Tuesday - March 21, 2006

Category Image Night Driving (w/addendum)


It was time to go. It was late at night, and we were loading up our vehicles to begin movement to our attack positions. Normally I rode in the command and control vehicle but for some reason the Operations Officer directed me to ride in his vehicle. Everything was going as planned. Everything except one thing. My thing.

Normally he is extremely even tempered. I admire Steve White more than just about any officer I've ever known. Professional, inclusive, brings everyone onto his team with respect and provided consistent, decisive leadership. This was the only time he lost his temper with me.

"So we're screwed! We've got no comm."

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Surprised by his anger, I responded in kind and immediately regretted it. "How do you think that? We've got VHF and SatComm, just like always. And we'll get data running soon."

Steve was angry that our CONDOR data network, which no one had ever used yet outside of testing, wasn't yet functional. It was an experimental system that we only had in our possession for a few days and only got a critical cable an hour earlier. But now we were rolling into battle and he believed my early promises for delivering miracles. I normally didn't promise anything that I didn't know I would deliver. This time I miscalculated. It was much harder to get this untested equipment working than I had anticipated. But we had all our other systems up and running and this system was just an extra one. It was a very powerful extra system, but nothing we had ever needed before.

Steve is a thorough professional, sloughed off my retort, and we all climbed in the up-armored Humm-vee and moved out in darkness to our initial combat operations center (COC) location. Really, it was nothing more than an open field nestled among some small hills in the desert just south of the city of Hit.

I was riding in the right seat up front, one of my radio operators was driving, while Steve and Woody, our air officer, were in the back seats. It was a pitch black, moonless night and I couldn't see a thing. We drove with our lights out, the driver wearing night vision goggles. I sat in the humm-vee with nothing to see except glowing lights on the radios.

But then something else didn't go according to plan. Some of our new up-armored humm-vees had bad fuel controls. These trucks had bigger engines to compensate for the extra armor and the vehicle I was in was so new that even the air conditioner worked great. But the fuel controls presented a problem. If the ground was flat the truck was merely sluggish. But if there were any rise in terrain, anything as mountainous as a speed bump, if we didn't already have some forward momentum, we couldn't move. It was almost comical.

Except that it wasn't.

After we got south to where Route Bronze and Route Uranium split, we turned north and drove through the desert to our night's destination. Now it was the driver's time for expressing frustration. The dust in Iraq's deserts in the summertime is often called moon dust because it is light and puffy like aerated talcum powder. Sure enough, as soon as we got off road the dust billowed and obscured everything. We had to drive exclusively by the bright night vision reflectors on the vehicles ahead of us. But whenever we hit a small rise in the terrain, we fell further and further behind. We lost our way several times, dragging along all the vehicles behind us.

Steve dug out a set of night vision goggles so I could help the driver find and stay in contact with the leading vehicles. Several times we had to stop and investigate why we seemed stuck. We didn't yet understand the fuel control problem. I also had to wander out in front, to link up with the vehicles in front who had stopped to wait for us. It was slow going.

All this time, our communications chief was continuing to talk via satellite to get our data systems working.

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We finally reached where we were going, and anxiously monitored the progress of the three line companies -- K/3/25, L/3/25, and the army's magnificent Company C from the "first of the ninth" regiment -- as they entered the city. Weapons company screened to the north, and a company from the 2d Light Amphibious Reconnassaince battalion screened east and west.

I can't describe the elation I felt when the sun rose and the murky, dusty desert turned into a bright and clear day, with the city spread out below us. The mystery was revealed, for the first time I saw where we were and where we were going. About that time, our data network came up, in a limited way, and we started getting email from our amtraks, Lima Company, and our advanced logistics operations center. In a couple more hours, we broke the code on connecting to the regular military classified network.

Steve finally got his data package, and stayed in touch with everyone through our chat rooms. The regimental staff continuously stayed in touch to a degree never before possible. Bandwidth was limited, but usable, and we were able to provide a much clearer picture of operations to higher headquarters than ever before. The system was finicky, and took a lot of attention to keep it running, but it worked.

Shortly after sunrise we moved into the city, and moved to three more locations, finally settling in what became Firm Base 1. I remained there for over two weeks with the battalion staff until we relinquished it to Lima Company and returned to Camp Hit, five miles north of the city to continue on going control from there.

*******

Addendum. Skyler's dad made a comment that it was too bad we had a bad day. Here was my response.

It wasn't really a bad day. Everything went well except that my humm-vee was a dog. We were stressed because we thought we were going into a battle that would be like Fallujah. We fully expected a very bloody greeting. We had gotten rough welcomes in Hadithah and Haqlaniyah, and Barwana and most other places. Only Kubaysa was quiet. Hit was a place that had very bad ambushes on the battalion before us and we'd not been there since. So we were a bit jumpy.

After we moved from that position we drove into the city. The line companies had advanced through the area and cleared a building for us to use as a headquarters. But they were long gone by the time we got there. I was the first one out of the vehicle when we arrived and the S-3 and air officer were busy directing the battle. So I took it upon myself to clear the building. Me and two other Marines did old fashioned infantry stuff, busting the doors open and making sure no muj were there. It was empty, but I had fun playing John Wayne, if only for a brief time on a building that was cleared once already.

I really had a ball over there. I wonder if I'll ever get to do it again.

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