Disarming the Bomb, Part 11
Al Nasiriya, RTE Tampa
T-Bone and I sat in our foxhole the whole night. We were buried in that hole from the waist down. Anticipating the enemy, waiting, watching. With each hour that went by, our visibility started to improve. Even though it was night time, we could see more and more ahead of us. Everyone was silent.
Other than the howling wind and the sound of sand hitting our faces and Betsy, everything was extremely quiet. Surprisingly, we were not tired. And the time seemed to be going in fast forward. An hour felt like ten minutes.
Finally, the sun started to peek over the horizon. It was still extremely cloudy, with mud and sand in the air, but the visibility was much better. As the sun fully exposed itself I remember looking over at T-Bone.
“Hey brother, you think these idiots are still coming?” I asked.
“Who knows, I’m going to go find out what’s going on. I’ll be right back,” said T-Bone.
As T-Bone slid himself out of the foxhole, I realized that he wasn’t going to be able to get back in. Dammit! I thought to myself. I grabbed the shovel and started to re-dig our foxhole. T-Bone returned about ten minutes later. “Hey brother, it’s over, let’s pack up and get some rest,” T-Bone said.
What the hell! I thought to myself.
As quickly as the battle started, it was over. At the time, we didn’t know exactly what happened. The only thing we knew is that the mechanized Iraqi division that had been “headed our way” was destroyed.
The Weather Channel reported how that very sandstorm affected the invasion. Here is what really happened:
On Mar. 25, 2003, a low-pressure system dragged sand and dust from the Saudi Arabian and Egyptian deserts to Iraq. This was five days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq (the first stage of the Iraq War) had begun.
General Tommy Franks led the mission and attributes the sandstorm as a key event in the Iraq war. The sandstorm was predicted, but the severity was not. The sky suddenly turned a reddish-brown as thick dust and sand took over southern Iraq.
There were 170,000 coalition troops in the area. Visibility quickly reduced to 10 meters or less. And when it rained, the dust in the air turned to mud.
On the ground, the infantry units continued with their mission during breaks in the sandstorm. The teams were able to identify the exact GPS coordinates of the enemy armor and artillery. But the sandstorm worsened and the mission had to come to a halt.
Commander Gene Renuart approached Franks and suggested that they take advantage of the poor weather conditions, namely "destroy the Republican Guard formations." The enemy hadn't moved in 16 hours, so it was an opportune moment to strike. And though ground artillery couldn't be mobilized, planes were able to fly over the sand and deliver precision-guided bombs through the zero-visibility weather.
The "kill zone" stretched from Al Kut in the Tigris Valley to the Karbala gap. As the sand continued, the enemies were being destroyed. The bombardment lasted from the night of Mar. 25 to the morning of Mar. 27.
It wasn't widely covered by the media because there were no correspondents in the cockpits of the strike planes or the targeting areas in the air operations center.
Another day at the office. As the sandstorm started clearing up, I saw the pilots getting out of their helicopter. It was caked with sand, and the pilots looked just like we did. We looked like chocolate human sugar cookies. I was amazed at the fact that they were able to cover up the intakes and exhaust ports of the engines with intake and exhaust covers.
The wind had been very strong and for them to have gotten out and installed these covers was amazing. As a prior aircraft engine mechanic, I was impressed. I watched the pilots preflight their aircraft. A preflight is when the pilots inspect their aircraft before they start it. I knew this is what they were doing from my time on an aircraft carrier.
Wow! A combat preflight! Insane! I thought to myself. I’d never seen a combat preflight before.
T-Bone and I cleaned up Betsy as much as we could. We performed the same preventative maintenance we did before the sandstorm.
It was now time to perform the mission we were assigned before the sandstorm. Our mission was to support a supply convoy to Al Nasiriyah along Main Supply Route Tampa.
As we started our way down route Tampa, I remember thinking how beautiful this desert land looked and felt. My adrenaline started to ease back into my bones as we drove deeper into enemy territory. The first overpass we arrived at had EOD painted on the side with orange fluorescent spray paint. It was the first of many weapons caches that I have encountered in my career. A weapons cache is an area where the enemy stores weapons and ordnance on the front lines for battle and engagement.
T-Bone and I pulled over to inspect what we had. The convoy was moving slow so we had free rein to inspect any unexploded ordnance we found along our route. This was the mission. In total, we found four weapons caches on this stop.
These specific caches were staged on the overpass and on the sides of the route. The one we initially saw was inside a guard shack on one side of the overpass. Of the other three, one was on the other side of the overpass in a second guard shack, and two more were on each side of route Tampa.
Two of the four were up high on the overpass, and the other two on the sides of the route. Pretty good fighting positions, but not great if you’re fighting U.S Marines with tanks.
The illustration above isn’t actually a picture of route Tampa, but I wanted to provide a visual reference as to how they set up fighting positions along the route. The red arrow indicates direction of travel, and the blue squares indicate where the caches were located. The black square is explained below.
In total, the four Caches had the following ordnance items and weapons:
AK-47’s (12)
RPG’s with launchers (4 Launchers and 32 RPG rockets)
60mm mortars (16)
80mm mortars (12)
Russian hand grenades (16)
60mm mortar launching tube (1)
80mm mortar launching tube (1)
We also had U.S unserviceable ordnance items indicated by the black box in the illustration. Unserviceable ordnance are ordnance items that fell off the truck that was transporting them. Once they fall off the truck, they are considered unserviceable and must be disposed of. There were 16 total 155mm U.S projectiles that were unfuzed and still in their pallets.
These caches or fighting positions also had Iraqi uniforms in them. By the look of how the ordnance and weapons were scattered about, it showed us just how fast these positions were abandoned.
“Fuck yeah! I guess these guys aren’t as badass as we thought,” I said to T-Bone.
“Hell no they aren’t!” T-Bone responded.
T-Bone and I had talked about this before the sandstorm, when word had come back about the casualties sustained by the US Army and Marines in Al Nasiriyah. But now we were very confident that we were winning.
“Hey brother, which caches you want to take?” I asked T-Bone.
“You take the left side and I’ll take the right side,” said T-Bone.
“Roger that. I’m taking a small pull line and I’m going to remote pull any items I think are suspicious of booby-traps.”
“Let’s try and set up one shot so we can conserve our bang,” T-Bone instructed. Bang was slang for explosives. “But let’s not risk our safety though. If we have to set up multiple shots, that’s ok too,” T-Bone said.
“Roger,” I replied.
I first went to the cache on the left side of the road as T-Bone worked up on the overpass. As I looked inside the L-shaped foxhole I saw the AK-47s, PRG rockets with RPG launcher, and the mortars and mortar tubes. I rigged my pull line so that I could pull multiple items with a single pull.
This took careful planning and placement of my pull line. While attaching the pull line, extreme care must be taken so as not to disturb any of the items. I remember feeling like I was a seasoned EOD Technician already.
Dude, you’re still a new guy, Andy, don’t get cocky, I thought to myself.
After I finished rigging up my pull line, I took a long last look before I went to the end of my pull line. I did this to get a mental snapshot of how the items were configured. This was important for after I made the pull. I wanted to make sure that after my pull, the items were displaced from their original position. The process was just like the landmine that I responded to in Camp Coyote, because nothing changes, procedural-wise. T-Bone was doing the same procedure on his overpass cache.
“HEY BROTHER, I’M GOOD TO GO WITH MY SET-UP!” I yelled.
“YEP! SAME HERE! YOU PULL FIRST, THEN I’LL PULL MINE AFTER!” T-Bone yelled back.
We were pretty far away so we had to yell to hear each other. You would think that we would have had comms, but we didn’t. It was early in the war and our equipment was pretty limited. We only had a radio in Betsy.
This is so badass! I’m actually doing my job as EOD! I thought to myself.
This was truly the first time I felt happy with my job. During this deployment, deep down I felt the proudest and the happiest I have ever felt in my life. All the hard work, all the testing and training had paid off big time. To put things into perspective, 37 guys started from Day One dive school; at the end, eight of us made it all the way through and earned our crabs. EOD school was tough, and the job is too. I owned it and loved it deeply.
I got to the end of my pull line, gave T-Bone a thumbs up and pulled. We both waited under cover. No explosion, good to go. T-Bone gave me a thumbs up and he pulled his. We waited, no explosions. We repeated this process until all the ordnance items were remotely moved and displaced from their original positions.
Our next task was to set up our shot. T-Bone and I were borderline OCD. Well, most US EOD guys are! Everything has to be tight and perfect.
A “shot” is what we refer to as a demolition charge. It can range from less than a pound to hundreds of thousands of pounds. The two images you see below on the right are an example of complete trash demolition shots. Sloppy, not tight, and very unscientific. The likelihood of the shots on the right not consuming all the ordnance is extremely high.
Furthermore, the likelihood of those shots kicking out ordnance is high as well. A “kick-out” is when an ordnance item in a shot gets kicked out and does not detonate. This creates more hazards and wastes time. Having to recover a kicked out ordnance item is not a good op.
Now then, look at the picture on the left. It shows a very tight and neat shot. The difference is U.S. trained EOD vs. foreign trained EOD.
T-Bone and I started to set up our shot. We placed the AK-47s down first. Then the RPGs on top of the AK-47s, nice and tight. Any ordnance that has a shaped charge needs to be towards the bottom of the shot. This is because you don’t want the shaped charge to form. You want to explosively crush the shaped charge so as not to have it project downrange.
Next we put the 60 and 80mm mortars on top of the RPGs. Again, nice and tight. Then the US 155mm unserviceable projectiles. After all the ordnance was tightly stacked, we placed our C-4 explosives on top, just as illustrated in the left picture above. Nice and tight. We set up a 4 minute time train, just like we did with the landline on Camp Coyote…
“FIRE IN THE HOLE! FIRE IN THE HOLE! FIRE IN THE HOLE!!!”
To be continued…