Celeen began the fruitless wait for the tank transporters, a 140-man, seventeen-vehicle column organized around 3rd Ranger Battalion's B Company was approaching the fifty-seven-meter-high, almost six-mile-long Haditha Dam complex. It was before dawn on April 1.

The Rangers' mission was to secure the dam to ensure the Iraqi regime didn't destroy it or otherwise use it to create a flood downriver. After shooting a handful of armed guards who failed to immediately surrender—the only initial resistance—they began clearing the administrative building at the dam's western end. Other than the discovery of twenty-five civilian workers, this was uneventful. But the Iraqi soldiers' courage seemed to rise with the sun. Iraqis on the western side of the river began firing RPGs. A Ranger sniper on the dam put his rifle sight to his eye and saw three men who had unwisely chosen a propane tank as cover. When the man clearly holding an RPG stood in front of the tank, at a range of 900 meters, the Ranger staff sergeant pulled the trigger. His first round sliced through the targeted gunner and continued into the propane tank, igniting it and instantly killing the other two men.

Next a truck full of armed men came hurtling toward the Rangers on a road that ran along the top of the dam. A GMV .50 cal machine gunner fired several hundred rounds into the vehicle, stopping it and killing five of its occupants. The others dismounted and engaged the Rangers in an hour-long firefight, at the end of which three Iraqis were dead, five had surrendered, and three who were seriously wounded had jumped over the side of the dam and come to rest 100 meters down a steep embankment. On the scene was 3rd Battalion Command Sergeant Major Greg “Ironhead” Birch, who had been Delta's A Squadron command sergeant major at Tora Bora. He and Sergeant First Class Jeffery Duncan, B Company's 2nd Platoon sergeant, knew the wounded Iraqis were certain to die unless the Rangers rescued them. Birch was wearing a brace on each leg after breaking his left ankle and fracturing his right tibia six weeks previously in a jump at Fort Bragg, but that didn't prevent him from joining Duncan in a 100-meter sprint down the slope to the stricken Iraqis, while under heavy fire from a ZSU antiaircraft gun to the south. By the time the pair reached the Iraqis, two had died. After providing the surviving Iraqi first aid, the two Rangers carried him back up the slope, still under fire. But despite the Rangers' best efforts, he died from his wounds shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, the actions of Birch and Duncan earned each a Silver Star.