thedrifter
03-20-04, 06:41 AM
Issue Date: March 22, 2004
The Longest Day — of the Iraq war
Casualties, accidents marred drive to Baghdad
By C. Mark Brinkley
Times staff writer
Sometimes, all you need to know is the date.
July 4. December 7. September 11. Dates that changed history.
Yet when the war in Iraq is recounted to future generations, no date will live in infamy apart from the others. Those two months of shock and awe, across wind-swept deserts and fertile river valleys, blend together like grains of sand in a dust storm for the troops who lived it and the families who monitored from afar.
But dates are the batting averages of history, the stats we use to remind us of the reasons we care.
We know June 6, 1944, for instance: D-Day, when American and Allied forces invaded Normandy, beginning the end of World War II.
If there must be a date with which we associate the war in Iraq, what should it be?
Perhaps April 9, the day the Marines hooked a chain to a statue of Saddam Hussein in the heart of Baghdad and dragged it to the ground? Or December 13, when the deposed dictator finally was captured?
Or March 23?
That was the day many remember all too vividly.
Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch and five comrades were taken prisoner in an ambush where 11 other soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company paid the ultimate price.
Eighteen Marines with Task Force Tarawa were killed in a firefight that went awry.
Two service members died after one of their own allegedly pulled the pins on live grenades and tossed them into the tent where they slept. A U.S. Patriot missile shot down a British jet, killing both pilots. Two Apache helicopter pilots were shot down, taken prisoner and displayed on television.
One day in Iraq. Thirty-three dead. Eight captured. Many wounded.
If every day of the war had been like March 23, the world might be a very different place.
Enemy within
Army Capt. Greg Holden thinks about the early morning hours of that day every time he looks at the scars on his left leg.
Holden, 31, of 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), lost eight pints of blood, and nearly his left leg, at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait after a soldier from his unit allegedly attacked with M67 fragmentation grenades and small-arms fire.
“You can’t go through a day without thinking about it,” Holden said.
Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, a combat engineer, is accused of killing two officers and wounding 14 other troops.
At his Article 32 evidentiary hearing a few months later, witnesses said Akbar switched off the lights in the tent pod, plunging it into near-total darkness, then tossed the grenades and fired his M4 carbine at soldiers running out of the tents under the mistaken impression the enemy had attacked.
Army Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert died at the scene. Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone died two days later from shrapnel that pierced his neck.
If convicted, Akbar could face lethal injection, making him the first soldier to face the death penalty in a court-martial since 1998.
The attack occurred about 1:30 a.m., and Holden remembers trying to get out of his tent after the first grenade went off. That’s when the second grenade — about three feet away — blew him off his feet.
“It launched me through the air. I landed on the top of my left shoulder,” Holden recalled in a March 3 telephone interview from Fort Campbell, Ky. “I remember trying to get up and walk, but my left leg just did not work.”
The grenade fractured his lower left tibia in 15 places, blew away joints of the fourth and fifth metatarsals of his left foot, blew away part of his left heel and split open his left leg from ankle to knee.
Twelve surgeries later, Holden walks on his own and works as the 1st Brigade’s assistant intelligence officer at Campbell.
Army Col. Ben Hodges, commander of the 1st Brigade, took grenade fragments to his right forearm in the attack but says the pain he suffered from the attack mostly was mental.
“The fact that that would occur in my unit was really painful,” Hodges said in a March 2 interview. “I can’t get away from the fact that a soldier in my unit tried to kill American soldiers.”
Holden has similar feelings but is determined to get on with his life.
“There is no sense in looking back on why, why, why … you can’t change what happened to you,” he said. “He is not going to get the best of me.”
Success and failure
For the Air Force, March 23 marked the successful end of Operation Ugly Baby, the effort to airlift about 280 Army and Air Force special-operations troops into Kurdish-held territory.
Joint Special Operations Task Force-North wanted to fly into Iraq via Turkey, but objections from the Turkish government forced the six MC-130H Combat Talon II aircraft to infiltrate Iraq from Jordanian airspace and fly low over Iraq for about four hours.
Iraqi anti-aircraft fire was so intense that one Combat Talon lost an engine and made an emergency landing at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Once on the ground, the special-operations teams joined Kurdish allies to confront 13 Iraqi divisions along the Kurdish line and Ansar-i Islam terrorist strongholds near the Iranian border.
But the day would not be successful for everyone. Army Chief Warrant Officers David Williams and Ronald Young, Apache helicopter pilots from 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, at Fort Hood, Texas, were shot down near Baghdad on a combat mission.
The pair was captured, videotaped for the world to see and held prisoner for three weeks. Advancing Marines found them April 13 near Tikrit, and the two men were flown home to their families.
Other troops would face Iraqi opposition on March 23, as well, and some faced a similar fate. As allegations of an attack on the 101st Airborne by one of their own continued to crackle across military airwaves in southern Iraq, ground forces continued pushing toward Baghdad.
By dawn on March 23, U.S. ground-combat units had advanced more than 200 miles into Iraq in three days and were 130 miles north of Nasiriyah, an advance Army researchers call historically unprecedented for speed and depth of penetration.
The goal was to prevent the Iraqis from mounting a worthy defense, but moving that far that quickly required more than bullets and bravery. It also required aggressive support from a variety of logistics, medical and maintenance units, many of which had to move at a steady pace behind the units they supported.
That’s how the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company, tasked with supporting a Patriot missile unit, ended up in Nasiriyah.
A fateful encounter
Considered by many to be the heroes of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Patriot missile units again played an active part in the war in Iraq. But all was not smooth.
On March 23, the day when nothing seemed to go right, a Patriot missile team near the Kuwaiti border accidentally shot down a British fighter returning from air attacks that destroyed Republican Guard forces near Baghdad.
The ripple created by the first confirmed “friendly fire” deaths would have added pressure to the 507th Maintenance Company to keep its missile systems ready and able, but those soldiers had bigger problems.
Moving in the back of a 600-vehicle column, members of the 507th got separated from the group, according to an Army account. At about 7 a.m., Iraqi military forces and armed irregulars attacked the convoy.
There were 33 soldiers in the 18-vehicle convoy, including two from the 3rd Forward Support Battalion traveling in a 10-ton wrecker with members of the 507th.
The attack lasted as long as 90 minutes.
In the end, 11 soldiers were killed, six were captured by Iraqi forces and 16 regrouped with other American troops. Nine of the 22 soldiers who survived, including the now-famous Pfc. Jessica Lynch, were wounded in action.
The public frenzy that followed spawned a television movie and authorized biography of Lynch, who was rescued by American forces April 2.
And the media darling, now out of the Army, is still making headlines. In late February, newspapers worldwide carried photos of a smiling Lynch presiding over inauguration ceremonies for the new Carnival Miracle cruise ship, which she then boarded for its maiden voyage to the Bahamas.
Despite her ordeal, Lynch was one of the lucky ones. A third of the soldiers who entered Nasiriyah with her that day never made it to another holiday. And they weren’t alone.
A bridge too far
There was never a question the leathernecks of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, would secure two bridges and the town of Nasiriyah on March 23. But no one predicted they also would see 33 of their own killed or wounded.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that any one of us who were there don’t think about it,” said Lt. Col. Rick Grabowski, 45, of Farmington, Iowa, commander of the battalion until June.
The regiment’s casualties — 18 killed and 15 wounded in action — were borne by the Marines of Charlie Company, tasked with taking the city’s northern bridge.
While Alpha Company worked to secure the southern bridge and Bravo Company bogged down in a muddy lot east of town, Charlie Company forged north toward the second bridge, up a thoroughfare later dubbed “Ambush Alley.”
continued...
The Longest Day — of the Iraq war
Casualties, accidents marred drive to Baghdad
By C. Mark Brinkley
Times staff writer
Sometimes, all you need to know is the date.
July 4. December 7. September 11. Dates that changed history.
Yet when the war in Iraq is recounted to future generations, no date will live in infamy apart from the others. Those two months of shock and awe, across wind-swept deserts and fertile river valleys, blend together like grains of sand in a dust storm for the troops who lived it and the families who monitored from afar.
But dates are the batting averages of history, the stats we use to remind us of the reasons we care.
We know June 6, 1944, for instance: D-Day, when American and Allied forces invaded Normandy, beginning the end of World War II.
If there must be a date with which we associate the war in Iraq, what should it be?
Perhaps April 9, the day the Marines hooked a chain to a statue of Saddam Hussein in the heart of Baghdad and dragged it to the ground? Or December 13, when the deposed dictator finally was captured?
Or March 23?
That was the day many remember all too vividly.
Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch and five comrades were taken prisoner in an ambush where 11 other soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company paid the ultimate price.
Eighteen Marines with Task Force Tarawa were killed in a firefight that went awry.
Two service members died after one of their own allegedly pulled the pins on live grenades and tossed them into the tent where they slept. A U.S. Patriot missile shot down a British jet, killing both pilots. Two Apache helicopter pilots were shot down, taken prisoner and displayed on television.
One day in Iraq. Thirty-three dead. Eight captured. Many wounded.
If every day of the war had been like March 23, the world might be a very different place.
Enemy within
Army Capt. Greg Holden thinks about the early morning hours of that day every time he looks at the scars on his left leg.
Holden, 31, of 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), lost eight pints of blood, and nearly his left leg, at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait after a soldier from his unit allegedly attacked with M67 fragmentation grenades and small-arms fire.
“You can’t go through a day without thinking about it,” Holden said.
Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, a combat engineer, is accused of killing two officers and wounding 14 other troops.
At his Article 32 evidentiary hearing a few months later, witnesses said Akbar switched off the lights in the tent pod, plunging it into near-total darkness, then tossed the grenades and fired his M4 carbine at soldiers running out of the tents under the mistaken impression the enemy had attacked.
Army Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert died at the scene. Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone died two days later from shrapnel that pierced his neck.
If convicted, Akbar could face lethal injection, making him the first soldier to face the death penalty in a court-martial since 1998.
The attack occurred about 1:30 a.m., and Holden remembers trying to get out of his tent after the first grenade went off. That’s when the second grenade — about three feet away — blew him off his feet.
“It launched me through the air. I landed on the top of my left shoulder,” Holden recalled in a March 3 telephone interview from Fort Campbell, Ky. “I remember trying to get up and walk, but my left leg just did not work.”
The grenade fractured his lower left tibia in 15 places, blew away joints of the fourth and fifth metatarsals of his left foot, blew away part of his left heel and split open his left leg from ankle to knee.
Twelve surgeries later, Holden walks on his own and works as the 1st Brigade’s assistant intelligence officer at Campbell.
Army Col. Ben Hodges, commander of the 1st Brigade, took grenade fragments to his right forearm in the attack but says the pain he suffered from the attack mostly was mental.
“The fact that that would occur in my unit was really painful,” Hodges said in a March 2 interview. “I can’t get away from the fact that a soldier in my unit tried to kill American soldiers.”
Holden has similar feelings but is determined to get on with his life.
“There is no sense in looking back on why, why, why … you can’t change what happened to you,” he said. “He is not going to get the best of me.”
Success and failure
For the Air Force, March 23 marked the successful end of Operation Ugly Baby, the effort to airlift about 280 Army and Air Force special-operations troops into Kurdish-held territory.
Joint Special Operations Task Force-North wanted to fly into Iraq via Turkey, but objections from the Turkish government forced the six MC-130H Combat Talon II aircraft to infiltrate Iraq from Jordanian airspace and fly low over Iraq for about four hours.
Iraqi anti-aircraft fire was so intense that one Combat Talon lost an engine and made an emergency landing at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Once on the ground, the special-operations teams joined Kurdish allies to confront 13 Iraqi divisions along the Kurdish line and Ansar-i Islam terrorist strongholds near the Iranian border.
But the day would not be successful for everyone. Army Chief Warrant Officers David Williams and Ronald Young, Apache helicopter pilots from 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, at Fort Hood, Texas, were shot down near Baghdad on a combat mission.
The pair was captured, videotaped for the world to see and held prisoner for three weeks. Advancing Marines found them April 13 near Tikrit, and the two men were flown home to their families.
Other troops would face Iraqi opposition on March 23, as well, and some faced a similar fate. As allegations of an attack on the 101st Airborne by one of their own continued to crackle across military airwaves in southern Iraq, ground forces continued pushing toward Baghdad.
By dawn on March 23, U.S. ground-combat units had advanced more than 200 miles into Iraq in three days and were 130 miles north of Nasiriyah, an advance Army researchers call historically unprecedented for speed and depth of penetration.
The goal was to prevent the Iraqis from mounting a worthy defense, but moving that far that quickly required more than bullets and bravery. It also required aggressive support from a variety of logistics, medical and maintenance units, many of which had to move at a steady pace behind the units they supported.
That’s how the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company, tasked with supporting a Patriot missile unit, ended up in Nasiriyah.
A fateful encounter
Considered by many to be the heroes of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Patriot missile units again played an active part in the war in Iraq. But all was not smooth.
On March 23, the day when nothing seemed to go right, a Patriot missile team near the Kuwaiti border accidentally shot down a British fighter returning from air attacks that destroyed Republican Guard forces near Baghdad.
The ripple created by the first confirmed “friendly fire” deaths would have added pressure to the 507th Maintenance Company to keep its missile systems ready and able, but those soldiers had bigger problems.
Moving in the back of a 600-vehicle column, members of the 507th got separated from the group, according to an Army account. At about 7 a.m., Iraqi military forces and armed irregulars attacked the convoy.
There were 33 soldiers in the 18-vehicle convoy, including two from the 3rd Forward Support Battalion traveling in a 10-ton wrecker with members of the 507th.
The attack lasted as long as 90 minutes.
In the end, 11 soldiers were killed, six were captured by Iraqi forces and 16 regrouped with other American troops. Nine of the 22 soldiers who survived, including the now-famous Pfc. Jessica Lynch, were wounded in action.
The public frenzy that followed spawned a television movie and authorized biography of Lynch, who was rescued by American forces April 2.
And the media darling, now out of the Army, is still making headlines. In late February, newspapers worldwide carried photos of a smiling Lynch presiding over inauguration ceremonies for the new Carnival Miracle cruise ship, which she then boarded for its maiden voyage to the Bahamas.
Despite her ordeal, Lynch was one of the lucky ones. A third of the soldiers who entered Nasiriyah with her that day never made it to another holiday. And they weren’t alone.
A bridge too far
There was never a question the leathernecks of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, would secure two bridges and the town of Nasiriyah on March 23. But no one predicted they also would see 33 of their own killed or wounded.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that any one of us who were there don’t think about it,” said Lt. Col. Rick Grabowski, 45, of Farmington, Iowa, commander of the battalion until June.
The regiment’s casualties — 18 killed and 15 wounded in action — were borne by the Marines of Charlie Company, tasked with taking the city’s northern bridge.
While Alpha Company worked to secure the southern bridge and Bravo Company bogged down in a muddy lot east of town, Charlie Company forged north toward the second bridge, up a thoroughfare later dubbed “Ambush Alley.”
continued...