Humble Pie

For the past three days, we have been working on some urban warfare stuff. The first day was some short range marksmanship which entailed some shooting and the second day we learned about the specifics of room and house clearing (see "Better Every Day" post below).


Yesterday we had the collective training event that tied a lot of what we have been learning for the past six weeks together.


Our link up with the Iraqi Army (IA) went well (some American soldiers posing as Iraqis, augmented by some locals who were playing the part, and the commander was an Arab-speaking giant of a man named Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed). "LTC Ahmed" (not his real name) briefed us on his plan through an interpreter to go to the town of Bashur and meet the local sheik and mayor. The sheik had asked LTC Ahmed to pay his town a visit, as there has been a rash of violence and an influx of people who were not locals. He suspected that al Qaeda was using his town as a staging base. He requested our presence at great risk to his personal safety.


LTC Ahmed's plan was to set some outer security and then go in and see if we could narrow down the search area by observing the locals and meeting with the sheik and the mayor. We split our force of 11 into a mounted element that pulled security from the outskirts of the town, and a dismounted element, which I went with. The American soldiers shadowed the Iraqi Army as they went about their searching and tactical questioning, and I stayed with LTC Ahmed and we did more of the same.


After about 20 minutes of searching, we found weapons, captured a bad guy, and gathered enough information to learn that the newly inserted al Qaeda leader, Mullah Abdul Mohammed, was in a town called al Hawej nearby. We loaded up and headed out to go and capture him.


A good day-- so far.


Al Hawej was not a good place for IA or coalition forces, so we were more aggressive going in. The plan was to go straight to the house where the bad guy was, apprehend him, and get out. All was going well until a sniper popped out of the weeds across the street from the town and shot one of our outer cordon security guys. Our team reacted well, and they quickly actioned on the sniper, and subsequently began treating our casualty. Simultaneously, another shot rang out from some random place and another one of our team was hit, this time the casualty was from the dismounted element. As Doc went to work, another shot rang out, and Doc was suddenly wounded.


We then noticed that the Iraqis had loaded up their highly valued target and they hauled ass, leaving us on the objective to fend for ourselves.


I'm told they'll do that from time to time.


Then, to add to the chaos, as I was trying to assess what was happening, one of the Observer-Controllers walked up and handed me a casualty card and said, "Sir, stop talking. You've been shot."


"From where?" I replied, astonished, as I was surrounded on three sides by high walls and I was kneeling behind a junked car. I thought I was in a pretty good spot. The card showed that I was shot in the right thigh, I could talk but could not move, and that I could NOT assist my unit in any way.


Ouch.


I pulled out my aid kit and began to self administer a tourniquet from my apparently profusely bleeding leg. That dude must have been a hell of a shot.


At that point I realized I had been shot to prove a point.


From there it pretty much went downhill... Unplanned contingencies I should have thought of planning for surfaced, and they were ugly. We struggled to get off the objective, and it was apparent we had failed to consider a lot of things in planning for our operation. We somewhat arrogantly thought we would just roll up and do the thing, LEEroy Jenkins-style.


Up to this point, I thought our team had been doing pretty well, but based on this exercise of Camp Funston-isms and extremes, we have a lot of stuff to still figure out. I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to finally do some collective training, and I'm pleased these things are coming to light here and not in Iraq. I suppose as long as you are learning, you are doing OK.


We have a couple of days left to fix some stuff, which is good. This Friday we have our capstone, which will wrap up everything we have been working on. Hopefully it will go better than this drill.


Hope you had a good weekend. Take care.


Ron