Unleash Hell!
FRONT-LINE DIARY
'Embed' world: hostilities, humanity
By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff, 3/31/2003
I am an ''embedded'' reporter with the First Battalion, 10th Field Artillery attached to the Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, and we are headed toward Baghdad as fast as the supply trains can feed ammunition to the young howitzer gunners who send 155mm rounds hurtling toward the Iraqi Army.
This ''embedment'' is a Pentagon experiment designed to provide more access to more soldiers and more commanders during the heat of combat than at any time since World War II. If you're ''fortunate'' enough to be assigned to a front-line unit, the horrific and heroic panorama of war unfolds around you like an Omnivision documentary.
From my perspective, I'm probably fifth-row center. The 1/10 has been in every fight that the Third Infantry has waged so far, and I flinched during close-range, hostile fire each of my first three days in Iraq.
I figure that counts as ''good access.''
What I didn't figure was that for me, the daily guns-and-bullets news of this war would be overshadowed by the individual stories and struggles of the 630 soldiers of this Georgia-based battalion. After rumbling 240 miles from Kuwait with them, I am struck by two observations: Young soldiers truly do fight the battles of their elders. And when they go to battle, they sacrifice in ways that are as old as war itself.
Lieutenant Colonel John D. Harding Jr., 42, a 1979 graduate of Lincoln-Sudbury High School in Sudbury, Mass., commands this battalion. A bull-like man, Harding rides to combat in front of his troops, perched in the turret of a Bradley fighting vehicle like a 21st-century George S. Patton. He's scathingly gruff with his senior officers when they fall short, uses language that comes straight from the docks, and can't wait to inflict more pain on Saddam Hussein. War may be hell, but Harding likes to wage it.
In the nights before the invasion, the movies ''Braveheart'' and ''Gladiator'' were his DVD choices. Harding's motto for the battalion even comes from ''Gladiator,'' a film about a Roman general turned Colosseum combatant. As Russell Crowe's imperial warrior says to his men during a fight against the barbarians, so does Harding to his artillery soldiers: ''Unleash hell.''
The firepower of this battalion, principally based at Fort Benning, Ga., comes from 18 Paladin howitzers -- mobile, self-propelled cannons that can shoot a round 18 miles with radar-guided precision. First Sergeant Bill Doherty, 41, a former tough guy from Fields Corner in Dorchester, yanked a looped rope that helped start the Third Infantry's war about 8 p.m., March 20, by launching a Paladin round from Kuwait toward an Iraqi observation post on the border.
A few hours later, I rode in the pitching passenger seat of a sand-churning Humvee that Doherty drove into the 6.2-mile no man's land that separates Kuwait from Iraq. We were second in line, leading Alpha Battery into hostile country. Shortly after midnight, headlights off in the desert darkness, following a path marked by low-illumination lights that had been stuck in the sand by US trailblazers, we crossed into Iraq -- uncontested but unsure of what lay ahead.
Doherty's intuitive improvisation had come into play immediately. Because of him, I transmitted a story to the Globe while on the border: computer on my lap, satellite phone held out the rear of the Humvee by Specialist Bob Collins, the wire that connects the computer and the phone strung through a jumbled maze of bottled-water boxes, sleeping bags, combat gear, and field rations.
One soldier used the radio to offer this Jack Nicholson-like observation on the invasion: ''We're baaaaack.''
Three sleepless nights and three engagements Into Iraq we rolled, everything quiet except for the crackle of the radio that updated the battalion about what vehicles had left Kuwait behind, and what hadn't yet crossed this Middle Eastern Rubicon. Then, the startling bulletin: ''500 dismounts,'' or hostile infantry, had been spotted between the battalion's two parallel columns. Behind the flimsy canvas door of the Humvee, I suddenly felt desperately vulnerable. Combat? So soon? I peered into the darkness, staring for shapes until the radio crackled again: The ''dismounts'' were camels.
Despite the camels, we advanced rapidly in the night, racing across a trackless desert in a seesaw, dipping, rolling motion that never stopped. Doherty, the top enlisted soldier in Alpha Battery, herded his howitzers, ammunition carriers, and fuelers together like a mad sheepdog the entire night and next morning, screaming at laggards to maintain the pace and barking at others to maintain proper spacing. ''What are you waiting for, Hitler's comeback?'' Doherty yelled at one tanker driver.
With no sleep, no lights, and no change in the lunarlike landscape, I began to hallucinate, seeing ghostly shapes of people, buildings, trucks, and trees where none existed. At first, I recognized the images as hallucinations. But as the night wore on and fatigue increased, I became surprised when they vanished as we passed.
With morning, my perception returned with my energy. ''You've got nothing but beautiful desert ahead of you,'' Harding radioed his troops.
But before the day was through, Doherty and I would come under mortar fire. Before the next day was through, we would witness a firefight outside a village where the stubborn Fedayeen, or irregular fighters fiercely loyal to Hussein, would spray advance elements of the convoy with small-arms fire and stalk the darkened roadside with would-be snipers.
Night had rolled into day, and into sleepless night, then into day again with the Third Brigade's seizure of a bridge and airfield outside the city of Nasiriyah. At the end of the third day, the battalion had helped quell more resistance at a key pass south of Najaf, and would camp for several days in enemy-dotted desert 70 miles from Baghdad.
My sense of time had disintegrated. The battalion had traveled almost 250 miles in three days, fought three engagements, and not lost a soldier. Harding said no artillery battalion in US history, not even under Patton's legendary whip, had done so much, so quickly. ''All the training paid off,'' Harding said. ''All of it.''
Closer to Baghdad, the toughest test awaited. But to this point, the 1/10 Field Artillery had done its job.
Little room for comfort, but lots of camaraderie Being an ''embed'' means living like the soldiers, with few special creature comforts. I've slept outside, on a cot, during a nightlong sandstorm. I've slept in the front seat of Doherty's Humvee. I've slept on the metal floor inside a howitzer and on a similarly uncomfortable ''bed'' inside an ammunition carrier. When the enemy is near or the chance of fighting is high, an armored vehicle does wonders for one's peace of mind. That is more than I can say for my back or my haunches.
I wear the same clothes for several days at a time. Cleanliness often means ''birdbaths,'' in which water is splashed on certain hygienically challenged areas. Laundry is a luxury, done only on widely separated days when the sand isn't blowing and the enemy isn't shooting. Two small tubs -- one with detergent, one with clean water -- help wash away the grit before you hang your clothes on a line strung to a gun turret or tent stake.
''I don't think I'll wash anything,'' joked Major Rob Bailes, the battalion's operations officer. ''I'll just turn my underwear inside out when I'm done and use the other side. Either that, or burn them along the way.''
Food is packaged MREs -- Meals Ready to Eat -- that are designed at the Army lab in Natick. A water-activated chemical heater makes ''pork chow mein'' taste as though it just came off the stove. The same for ''chicken tetrazzini'' or ''beef stew,'' my personal favorites among the two dozen choices available for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I do not recommend the bean burrito. Truth is, most soldiers eat no more than two of these meals a day, but they drink plenty of water carried up from Kuwait to keep them hydrated.
Attending to other sanitary needs requires a loss of instinctive discretion. Just grab toilet paper, head 100 yards into the desert, and do your business. Don't try this, as I have, in a sandstorm.
During the day, I wear a chemical suit -- hooded top and desert-camouflage pants -- to meet the lowest-level anticontamination measures that have been ordered since we left Kuwait. I carry a gas mask at my side at all times, and I've practiced grabbing the mask from its case, putting it to my face, adjusting the straps, and blowing out, then in, to make an airtight seal. Optimum time for this lifesaving exercise: 9 seconds.
And I spend hours talking to soldiers, from Harding down to the lowest private and dozens in between. They're unfailingly polite and friendly, and the initially unnerving experience of being called ''sir'' throughout the day has given way to an appreciation for the courtesy, discipline, and professionalism of this unit.
Often, the talk is of ''news'' -- what I know of the news from home, who's doing well in the NCAA basketball tournament, what's happening elsewhere in Iraq. Many of these soldiers are startlingly unaware of events outside their mission, and rumors scurry through the ranks like the scorpions and scarabs that make their busy way across these sands. A shortwave radio, which I have, is a magnet that draws soldiers to its scratchy broadcasts of the progress of the war. There is no fear in their curiosity, only a hunger for news that might bring them back to new wives, new babies, and a home that most of this battalion has scarcely seen since its deployment to Kuwait last March.
One soldier asked me whether he could place a love poem in the Globe, and pay for it as an advertisement as a way to communicate with his wife. Another asked me to e-mail his fiancee to tell her he's doing fine. When I asked Private George Bradley, a 22-year-old Alabaman, how he was holding up, he replied with a wry smile, ''I'm surviving, sir.''
I am counted among the official roster of this battalion, and every personnel check must account for me. I'm truly ''embedded'' with the 1/10, and the way home for me matches the return ticket for the rest of these desert-weary troops -- through Baghdad.
For the rest of the war, I'll be riding with the colonel, at the head of the battalion, but also within armor that can be sealed tight if Hussein launches chemical weapons. That's a comfort. Through Harding's eyes, and through my own, I'll watch from fifth-row center as this dangerous drama plays out.
boston.com |
