April 8, 2003
I had fallen asleep to the sound of sporadic tank fire up surrounding streets, but when I woke around 0400, it was because of the din of a great deal of sustained fire up where the Assassins had spent the night, inside the palace complex about a half mile northeast of us. I climbed up on top of the 113 to see if Howison knew what was going on. But he had switched his radio over from Assassins net to Cyclone the day before, and now he couldn’t find Assassins.
I wanted to go there, but the 113 didn’t have orders, and the idea of walking through pitch dark toward a firefight, unarmed, without night vision, with no clue which way the fight was oriented, was a non-starter. So we sat, paced, smoked, ate MREs, and listened to the mounting fire.
Intense machine gun and tank fire continued until dawn, around 0530 or so, when it eased. Around 0700, the Warthogs showed up.
They were beautiful. Two A-10 tank killers, each with a 30mm cannon in its nose, a Gatling gun that spat out a stream of depleted uranium rounds. Destruction and woe upon whatever lay below. The two of them performed an entrancing bumble bee dance up in the sky. One would climb, arc over and start its dive. Midway through its dive, the smoke would begin trailing back from the gun in the nose. A few seconds later, the noise would reach us. BZHZHZHZHZHZHZHZHZHZH. A violent grinding noise that seemed to vibrate the air all around, at a distance of a mile or so. A massive, murderous chainsaw in the sky.
The Warthog would spit out flares against heat-seeking missiles toward the bottom of its run and the noise would halt abruptly. It would bottom out, spit out more flares, then start its climb. Way up in the sky, the other Warthog would arc over and start its run. This deadly aerial ballet continued for some time.
“Man, they are just wasting whatever they are shooting at,” Kauffeld said. Howison and Pasto turned to cleaning their weapons.
I learned much later that one A-10 had been shot down by a ground-fired missile just prior to that attack, the pilot bailing out south of Baghdad. Another had been hit but made it back to its base. We had seen the other two remaining in the flight engaging.
This is what had happened:
Lustig was on watch around 0330 or so when he noticed about 30 figures approaching on his thermal-imaging device, the varying temperatures of their bodies and weapons painting a clear image on his screen.
“I looked down the road toward the arch,” Lustig said. “There were 20 or 30 dismounts walking down the road, right down the middle of the road … I didn’t believe what I was seeing.”
The men broke into two groups when they saw the tanks.
“They started talking and pointing in our direction,” Lustig said. The Iraqis unslung their rifles and RPGs. The tankers sat in their turrets and watched on the thermal.
“I got my guys up,” Lustig said. “I called the CO and told him he needed to get the guys inside, because these guys were loading up RPGs.”
Those tankers not on watch in the boulevard were sleeping on the decks of their tanks on the grounds of the Big Head Palace. Lustig wanted them inside their tanks. He kept watching the approaching Iraqis.
“They weren’t taking cover, just walking up like they thought they were going to surprise us,” he said. He started his tank’s engine.
“That’s when it hit. I saw a huge white flash,” said Lustig. An anti-tank missile had struck the housing of his main gun, its shaped charge burning a neat hole one centimeter in diameter in the steel deep enough to accommodate three-quarters of a ballpoint pen. It failed to disable the gun or penetrate the turret. If Lustig had been up in his hatch, it probably would have killed him. The driver, Spec. Donte Pirl, had also just closed his hatch directly below the gun and so got to live, but was temporarily blinded by the intense flash that lit up his periscope blocks. Lustig initially thought Pirl must be dead.
XO Lt. Tomlinson’s tank rolled out to join the Red tanks on the boulevard a few minutes after the shooting started. He saw a gunman approaching.
“He was doing combat rolls in the bushes, trying to sneak up on us. We saw him on the thermals,” Tomlinson said. The electronic image was clear as day, and he saw the man was in civilian clothes, his head wrapped in a keffiyeh. Tomlinson waited until he clearly made out the shape of the man’s Kalashnikov, then opened up with his machine gun.
“I’ll always remember putting four bullets in him. He kind of jerked a bit and stopped moving,” said Tomlinson. “Usually, you just see the aftermath. They’re in the bushes. You don’t see it happen. This was different. We fought a lot, but it’s a boom here, a flash there and you see the bodies afterward.”
For the GIs sleeping on the palace grounds, the noise over the high walls was sudden and close.
“I remember hearing those Iraqis screaming. Something like, ‘Baklak Allah!’” said Pvt. Chad Miller.
“The way it sounded, like, ‘Allah, here I come!’ They knew they were going to die. Then BOOM!” Miller said.
Pvt. Robert Mullen said, “The biggest thing I remember is being woken by the RPGs when we were sleeping in the palace. I thought, ‘Oh shit! We’re going to die.’ There was stuff that needed to be done. We had to slave off (jump start) Sgt. Ray. It didn’t seem like a good idea to go outside, but it had to be done.”
White Platoon leader Lt. Robert Redmon said, “I was asleep and I heard the rocket go off. It sounded close. I got everyone up. The CO said we had no friendlies on either side of the street. We were weapons free. I told my guys, everything they saw, light it up. We were firing everything we had.”
Lustig’s crew had recovered from their hit and were moving forward to engage. It complicated things for Lustig that his turret had jammed several days earlier and would no longer traverse. But Lustig and his driver had plenty of practice in the last few days pivoting the entire tank so his gunner, Spec. Seth Houlberg, could hit his targets, and Lustig didn’t let this significant mechanical issue deter him.
As the tankers approached the northern gate at the intersection of Jaffa and Haifa streets, near the Jumhuriya Bridge, they saw buses and trucks unloading up to a hundred fighters there, and opened fire on them. Once through the gate, they were met with intense fire coming down from the buildings around the intersection and from a bunker complex in the park opposite.
“Red went to the left,” Redmon said. “Gold (the mechanized infantry platoon) went north. We turned to the east. We started taking sniper rounds from the red building.”
He was refering to the Ministry of Planning, a tall office building at the foot of the Jumhuriyah Bridge over the Tigris. Here the company took its first combat casualty, 20 days into the war.
“We had RPGs flying through, AK fire,” Redmon said. “I heard the gunner say, ‘We’ve been hit!’ I thought he meant an RPG. I looked back and I saw him slumped down. It looked bad. The whole net went quiet. We started backing our tanks to evacuate him. The first three tanks started laying down everything they had to suppress the snipers.
In White Platoon Sgt. Philip Cornell’s tank, gunner Sgt. Greg Samson said, “I saw a flash when the round hit the metal. I thought I was the one who got shot. I went down in the hatch to check myself and then I saw he was shot. He pulled himself down. He said, ‘I’m shot.’”
Cornell had been shot through the shoulder by a bullet that went down into his chest. In another tank, the loader had been shot in the arm. While Cornell’s loader tended to his wound, Samson had to go back up to guide the driver as he backed up the tank.
“I’m exposed, half my body, but I had to, to pull back, to save his life,” Samson said. Of the fight in the intersection, he said, “This one was the worst one. It was a lot of fire coming down, and you don’t know where it’s coming from.
“After we evacuated him I got more mad. I wanted to rearm my small arms and get back to the fight,” Samson said.
Meanwhile, Wolford had been briefly stunned, when a bullet hit a spent .50 caliber shell lying on the deck of his turret and spun it into his neck, dropping him down his hatch. Wolford showed me that dinged-up .50 cal shell later in the day. He was carrying it in his pocket.
Heavy sniper fire and RPGs were raining down from the high-rise Planning Ministry and a small apartment building on the intersection and from another tall building, the Telecommunications Ministry across the river. The tankers were also receiving fire from a bunker complex in the park opposite and from up Haifa and Jaffa streets. They were unable to engage at high angles in the confines of the intersection, and now they were forced being to fight down in their hatches, with limited views of a high-rise urban battlefield. This was exactly why doctrine called for tanks to avoid urban fights. Mortars and at least one heavy anti-tank missile had been fired. Wolford was concerned about losing tanks. He pulled back into the palace district, and the Air Force spotters arranged to have JDAMS, guided bombs, dropped on the two closest buildings. The top floors of the Ministry of Planning were gutted. The small apartment building was reduced to a pile of rubble. Then, the Warthogs showed up and began working over the vehicles and the bunkers in the park.
This was the big street fight we had expected the day before, when the Iraqis collapsed and let us in. Those were the Special Republican Guard, supposedly the Iraqi Army’s elite. These were included Republican Guard, as we saw from the bodies and equipment when it was over, but also included irregulars, the Saddam Fedayeen and foreign mujahideen, who advanced toward their fight and were willing to die.
Around 7:30 a.m. Wolford moved his tanks back into the intersection when the Warthogs were done. He called up our Psyops/fire-support 113 from the July 14th Square so the LT could call in artillery. At last we were allowed to roll forward.
This time, Wolford put the Red and Blue platoon tanks on the right, facing east toward the Jumhuriyah Bridge. White Platoon, which had lost its platoon sergeant, held the quieter west side facing Jaffa Street and the palace district gate behind us. We arrived to find the tanks firing into buildings where snipers were still lurking. The fire had abated considerably from what the tankers had experienced earlier, but RPGs and mortar rounds continued to explode periodically in the intersection. The Gold Bradleys rolled past us to resume their position to the north, up Haifa Street.
“Earplug time,” my notes say. I saw flashes of fire from the highrise Telecommunications Ministry across the Tigris, maybe a quarter of a mile away, and saw Red’s tanks firing back, plugging the white concrete exterior with blackened holes. The tankers were “open, protected,” their hatches horizontal but raised six inches over the deck to give the commanders cover while allow a clear view. In the 113 we stayed up in the crew hatch, not wanting to be confined and feeling safer when we could see what was happening. We kept low profiles behind Pasto’s speakers to avoid exposing ourselves to shrapnel. Wolford was too busy to notice us.
The Gold Platoon Bradleys advanced up Haifa Street, engaging the bunkers in the park and snipers in surrounding buildings heavily with their 25 mm cannons and machine guns.
“I love you, Gold,” Wolford said over the radio, which Howison now had tuned into the Assassin net. “I love you, baby! I love you, Gold!”
Wolford was glad to be back here engaging with an enemy that had shot two of his men and forced him back. He told Blue Platoon to put a couple tanks up on the bridge.
“Get up there. I want eyes on the other side of that bridge. Move, move! We’ve got bad men up there,” Wolford said. “Blue One, you need to be engaging to your left and right. Keep their heads down. Blue, you need to be wreaking havoc up there. You need to be firing all of your weapons systems…Hey Blue One, you see anything coming across the bridge?”
“Negative,” said Lt. Laughlin. “Just receiving small arms fire.”
“Blue Four, I’ve got some pop-offs coming from that building to your left,” Wolford said, refering to the Telecommunications Building. You need to put a HEAT (high-explosive anti-tank) round into it, or you need to light it up with your .50 and your coax.”
“Assassin Six, this is Blue One. Just destroyed enemy dismounts in a building to your right.”
Wolford looked over then, noticed us standing up in the 113’s hatch and ordered us to get down. Down inside the 113, I listened to the fight on the earphones of my tanker helmet, taking notes on the radio chatter, while glancing over Pasto’s shoulder as he perused a copy of “College Girls” he had found in the vehicle. I had pretty much forgotten such things as sex and naked women existed and found it suddenly interesting.
Blue reported destroying a car trying to cross the bridge.
A Gold commander reported, “We’ve got some dismounts in a little bunker in this square. You want us to clear out this area?”
In the 113, we decided the “get down” order had expired and stuck our heads up again.
“Yeah, clear the area,” Wolford said. “When you’ve done that, I’ve got some errands for you.”
The Gold Bradleys dropped their ramps and the infantrymen shuffled out, moving out into the park where a bronze statuary cluster of Arab women with water jars ringed a fountain with a pool about 50 feet across. The white doves that apparently considered this statue home would settle on the women, then fly off in a panic whenever the main guns fired. One of the bronze women was blown off at the torso and the others were riddled with bullet holes.
Our track’s driver, Leal, a skinny kid with Coke-bottle specs and a shaved head, barely 20, commented, “I’m not even getting any kind of emotion off this anymore.”
“Assassin Six, this is White One, I just engaged and destroyed one potential car bomb,” Redmon reported.
“Assassin Six, Gold One, we have an EPW. He’s still alive but his legs are blown off.”
“OK, take his weapons off him and tell him we’ll get him when this battle’s over,” Wolford said.
Gold One said, “On the right we’ve got five or six dead and the one with his legs blown off. We’ve getting ready to move on the left…can you get Trauma up here for the EPW? If we don’t get him out of here soon, he’s probably going to die.”
“I want to let the situation develop a little more,” Wolford said. It sounded cold, but he remained concerned about his own tankers and the security of the intersection, and wasn’t ready to expose the lightly armored medic track and the medics to enemy fire for a dying Iraqi soldier.
“OK, but he’s probably going to die,” Gold said.
At 10:45 a.m., Wolford passed on the word that an Iraqi radio had been captured. The Arabic-speaking counter-intelligence officers were listening to it a forward observer’s chatter.
“He has direct eyes on our position and he’s getting ready to call fire,” Wolford said. “So I am going to nominate that 30-story building for a 500-pound bomb, because I think he’s been in it and watching us all morning.”
He was refering to the Telecommunications Ministry across the river. All of us who were up began scanning all the surrounding buildings. Harassing RPG and mortar fire were one thing, but a serious artillery strike would be a big problem. Wolford asked Red One, Lt. Middleton, now up on the bridge, to give him a grid on the Telecommunications Ministry.
“Red One, I need that grid quick. We’re going to put Battle King on it,” Wolford said, refering to 2nd Brigade’s artillery. “We’re going to put mortars on it and we’re going to drop a fucking 500-pound bomb right on it.”
Conflicting information started coming in about the suspected Iraqi forward observer.
“The observer says he’s by a canal by a Turkish restaurant. You see a Turkish restaurant?” Wolford said. A little later, he said, “OK, Red One, about 100 meters on each side of the bridge, destroy all the parked vehicles. He’s in a parked vehicle and he’s talking to a guy who’s observing.”
“Roger,” Middleton said.
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood, would you be mine?” Leal sang.
Red Platoon’s first boom startled the doves again.
“Look at the doves. That’s beautiful,” the LT said.
As we continued to scan the buildings, Howison and I began comparing the benefits and pleasures of smoking versus chewing, and how in a war zone, one didn’t care and did either as one chose.
“War is redneck as hell,” Howison observed. “All these big vehicles. Guns, blowing shit up.”
Some time passed, and while the tanks on the bridge continued to exchange fire with RPG teams on the opposite bank, no artillery barrage fell upon us. I was getting bored with the search for the Iraqi spotter, and the incoming fire was trailing off. I hopped down from the 113, walked over to Tomlinson’s tank and climbed up to get some quotes about the pre-dawn fight. In the middle of our conversation, Tomlinson, who was listening to the radio on his headphones while we talked, told me one of the tanks up on the bridge had spotted someone with binoculars talking into a telephone in a tall building downstream, and they were getting ready to fire.
The tall building was the Hotel Palestine, a name I didn’t know at that time although I had laid eyes on it when we rode along the river the day before. The TV cameras up there, which Sgt. Shawn Gibson says he never saw, famously recorded his turret turning, his 120 mm main gun elevating, and then the flash. On the 15th floor of the hotel, Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters, and Jose Cuoso of Spanish Television, were killed by the blast.
“You have heavy fire coming from this area and someone with binos, talking on a cell phone and pointing. That’s a spotter,” Gibson told me a couple of days later. “We were taking fire from all up and down that road. I had already engaged 10 RPG teams and four mortar teams. I took them out because they were trying to take me out.”
He was distraught and defensive about it by then. It had turned into an international scandal, and was being played up as a purposeful attack on the media. I knew Gibson as a thoughtful, serious and compassionate soldier. I questioned him at some length and pointedly about the Palestine situation, because that was my job. I didn’t enjoy doing it. When Gibson told me he thought he was firing on an Iraqi forward observer and he never saw any cameras, I knew what I needed to know about what had happened. It was an accident. Protsyuk and Cuoso signed on for the same deal all of us did when we went to Iraq, and getting killed was part of it.
The Palestine was well-known to television viewers worldwide as the location of some of the Iraqi Information Minister’s more hilarious press conferences and as the current headquarters of the non-embedded international press in Baghdad. We had not been watching TV. Wolford said later the hotel was not marked on his maps and he had never been told about it. The Army was handling the west side of the river – and was well informed on all sensitive sites there – but the east side was supposed to be taken by the Marines, who wouldn’t arrive there for another day.
There has been conflicting information about what Wolford’s higher command knew about the hotel. DeCamp told me months later that he and Perkins only learned about the Palestine after it was hit, as they were plotting an air strike on the Telecommunications building that Wolford wanted to empty out. The AP’s Chris Tomlinson and Fox TV reporter Greg Kelly conveyed the news when they learned by sat phone from their news desks in the States that the press in the Palestine were reporting they had just been fired on. The question for me has remained why, when ground forces were approaching Baghdad, commanders were not told the foreign press had moved from the Al Rashid hotel just northwest of our current position, to the Palestine across the river. Everyone but those on the ground with the guns seemed to know about it.
In the Jumhuriyah intersection, I was just becoming aware there was a problem. Someone, possibly Lt. Tomlinson, told me a couple of journalists had been killed when they shot the building. DeCamp pulled up in his tank, and then Perkins arrived with a number of embedded reporters and camera crews in tow – about half a dozen guys I had not seen since Kuwait. Perkins and deCamp held an impromptu press conference in the lee of the bridge.
It didn’t take long. Perkins blamed Saddam for using civilian clothes, vehicles and buildings, and said he was surprised this hadn’t happened earlier. Wolford said that his men had been engaging RPG teams up and down the opposite bank all morning. Perkins asked us not to report that they had captured an enemy radio and were listening to their chatter, because, he said, it might still be useful.
And then we moved on. Some of the tanks and Bradleys had already moved up to the next big intersection several blocks north. The 113 was sent to join them, and I went, too. The Palestine incident was part of what I wrote that day, as was the morning’s battle, but I did not give it much more thought than that for several days. There were a lot of people dying. I was initially surprised a few days later when Jean Paul Mari, a French reporter for Le Nouvelle Observeur, told me that it had become a big international scandal and there were accusations the Americans were purposefully targeting journalists. He showed up at the company’s position in a small palace looking for Wolford, who accommodated him with repeated interviews and also allowed him to talk to Gibson – something that never would have been allowed by a civilian police department in a comparable situation. Mari asked me a few questions about the situation, which I agreed to discuss off the record, not caring to be part of his report. He told me he had cradled one of the dying men’ heads up inside the Palestine.
For Mari, this was a lot more personal but he seemed to be making a sincere effort to understand it, and I accepted that at face value. He stated that while there had been no fire coming from the Palestine, he understood how fire coming from an anti-tank missile battery downstream from the hotel could have been perceived as coming from the hotel itself. That observation did not make it into the heavily biased report Mari ended up writing for “Reporters Sans Frontieres,” a French organization that is apparently also sans professional standards. The report was titled “Two Murders and a Lie,” though it failed to produce evidence that either of those things had happened.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists also failed, despite its best efforts, to find evidence anyone had committed murder at the Palestine, though CPJ did back flips to insinuate there was no way the tankers could not have known what they were shooting at. It is hardly worthwhile to take seriously any French report on American actions in Iraq. But CPJ also had demonstrated early and often during the war that they were willing to think the worst about any possible American infraction – using language of condemnation and protest before facts had been established – while only mourning and expressing concern about adverse actions toward the press at the hands of the Iraqis. Wolford, Gibson and deCamp were cleared by a military investigation but remain the target of warrants in an open Spanish war crimes investigation ofocusing on the death of Cuoso.
At the next intersection northon Haifa Street, the Baghdadis started coming out. We began receiving waves and thumbs up, as Iraqis called out “Good USA!” and “Thank you, thank you!” and “Mr. Bush! Walker Bush!” They also immediately turned to looting, in small numbers at first. We saw some guys moving refrigerators and air conditioners, but it was nothing like what we would see over the next few days.
I wanted to go talk to some Iraqis who were sitting outside a teashop up the road. I told Howison.
“Take Pasto with you,” he said.
Pasto was happy. He wanted to talk to Iraqis.
We went up, were nicely greeted and invited to sit on the long bench outside while kids and old men came up to have a look at us and middle-aged men started trying out their few words of English. I used my little bit of Arabic, and told Pasto how to say hello and thank you. We were having a good time and they were getting ready to bring out the tea when a couple of 30-ish guys from the neighborhood came along, looking concerned. They indicated through broken English and signs that there was an RPG crew around the corner.
We took them back to one of the infantry sergeants in the square. I spent about 10 minutes trying to translate as the sergeant wanted to know exactly where the RPG men were and how many of them were there. But by the time a squad finally went up an alley to flank the RPG team, they were gone. My new Arab pals explained that the fighters were using the river bank to flank us and launch harassing attacks.
We drove back down to the Jumhuriyah Bridge as plan were being finalized to drop two guided bombs into the high-rise Telecommunications Ministry across the Tigris. That project had been put on hold when the Palestine was hit. Everyone wanted to watch, though we were told to get down in case the Air Force missed. Over the radio, someone announced the “bombs away” had just been given. With the 113’s crew hatch propped open about a foot, we saw two dark streaks, one after another, drop from the low overcast directly into the top of the building. Then the bombs detonated deep inside, and front of the building blew off in a big cloud of dust and smoke. Zucchino, who went back months later to do additional reporting for his book, Thunder Run, established through interviews with locals that the Turkish restaurant reported in the Iraqi forward observer’s radio chatter was on the first floor of that building. The locals knew that it had been occupied by the Iraqi military. That is probably where the Iraqi spotter had been all along.
We set up for the night with the 113 straddling the median strip on Jaffa Street near the foot of the Jumhuriyah Bridge, with the lovely shattered fountain of the women at the well and some dead Iraqi soldiers lying in the grass nearby. In the late afternoon, we brought several chairs out of the bombed-out Planning Ministry and set up a little lounge for ourselves under the spreading branches of a tree that had somehow survived all the day’s fire nicely. Having left behind all my electronics in the rush to get onboard the assault the day before, I wrote my story longhand and called it in by sat phone. As we ate and kicked back, Pasto and Howison wanted to hear the parts they featured in, so I read aloud from the yellow Iraqi composition book with Saddam on the cover that one of the GIs had given me to write in. That was our evening’s entertainment, and soon it was pitch dark. We took our sleeping places again, mine on the big flat ramp with Leal’s sleeping bag, and dropped off almost immediately, except for those who stayed on watch. There was fire in the park during the night as the infantry engaged three “dismounts,” but otherwise it was quiet.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:26 am on Sunday, April 8, 2007
4 Responses to “April 8, 2003”
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April 8th, 2007 at 1:37 am
April 8, 2003
April 8, 2003 Critter Crittenden I had fallen asleep to the sound of sporadic tank fire up surrounding streets, but when I woke around 0400, it was because of the din of a great deal of sustained fire up where
April 8th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.08
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April 8th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Dang, Jules, but that was some deep s**t you were in. I’m honored to be able to read it. Keep it up!
April 8th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Jules,
Years ago I had an epiphany about war stories. Why some veterans sit around and talk about them, why some folks write them, why others read them. It’s all about reliving the rush, getting another adrenaline fix. Adrenaline is THE most addictive drug, and once you find the level that sets you up, you’ll try and regain it, even if only in part.
I really do think it’s that simple. Plus, sometimes, heck even many times, reliving it is a catharsis.
Regardless, you are a hell of a writer and I am honored to be able to read your works here. My sincere thanks to you for this.
Respects,