Bradley's fighting in Fallujah

From: Jack (milveh@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue Nov 23 2004 - 13:03:06 PST


You guys might be interested in this story from the
front. Bet you won't find this stuff in your local
paper:

2-7 Cav. started staging their Bradley Armored
Fighting Vehicles, Abrams tanks and armored personnel
carriers ready to take the fight to the streets.

The Ghost Battalion began their assault on Fallujah
just after 7 p.m.

Under the cover of darkness, three companies from 2-7
Cav. breached insurgent defenses by plowing through a
railway station on the outskirts of Fallujah’s Joulwan
district.

After nearly 18 hours in the claustrophobic urban
canyons that constitute the front lines of the battle
for Fallujah, the crew of the lead Bradley Fighting
Vehicle was cramped, weary and low on ammunition.

Then they came under heavy enemy fire for the first
time all week.

Within 15 minutes, as shooting erupted around them,
their radio crackled with the news that their company
commander's vehicle, blocks behind them, had been hit
by a rocket-propelled grenade. The blast killed an
interpreter and severed a soldier's arm. A Bradley
that sped to the rescue was hit by another RPG that
slipped under its high-tech armor, wounding the
driver.

A block away, they heard the boom as a third rocket
from insurgents took out the transmission on a huge
Abrams tank. The tank's turret wouldn't move. Nor
could the tank drive in reverse or pivot.

In a quiet voice that cut through the garbled shouts
on his radio, Sgt. Jack Ames, 29, the Bradley's
gunner, noted to the six other soldiers: "Wow. We're
the only ones left here."

Inside the troop compartment of another Bradley, Alpha
2-1--a space hardly larger than two refrigerators--a
hulking 17-year-old from Florida crouched across from
a skinny 24-year-old team leader, weighed down by 65
pounds of gear. Along with two other soldiers crammed
in, buried in equipment and juggling two machine guns,
a grenade launcher and an anti-tank missile launcher
the size of a fence post. The weapons were useless
inside the vehicle. But in this neighborhood, getting
out and fighting on foot would be too dangerous.

Ames and the Bradley's commander, Lt. Michael Duran,
24, rode in the turret above the troop compartment.
Spec. Clint Hardin, 23, rode up front, steering the
30-ton vehicle using a monitor and periscopes.

The men in back slept uneasily for much of the night,
leaning helmets against metal or one another as the
Bradley's 25 mm gun tore apart houses and buildings
where insurgents were thought to be hiding.

But at dawn, rifle rounds began pinging off the
Bradley's armor and the RPGs began exploding, rocking
the vehicle, raining dust on the men inside and
sucking the air from the compartment again and again.

Search and destroy

Bradley Alpha 2-1's 19-hour mission into Fallujah
began at sunset Thursday, hours after a briefing for
battalion officers.

The goal was to move ahead of U.S. Marines and find
the insurgents, remnants of a rebel force that in
previous months had turned Fallujah into one of the
most dangerous cities in Iraq (news - web sites).
Failing that, the soldiers were to destroy the
insurgents' hiding places, preventing them from being
used to ambush the Marines.

In the normally bustling battalion command tent, two
dozen senior soldiers in stifling body armor listened
silently.

"Destroy everything you can destroy. Make sure you
keep together," Lt. Col. Jim Rainey told his officers,
reminding them of the rules of engagement established
to protect civilians. "Given those constraints, kill
everything that you can kill."

At dusk, Alpha 2-1's commander Duran led 36 soldiers
into his and three other Bradleys for the assault. He
would take the platoon into battle.

As Hardin cranked Alpha 2-1's diesel engine, he
recounted the vehicle's war.

Since arriving in March, the men had run over eight
bombs. Since fighting began in Najaf in August, the
Bradley had been hit by 16 RPGs. One of them smacked
the front armor outside Hardin's seat.

"Felt it, heard it, instant migraine," he said in a
San Antonio twang. "I didn't see it coming, and it
blew up right in front of my face."

Duran crawled into 2-1's turret next to Ames, a tiny
man who sucked down cigarettes and travel mugs of
Iraqi instant coffee, which he brewed throughout the
night. He, Ames and Hardin would stay awake the entire
night.

Up the back ramp clambered Pvt. Thomas Dennis, 17;
Spec. David Garcia, 24; and Spec. Jimmy Baca, 26.
Their job would be to jump out and fight if needed.

Last in was Sgt. Charles Thornton, 23, who sat and
shouted "Close it!" over the engine noise. The heavy
ramp clanged shut. The desert disappeared, and inside
Alpha 2-1 all became noise and dark.

It was 6 p.m.

Until 1 p.m. the next afternoon, the crew's only view
of the outside world would be on a green 8-by-10-inch
monitor that switched between the gunner's thermal
sights and an aerial-photo map of Fallujah that showed
positions of friendly forces. It fizzed out
periodically.

Fallujah became a shooting gallery on the screen, with
everything that looked as though it could hide a bomb
or an enemy sniper drawing fire from Ames' gun.

Working where tanks can't

DOOM-DOOM-DOOM. A cistern exploded in a cascade of
water, sending a cat screeching into the darkness.

A suspected spotter for insurgent snipers appeared in
an upper-floor window. Ames shot. DOOM-DOOM-DOOM. The
man never reappeared.

Working in twos and with Alpha 2-1 in the lead, the
four Bradleys of Duran's platoon rolled through
streets so narrow tanks wouldn't enter; they couldn't
have swung their cannons. The platoon essentially was
on its own.

Obstacle by obstacle, the Bradleys sent high-explosive
shells into the streetscape. Some found roadside
bombs, many didn't. Mostly the night was quiet.

Inside the troop compartment, the soldiers dozed and
watched the monitor, seeing the eerie infrared shapes
of palm trees waving in a nighttime breeze they could
not feel, as Bradleys slipped down broken streets
crisscrossed with electrical extension cords above.

They tensed as Alpha 2-1 passed a blown-up bus where
they thought explosives could have been planted. They
listened on the radio as another platoon spotted a
mortar team on a nearby block, raining shells down on
them.

At midnight, six hours into the patrol, another
company of Bradleys behind them stumbled on a huge
ambush waiting to happen: A pile of concrete and metal
bars, which snarl the tracks of Bradleys and tanks, a
tipped-over fuel tanker packed with explosives, a
gigantic dirt pile behind that, and a three-story
building full of suspected insurgents.

Tanks, an Air Force AC-130 Spectre gunship and a Navy
F-18 fighter dropping a bomb came in and destroyed the
building.

The first bad news came at 2 a.m.: An Abrams lightly
damaged in battle had tipped over in a ditch north of
town. The tank's driver died instantly, prompting a
sharp expletive from Garcia, who sat closest to the
radio and relayed each scrap of bad news.

More came at 3:55. Alpha 2-1's mission was supposed to
end at dawn. Instead, Duran relayed another message:
"Continue to press the enemy." The soldiers groaned.

But the enemy did not appear until 6:45, when a man's
thermal image appeared running between the arched
windows on the ground floor of a mansion. Another
silhouette appeared on a nearby roof.

On the monitor, the men watched Ames aiming the
Bradley's gun, but the silhouettes didn't reappear and
Ames didn't shoot. Twenty minutes later, an RPG found
the Bradley. A sudden, high-pitched bang rocked the
vehicle from side to side and the men crouched a
little lower, ducking their helmeted heads like
turtles disappearing into shells.

Searching for an open shot, the Bradley almost backed
into a tank behind it. And then the tank fired its
main gun, wrecking the opulent house across the way.

As dust and quiet settled, Ames griped, "How come they
get to shoot the mansion?"

Low on ammo

Two hours later, RPGs erupted from the direction of a
mosque. The platoon's four Bradleys opened up, firing
for more than an hour as shapes of people flitted
across the monitor in the troop compartment.

"We're getting low on ammo," Ames warned, reading off
a list of what he had fired--hundreds of
high-explosive shells that blew holes the size of
dinner plates in cinder-block walls, and hundreds of
other shells designed to take out enemy fighters.

When rocket fire picked up again, frustrated Bradley
gunners trained their sights on buildings but held
their fire. The Marines, who had arrived on foot, were
too close--and right in the line of fire.

Alpha 2-1 was trying to find a way south to clearer
shots when the insurgents' attack began in earnest.

"I'm hit!" Alpha Company's commander, Capt. Ed
Twaddell, shouted over the radio at 11:43. The
armor-penetrating RPG punched a half-dollar-size hole
in his Bradley's back gate, then filled the troop
compartment with light, noise, gore and flying metal
before lodging in the turret where he was standing.

"I saw light and a flash down by my knee, and then the
turret filled with smoke," Twaddell said later, his
face still covered in soot and dust.

His interpreter, sitting behind him, had been killed
instantly, a baseball-size gash in his side.

Two blocks north of Alpha 2-1, a Bradley maneuvered to
help, disgorging a medic and soldiers under a hail of
gunfire. Within minutes a penetrating RPG exploded
under the second Bradley's driver compartment,
wounding a man from West Virginia who had survived RPG
shrapnel to the neck when his Bradley was hit in
Najaf.

For an indeterminate time, Alpha 2-1 was all alone.
Somehow the crew had been separated from the platoon's
other three Bradleys, spread out somewhere in the
tangle of buildings.

The crew heard another explosion at 11:59--the RPG
shot that disabled the Abrams. Duran found his other
Bradleys on the radio and ordered them to stand guard
around the tank as more tankers hooked a tow bar to
it. It took a half-hour.

As the armor limped north through town, a lone Marine
hiding behind a tree flagged Alpha 2-1 and gestured
toward a house across the street, indicating that an
insurgent was inside.

Ames pumped his last few rounds into the top floor.
Emerging from behind the tree, the Marine waved
happily.

"No problem, buddy," Ames said wearily as Hardin drove
slowly back to camp.

They arrived at 1 p.m., 19 hours after they had left.

But within an hour, Alpha 2-1 and its crew had
refueled, reloaded and returned to Fallujah.

END

My thoughts... The Battle of Fallujah ranks right up
there among the toughest and best one fights the USMC
has been in since Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Bloody Ridge.
They killed and wounded 2000 insurgents and lost 56.
They took out over 35% of the estimate forces causing
havoc and beheading civilians in Iraq. The Bradley
was a kick-ass vehicle, one that "60 Minutes" called
uncessary and too expensive.

Not much of their stories about this victory are
making it to the mainstream media...imagine that?



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