Stories from the Gulf War: US Special Forces (and a few F-16's) versus 100+ Iraqi Soldiers
Mads Brevik
'AT&T building'" for more info)
- Mads -
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Last Week: G-Day
Swayjghazi, Iraq
Far removed from the great sweep of armies in the south, two Special Forces
A-Teams waited in their burrows above the Euphrates, watching for any sign of a
counterattack from Baghdad. One eight-man squad from 5th Group's 1st Battalion
had been inserted by helicopter the previous night near the tiny village of
Swayjghazi. The team leader, a stocky, tobacco-chewing chief warrant officer
named R. F. Balwanz, herded his team into a shallow drainage canal, where they
built a pair of hide sites three hundred yards west of Highway 7, the two-lane
blacktop running from the Iraqi capital to Nasiriyah.
With the farmland around Swayjghazi lying fallow for the winter, American
intelligence had concluded that local peasants would have little reason to
venture out of their village and into the fields. This assumption, as Balwanz
immediately discovered, was absurd. No sooner had the team finished sterilizing
its holes at sunrise than dozens of Iraqis began drifting across the
countryside. Peering through a narrow slit in the camouflage, Balwanz counted at
least fifty people: women gathering firewood, children playing, men herding
goats and sheep.
Soon the Americans heard the singsong of young children capering along the canal
bank. The voices suddenly hushed. Evidently sensing intruders in the ditch, the
children ran shrieking toward the village: Several sharpshooters burst from the
holes, training their weapons on. the fleeing youngsters. For a terrible moment
the Americans wondered whether to fire. "Do we shoot them, chief?" a soldier
asked. "Naw;' Balwanz replied, "we're not going to do that." Instead, the team
slogged east in the muddy ditch for four hundred yards and set up a defensive
perimeter.
A few minutes later the children returned, this time accompani by a young man
wearing a robe and sandals. With nowhere to hide, the Americans waited in a
tight circle, weapons at the ready. The Iraqi's eyes widened at the sight of
eight heavily armed soldiers crouched his field. "Peace be with you," Balwanz
called in Arabic. The man said nothing; he turned and hurried back toward the
village. Perhaps, Balwanz told himself, the civilians would ignore them.
It was not to be. Thirty men carrying rifles soon emerged from Swayjghazi,
fanning out across the fields. A moment later four trucks, a Land-Rover, and a
bus rolled up from the south. A hundred and fifty Iraqi soldiers spilled onto
Highway 7, apparently summoned from a communications compound three miles away.
Balwanz radioed XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters 15o miles to the south.
"Contact is imminent. We're going to have a fight here. We need to be picked up
and we need close air support."
Two enemy platoons funneled into the canal; two others circled toward the
American flanks. Curious women and children drifted from the village to watch.
Balwanz ordered all rucksacks and classified communications equipment tossed
into a pile, salvaging only the weapons and a single satellite radio. Setting a
one-minute fuse in a block of Cq. plastic explosive, the team again scurried
east to a new fighting position where the ditch made a ninety-degree bend; the
equipment blew up behind them just as Iraqi scouts reached the pile.
The crack of rifle fire swept across the field. Bullets sang overhead or chewed
into the dirt embankment. The Americans fired back with M-r 6s and a pair of
Zo3mm grenade launchers. "Shoot only the soldiers, no civilians," Balwanz
commanded. "Conserve your ammunition." With a warbling war cry the Iraqi troops
dashed forward, dived for cover among the furrows, then ran forward again. Enemy
bodies soon littered the field, but the Americans were still outnumbered fifteen
to one. A sense of doom stole over the team as the enemy noose tightened.
Balwanz turned to see two of his men glumly waving to each other in a last, sad
gesture of farewell.
Just when their predicament seemed desperate, the roar of Air Force F-x6s washed
over the battlefield. The first payload of cluster bombs shattered the highway,
where fifty Iraqi reinforcements and a dozen vehicles had congregated. Using a
small survival radio and a flashing mirror to signal his position, Balwanz
directed other strikes to within two hundred yards of his flanks. The fields
blossomed with fire around them as the team huddled in the ditch. "One shot, one
target," Balwanz warned, glancing at the dwindling stockpile of ammunition.
"Nobody fires on automatic. Take your time, pick out your targets. Let's keep
them at bay."
With the Air Force overhead, the tide turned. Another Iraqi charge was repulsed
with more cluster bombs and a bold counterattack back down the canal by Balwanz
and one of his sergeants. Several more hours would pass before two
search-and-rescue helicopters dared venture into the firelight. Dispirited and
in disarray, an estimated x5o of their comrades now dead, the Iraqis failed to
spot Balwanz and his men as they slipped in pairs from the ditch to an earthen
bean three hundred Yards away. Then, from the south, the Americans heard the
throb of rotor blades. Two Blackhawks touched down almost on top of them. The
men flung themselves into the open bays. Within fifteen seconds, they were gone.
Seventy miles to the west, another Special Forces A-Team had been inserted by
helicopter shortly before midnight on the 23rd. Splitting into a pair of
three-man squads, the team took up positions fifteen miles apart above the
Euphrates River town of Samawah. The southernmost squad had been compromised
almost immediately. Bolting across the desert, the men would travel southwest
for three days before being picked up at a rendezvous point.
The other trio - Master Sergeant Jeffrey Sims, Sergeant First Class Ronald
Torbett, and Staff Sergeant Roy Tabron - had hiked five miles from the
helicopter drop-off point before building a hide site in a ditch three hundred
yards north of the village of Oawam al Hamzah. Throughout the morning of the
24th the soldiers kept vigil over Highway 8, assuring XVIII Corps that no Iraqi
armored units had yet rolled toward the French forces at Rochambeau or the
Screaming Eagles at Cobra. Shortly after noon, however, Sims spotted a pair of
slender figures wandering from the village toward the drainage ditch. Squatting
in their lair, the Americans watched nervously as a young Iraqi girl and an old
man strolled toward them across the furrowed fields.
Sims never knew precisely what betrayed him. Maybe it was the small satellite
antenna concealed on the burrow roof; perhaps a glint of metal or subtle changes
in the hue of the sand drying around the burrow. Whatever the reason, the girl
stopped abruptly and pointed at the hide site. The old man shuffled forward, his
eyes searching the ditch. Then he gathered his robes and sat on the ground only
inches from the hole.
The Americans flung back the heavy roof and burst into the open with drawn
pistols. Tabron grabbed the old man, who tugged open his coat to show he was
unarmed. "We are your friends," Sims said in Arabic. The Iraqi, clearly
skeptical, announced that Iraqi soldiers were garrisoned nearby. No more eager
to kill civilians than Balwanz had been, Sims ordered them released. The
terrified girl and the elderly man hurried back into town; the Americans moved
five hundred yards down the ditch in search of a better fighting position.
Fifteen minutes later rifle fire erupted from houses on the outskirts of Oawam
al Hamzah. A bus clattered to the edge of the field and fifty Iraqi soldiers
spilled out the door. As the enemy leader flashed hand signals to his dispersing
men, Sims shot him dead. To the north, Torbett saw a woman driving a tractor
with soldiers in tow on a flatbed trailer. Squinting through the sniper scope of
his M-z 6, he squeezed off a single shot at nine hundred yards and, in an
astonishing feat of marksmanship, sent an Iraqi flying from the trailer.
Sims radioed XVIII Corps with a request for immediate extraction. To protect his
flanks, he ordered Torbett to move two hundred yards to the left; Tabron shifted
a similar distance to the right. Two more buses pulled up and a hundred soldiers
poured onto the battlefield, weapons blazing.
With only three hundred rounds of ammunition apiece, the three Americans fired
on automatic only when the Iraqis attempted to overrun them. Sims felt himself
dipping and soaring through wild mood swings, from depression as the enemy
seemed to gain the upper hand, to elation whenever gunfire drove them back. He
took stock of his arsenal: an M-r6, five grenades, two claymore mines, fifteen
pin flares. They would never be captured alive, Sims resolved; he preferred
death to the prospect of being paraded like a circus beast on Iraqi television.
Ninety minutes into the firelight, a single F-z6 streaked through the thick
clouds overhead. Sims fired fourteen flares - one red dart after another
flashing skyward - before the pilot saw them. A pair of cluster bombs boiled
through the enemy on the right flank, five hundred yards from Tabron. The pilot
made several more passes, walking his bombs ever closer, before breaking away to
refuel. When he saw a sudden movement on his left, Sims whirled around and
raised his rifle. "Ron? Is that you?" he barked. "You'd better tell me something
or I'm going to blow you away." "It's me!" Torbett yelled, waving an arm. Sims
lowered his weapon.
Sims's radio distress call had been relayed to the flight line at Rafha, i7o
miles south, where a Blackhawk crew commanded by Chief Warrant Officer Jim
Crisafulli had been resting after a long night spent inserting SF teams behind
the lines. Within four minutes Crisafulli had cranked his engines; fifteen
minutes later the helicopter lifted off with Crisafulli, his co-pilot, a pair of
Special Forces soldiers, and two crewmen manning the Blackhawk's twin door guns.
Having dodged heavy gunfire on the previous night's mission, Crisafulli
initially flew a zigzag course toward the Euphrates Valley at i6o miles an hour,
keeping the helicopter five to ten feet above the desert. But Sims's pleas,
audible over a high-frequency channel, grew ever more desperate. "If they can't
get here in twenty minutes," he finally warned, ~~~ey may as well not come."
Still forty-five minutes away, Crisafulli abandoned the evasive flight plan and
pointed the Blackhawk's nose straight for Oawam al Hamzah.
The town soon loomed ahead, a clutter of boxy houses bracketed by Highway 8 and
the muddy ribbon of the Shatt al Hillah. Crisafulli believed Sims to be west and
north of town, beyond a skein of electrical cables stretching across a field
from the highway. "We're going to have to go under the power lines," he warned
the crew. But as the helicopter swooped between two stanchions, another set of
wires - much lower than the first - suddenly loomed two hundred yards ahead.
Crisafulli yanked back on his control stick and the Blackhawk soared almost
straight up, plastering the men in back against the cabin ceiling.
After looping over the wires, Crisafulli again dived for the ground, but the
Iraqis had seen them. "We're taking fire!" the crew chief yelled. Hundreds of
muzzle flashes winked from the irrigation ditches and narrow dikes. Above the
screaming engines and throb of the rotor blades Crisafulli heard the hammer of
his door guns while the helicopter danced amid the enemy tracers.
Jeff Sims, watching the Blackhawk buck and heave along the power lines, fired
his last pin flare. From the corner of his eye Crisafulli spied the red
phosphorous rocket streaking five hundred feet into the air behind the
helicopter and assumed the Iraqis had launched a surface-to-air missile. He
pitched the Blackhawk into a sixty-degree dive at 14o knots before the crew
chief yelled, "No, no, it's a flare! I see them!" The trio was south of the
power lines after all. Again Crisafulli lurched over a skein of wires - pinning
his crew to the ceiling once more and swooped beneath a second set.
"One o'clock!" the crew chief shouted, pointing at three figures sprinting
across the desert. Crisafulli kicked the helicopter into a 18o degree turn and
slammed into the ground less than fifty yards from Sims. The two SF soldiers
leaped from the bay, firing at the Iraqis with their M-16s while the door
gunners swiveled from side to side, machine guns roaring. Enemy rounds pinged
against the fuselage and shattered the cockpit windows. Plexiglass sprayed
across the flight controls. More bullets smashed the Blackhawk's electronic
jamming pod and ricocheted off two of the rotors, ripping holes in the
honeycombed blades.
Lugging the radios as bullets nipped at his heels, Sims waited until Tabron and
Torbett threw themselves through the Blackhawk's door. Fifty yards beyond the
tail rotor he spotted several enemy soldiers rushing toward the helicopter.
"You've got three Iraqis right behind you!" he shouted. The door gunner wheeled
around and fired a long savage burst, slicing all three men in half.
Sims leaped aboard. Crisafulli lifted off. Wind whistled through the shattered
cockpit as a final burst of tracers whizzed past. The Blackhawk pelted across
the desert. Oawam al Hamzah receded from view, then dropped below the horizon.
Beneath the singing of the battered rotors, nine men shrieked with joy,
astonished to be alive.
----
Mads Brevik
- Mads -
Mads Brevik
Mads Brevik wrote:
>
...
>
> The crack of rifle fire swept across the field. Bullets sang overhead or chewed
> into the dirt embankment. The Americans fired back with M-16s and a pair of
> 203mm grenade launchers. "Shoot only the soldiers, no civilians," Balwanz
...
>
> Just when their predicament seemed desperate, the roar of Air Force F-16s washed
...
> in disarray, an estimated 150 of their comrades now dead, the Iraqis failed to
...
> took stock of his arsenal: an M-16, five grenades, two claymore mines, fifteen
...
> Ninety minutes into the firelight, a single F-16 streaked through the thick
...
> Sims's radio distress call had been relayed to the flight line at Rafha, 17o
...
> get here in twenty minutes," he finally warned, "they may as well not come."
...
> ----