Active Unit News

Ft. Carson soldiers pull commando duty
By Jim Hughes, Denver Post Staff Writer

SAMARRA, Iraq - A small team of American soldiers stormed a private home in a predawn raid Tuesday in this holy city north of Baghdad. Wearing night-vision goggles, they ran through the shadows to the two- story white stucco house and kicked in the door. Minutes later, they left, leading three men - bags over their heads, their hands bound behind their backs - out of the house and into their Humvees. They never fired a shot.The house belonged to a local member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who is suspected of running the regional cell of the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam. But the Americans who seized the trio were not Army Rangers, Navy SEALs or members of the Army's Delta Force, the kinds of specialized, highly trained soldiers who usually conduct such raids. Instead, the soldiers are members of the mechanized 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division, a unit usually called upon for its tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and howitzers. With the main fighting in Iraq now over, the soldiers, based at Fort Carson outside Colorado Springs, are using less-traditional tactics to mop up pockets of Iraqi resistance. Brigade commander Col. Fred Rudesheim ordered the "snatch and grab" mission Monday afternoon after Baath Party loyalists, perhaps emboldened by the fact that it was Hussein's birthday, took to the streets of Samarra. Filling the beds of pickup trucks and sitting on cars, groups of young men rode bare-chested through the city waving flags, rifles, pictures of Hussein and their shirts, according to U.S. soldiers patrolling the area. When the demonstrators saw the soldiers, they hid their weapons. When pursued, they dispersed. Similar demonstrations also have occurred elsewhere in Iraq in recent days. "The Baath Party is alive and well," Rudesheim told the brigade's top leaders before ordering the raid Monday afternoon. "We're going in tonight." Something like Tuesday morning's raid "does not exist" in the mechanized infantry playbook, one brigade officer said. But such missions could become more common for conventional forces as the Iraqi resistance becomes harder to find in daylight, said Maj. Greg Gehler, operations officer for the brigade's 1/12 infantry battalion. Since arriving in the Samarra area late last week, the brigade has received numerous reports of high-ranking Baathists hiding nearby. Since American soldiers are responsible for maintaining order here, if those leads pan out, brigade leaders may have to assemble such a team again, Gehler said."We don't practice it all the time," he said. "But do we have soldiers in the unit who have done this? Yes. Can we put together our own small teams to go out and do these kinds of missions if called upon? Yes." The ad hoc strike team was assembled only hours before it headed into Samarra. Acting with the help of local informants, it moved in on the house just before dawn.The team, which consisted of a brigade scout team and 1/12 infantrymen who previously had served in the Army's elite Ranger Regiment, opted not to raid two other targeted homes, said Capt. Nick Fuller, who participated in the raid. "We used the Bradleys because there were possibly more people than we wanted in there," he said. "The Bradleys pretty much spooked everybody, so it wouldn't have made sense to go after someone else. So they just went after the No. 1 guy. "The raid's impact is not yet known," said Lt. Col. Tim Parks, 1/12 battalion commander. A former Ranger Regiment company commander, he directed Tuesday's raid in Samarra. Any information gleaned from the prisoners will be useful as the brigade continues its efforts to strengthen its control of the area, said Capt. David Estrada, the 1/12 intelligence officer. "Potentially, he's going to generate more targets," he said of the man the soldiers went looking to capture. "And if he really is a high fedayeen guy, then we may have disrupted their command and control by taking him." Whether or not another mission demanding the skills of elite soldiers comes their way, soldiers here are likely to start working in smaller and smaller groups, Parks told a group of his subordinates Tuesday night. Because there do not seem to be many large-scale military targets left in the area, future missions for the 1/12 infantry may start to resemble Tuesday morning's mission in size, he said. "We've just entered a period where, chances are, I can't go on every op, and neither can you," he told his captains, lieutenants and senior noncommissioned officers. "The chances of a platoon leader executing a patrol as the senior guy on the ground are growing every day."

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