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Active Unit News
Johnson: Danger lurks door-to-door
By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News
December 20, 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq - We are headed out on patrol with the infantry tonight.
The Bradley Fighting Vehicle arrives, and its rear door lowers slowly to the street. We scramble up the ramp, take a seat and rumble away.
Our armored vehicle triggers a massive traffic snarl, but no one, not even the horn-loving Iraqis, dares honk at a Bradley.
The men of the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment have been after us all week to come watch them work.
They are the trigger-pullers of Fort Carson's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, hard men who do the dirtiest of the dirty work here.
They are the men who kick or blast in doors, storming houses and taking unwilling men to the floor.
They search for the weapons and explosives that for months have been used to kill scores of American troops.
Operation Ivy Blizzard has placed this city under siege for two days now, sending an unknown number of resistance fighters fleeing into the desert.
Some 2,000 troops, most from Fort Carson, have the city surrounded, and tonight the soldiers of the 1-8 Infantry will go alley-by-alley in an attempt to ferret out any fighters remaining behind.
Samarra, every soldier here says, is perhaps the most dangerous city in Iraq for American troops.
Patrols in recent weeks have come under unrelenting mortar and rocket fire within minutes of entering the city.
The plan now is to quell the attacks through massive raids on selected targets.
The 1-8's job is to isolate resistance cells in the northern half of the city, destroy their havens and, if necessary, kill any who fight back.
The men of the 1-8 pride themselves on their fierceness, their unforgiving nature and their unrelenting desire to keep the enemy on the run, never allowing them to feel safe - on bringing down hell's wrath on anyone foolish enough to fire even a single potshot their way.
As a result, they have lost but one soldier to enemy fire over their nine months in Iraq.
It happened about three weeks ago.
A rocket-propelled grenade sliced through one of their Bradleys, cutting clean through the chest armor of a soldier riding inside, killing him, and nearly exiting through the other side of the vehicle.
Soldiers quickly hunted down and killed the triggerman and his accomplices, and ringed with razor wire the small village from which they had emerged.
Their commander, Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, ordered a curfew in the town, and held both the mayor and council chairman responsible. He locked up both.
For more than a week, the wire and curfew stayed in place.
The mayor, long since released, last week vowed to the colonel he would personally go to prison if the soldiers took even a single gunshot from his village.
Stalking the dark alleys
It is nearly 9 p.m. when Lt. Dave Nelson, 24, of Colorado Springs, commander of Alpha Company, gathers his men and goes over the plan for tonight.
They will assemble on the northernmost outskirts of Samarra, virtually in the shadows of an ancient minaret constructed some 1,200 years ago. The drop-off point will be in an alley just west of a giant soccer complex. Squads then will fan out through the adjacent neighborhoods.
Only the sound of barking dogs can be heard as we make our way through pitch-black alleys. A column of some 20 soldiers, weapons at the ready, walk slowly down opposite sides. They have positioned us square in the middle.
The streets and paths of Samarra are filled with water from torrential rain earlier in the day and the soldiers slog through it, the water coming up over their boots.
At each intersecting alleyway, two soldiers go to one knee and sweep their rifle muzzles across the surrounding area, covering us as we hustle past.
The men do a well-rehearsed and choreographed dance, covering the intersections, falling back to the end of the line after the column passes.
It is how I found myself, at one point, walking the point.
Lt. Nelson, directly behind me, gently grabbed my Kevlar vest and stopped me, allowing others to pass.
The soldiers say nothing as they walk. Those who must speak, do so in a whisper. Outlines of humans can be seen in apartment windows above as we pass. Gasps and windows being slid shut echo in the darkness.
Men flee from back of car
It is 10:45 p.m. and we are walking along a wide alleyway, when a red sedan suddenly appears, racing our way. Its headlights suddenly go dark. A taxicab, too, soon appears. Its lights go off.
The soldiers of Alpha Company dash toward both, fingers on their triggers now. The sound of men shouting and brakes squealing fills the night.
A sergeant opens the door and pulls the driver from the red sedan while it is still moving. It rolls crazily into a stone wall.
Behind it, two men leap from the rear seat of the taxi and flee in separate directions. The growl of nearby Bradleys and more shouting can be heard.
"Benzine! Benzine!" the red sedan's driver pleads to the sergeant as he and another soldier wrestle the man to the ground.
Gasoline! Gasoline! He was just going to fill up, he screams over and over.
"Shut up!" the soldiers yell.
Just up the alley, the taxi driver is meeting the same fate. The search for the two men who fled turns up nothing.
A 9 p.m. curfew has been in effect in Samarra for weeks, Lt. Nelson later explains. And everyone has been told, both on television and in pamphlets distributed through the neighborhoods.
Anyone found on the streets after 9, the announcement said, will be shot.
"Now we weren't going to shoot these men, but the fliers have been specific," the lieutenant says. Only those holding or brandishing a weapon will be killed, he said. His men have dodged 40 RPGs over the past month, and enough is enough.
"This man is saying he was going for gas, like we're stupid. All the stations are closed," Dave Nelson says. The taxi driver, too, insists he was only out for gas.
But the soldiers note the back seat of both cars are soaking wet from the puddles everywhere. "Those men were doing something in these alleys," the lieutenant said.
As the soldiers bind the man's hands behind him with plastic handcuffs, he begins to sob loudly. They decide to let the taxi driver go.
"Benzine! Benzine!" the cuffed man wails as they lead him to a waiting Bradley. His red sedan is left where it came to rest, against the stone wall, its emergency lights flashing. "Benzine!"
Explosives light the night
"Our first time through here a couple of weeks ago," whispers Sgt. Christopher Drake, 25, of Cleveland, "we were tossing candy at the kids, you know, trying to show them we're good guys, that we care about them.
"They threw it right back at us," he says. "Minutes later, older folks were firing RPGs at us. It's like the Old West out here."
The Bradley comes to an abrupt halt. The rear door slams open to the street, and the four soldiers with us race up the road and around a corner.
When I arrive, gasping for air, a dozen soldiers sit crouched against a stone wall, their fingers in their ears.
"Down!" a soldier yells.
Ka-bloooom!
A wall of yellowish white fire seems to fill the street. Windows shatter and solid wood doors fly away in splinters. Then another terrific explosion erupts.
A compact car parked in the courtyard of the house, just behind the doors, has exploded. Flames leap some 20 feet in the air.
The force of the two pounds of C-4 explosive going off collapses the double aluminum doors leading into the courtyard of a house directly across the street.
An elderly man and two others are left standing exposed in the courtyard.
They fall face-first to the ground as a half-dozen M-16s are swung their way. Only their mouths move as they plead in Arabic for the soldiers not to shoot.
Twin C-4 explosions fill the air one block over as the men of the 1-8 rush two more houses. Soldiers are running everywhere. The Bradleys rumble in, their tracks spitting mud high in the air.
The men of 2nd Platoon race past the burning car, kick open the door of the house and rush inside. Three men lay face down in the front room, adorned only with rugs and pillows. Against a wall, three women and three young children sob uncontrollably.
Amid the wailing, the house is thoroughly searched for weapons. None are found. The men are bound with plastic handcuffs and led to a Bradley.
They say nothing as a sergeant writes the address where they were arrested and a series of other numbers on the back of their necks with a marker.
They are led away through the splinters and past their smoldering car, which is now little more than a smoking metal shell.
Prisoners taken earlier have identified the three as major weapons dealers in the city, Lt. Dave Nelson would later explain. They face days of custody and rigorous interrogation.
Lt. Dave Nelson has spent the last few minutes distributing money that command has given him to compensate neighbors whose homes have been damaged by the blasts.
"It's the right thing to do," he says.
The raids have netted more than a half-dozen men, but few weapons.
"That ain't the point," a burly sergeant seated at the rear inside the pitch-black interior of Bradley says, as we speed away. "We're showing the bad guys we're here, we ain't playing and we damn sure ain't going away."
'Hell of a thing we have to do'
Two other raids follow in which two more men are taken into custody. No C-4 is used during either.
"We don't always use it," an engineer will later explain.
"Sometimes a boot is just as effective. We mostly use it for effect. It lets people know we mean business."
It is 3:30 a.m. Friday when we are loaded back into the Bradley. A young Iraqi man sits handcuffed on the floor at my feet. We are rolling loudly through the the empty streets of Samarra when the driver suddenly puts on the brakes and lowers the rear door.
The 2nd Platoon swarms an old man that the gunner in the turret had spotted loading a 1970s vintage Toyota station wagon with what looked, from a distance, like crates.
The old man never looks up, but tells the interpreter he is only loading gasoline cans in order to be first in line at the station when the curfew lifts at 4 a.m. Soldiers search his tiny, ramshackle house. No weapons are found.
Lt. Nelson orders the man who'd ridden at my feet out of the Bradley.
Through the interpreter, he lectures the man about the importance of and the danger of not heeding the curfew.
He cuts the man's handcuffs and sends him away.
The lieutenant then looks at the elderly man still standing next to his station wagon and his gas cans.
"This man could have been shot to death tonight, when all he wanted was to be first to get gas." Dave Nelson says. "It's a hell of a thing we have to do out here."
It is 6 a.m. by the time the men of Alpha Company return to their base.
My ears still ring from the four- hours-ago C-4 blast.
Looking back at all I have witnessed, I suppose these raids are necessary, one aspect of the effort to establish a workable democracy and a peaceful society here.
But what I am absolutely convinced of is that for the soldiers who do this work, who must rid this country of dangerous men - if only for the sake of their own lives - there is no choice.
For them, it is all very necessary.
Bill Johnson and photographer Todd Heisler are on assignment in Iraq.
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