Monday, May 03, 2004

Road to Nowhere -- Marines Cheat Death, Beat Fiat Bomb by Seconds  

It's the middle of the afternoon at 1st Marine Division headquarters in Ar Ramadi and we're standing around in 90-degree heat, slung with packs and body armor, listening to a young captain from the Bronx brief us on our short convoy across the river to a base called Hurricane Point.

We will take four humvees on this trip, including a gun truck or technical with a mounted 240 SAW, squad assault weapon and about 20 marines carrying M-16 and M4 assault rifles. As the captain speaks, the marines pass out smoke grenades that could be used to obscure a disabled vehicle from enemy fire. They also pass out fragmentation grenades, olive green orbs with strips of red duct tape wrapped around the handles to keep them from exploding in case the pin is pulled inadvertently.

The captain (who doesn't wanted to be identified by name) reads off a checklist that covers everything from the military grid coordinates for our travel to recent intel on enemy forces in the area, radio frequencies and procedures if we come under attack.

"I'm not reading this for my own amusement," he says gruffly, "if something happens to me or Gunny you want to know how to get back so you better be fucking writing it down."

I'm sufficiently impressed enough to write the numbers down in my own notebook along with the marines--although without a GPS or even the slightest idea how dial in a military radio frequency, I doubt they will do me much good.

I'm heading out to embed with the 2/1 Marines near the heart of Ar Ramadi. A unit that has, by most accounts, had more men killed and killed more insurgents than any other in the Al Anbar province. They were dropped in a hornet's nest of activity, which on one particularly bloody day cost the lives of 12 Marines.



After the briefing I load my gear in the back of Captain Bronx's humvee. He confesses, as so many marines and soldiers have to me, that he has mixed feelings about the media.

"They always seem to focus on the negative--guys getting hurt or killed out here," he tells me."

I nod; waiting, listening for more. There is none. So I try to explain the intentions of my profession--with the same care and detail that military men and women have used to explain to me theirs over the last year.

"If we don't cover those things we don't honor the sacrifice that person has made," I say, "whether it's with their lives or limbs or whatever. For instance, if something happens to me out here, say we hit an I.E.D. (improvised explosive device) or an RPG (rocket propelled grenade), I don't want to die in the dark. I don't want my loved ones to be wondering what happened to me. I want them to know. And I want that sacrifice to be remembered by others too, however briefly."

He listens closely as I continue. I'm wound up now, because I've given this stump speech so many times--and because I want him to understand it.



"We do cover others things in Iraq, good things, when they happen. However, the news that stays in peoples' minds is the most dramatic moment. We can do five stories on school openings or rebuilding projects or an unusual act of kindness. And we have. But always the story that people end up taking away with them, the one that stays in their heads is the one in which a human being dies. There's no greater event in our lives, nothing that ultimately connects us more to each other."

When I'm finished he has the same look that I probably had after his briefing; tidbits of useful information as well as some frightening ones all washing over him, answering some questions, creating more.

When it's time to finally pull out, there's a uneven happiness in the momentum for me. Glad to be going somewhere, to exchange the heat for the fanning wind of the drive, to trade the relative safety of the walled and razor wire confines for the uncertain perils of the road.

As we wait at the gait for the sentries to process us through--a marine, not more than 18 or 19, is talking loudly to a friend in the humvee in front of us.

"Yeah, just because you're not gung ho every minute around here, just because you're not amped all the time--someone's always coming up to you and saying, ?hey marine you want to go have a talk with the chaplain?'"



"Hey marine," Captain Bronx calls out from our humvee, "you want to go have a talk with the chaplain," the vehicle erupts with laughter.

"No sir," he responds shaking his head, unable to complain without being called on it. " I don't need to talk to the chaplain." We drive on.

It's ten after three and we're a mile past the gate, rounding the bend to the southbound road that will take us to Hurricane Point. We are the second vehicle of four and spaced about 100 feet apart. On our left a few hundred yards away is a large concrete truck wash, where thirty Iraqis scrub the dust and grime from rusty big rigs that pull off Highway 1. On our right is an abandoned white Fiat, a junker, on the side of the road.

The lead vehicle has already gone by, but just seconds after we pass it--a deep and thunderous BOOM. The Fiat explodes, launching a shower of twisted metal and debris a hundred yards in every direction. The burnt-black and smoking chassis of the vehicle falls to earth hard, hitting the stretch of pavement we had just covered like a piece of space junk dropped out of orbit.

The concussion from the blast rolls through the humvee like a shot of nitro into the engine and that, along with our driver slamming foot to floorboard, puts a good 200 yards between us and the kill zone.

The third humvee, the one directly behind us, is for a moment, obscured by the black plume of smoke, but then it emerges other side. The fourth and final humvee has stopped a safe distance back from the blast area.

"I.E.D.," Captain Bronx yells, jumps out of our vehicle and runs toward that trailing vehicle.

"Get on the radio," he shouts up to the first humvee, "call 3550."



Marines pile out of number three, some staggering a bit, most shaking their heads, trying to clear the ringing in their ears. The rear tire on the passenger side of the humvee is flat, but that's the extent of the damage.

"That was on us." the captain says, in disbelief, "Shit!"

The marine in charge of the security detail for the convoy is shouting to his men to make a 360, a secure field of fire in all directions around the vehicles, preparing for the small arms attack that the military has learned often follow a roadside bomb. I'm running back and forth videotaping, waiting for the staccato report of AK-47's coming from ambush positions on in the fields to our right or from the building to our left. But nothing. Just the sound of my own breathing.

At first the captain tries to use a Thuraya phone to call back to Division HQ, but can't get a signal. After a few minutes of trying he gets on the field radio.

"We've been hit with an I.E.D.," he says into the radio calmly. "No casualties to report and we've established a secure perimeter around the area. Requesting a quick reaction force to helps secure the area and someone from E.O.D. unit (explosive ordinance disposal) to check out the blast zone."



One of the marines is walking up and down the road between humvees reaching over his shoulders into the space between his flak jacket and his tactical assault vest, loaded with ammunition. He pulls out a still warm, golf-ball sized piece of shrapnel that lodged between the two but didn't penetrate his skin.

An army captain named Matt Neiland, who had been riding in the front passenger seat of the same humvee, walks up to him.

"I got you beat," he says, holding up a fist-sized, chunk of mangled metal. "This bounced off my Kevlar," recreating the impact on the side of his helmet.

"The normal is for the middle vehicle to get hit," Neiland says, "and we were the middle vehicle so we were watching that white car as we came by it and sure enough, it blew. People got their bells rung. Some people had ringing in their ears, but nothing serious."

Eighteen-year-old marine private Robert Dahlen was also in the third humvee.

"It pushed me forward--and I turned around and saw a few of my men layed back from the blast," he says. "It just popped my ears and the other guys too. Good thing we had a high-armored vehicle. "

Captain Bronx orders the security team leader to round up the Iraqis at the truck wash for questioning.

"You know they had to see something," he says.

Before long a quick reaction force, a unit standing by for just these kind of emergencies, is on the scene to provide cover for our disabled convoy. Shortly after that, when the security team is confidant there won't be an ambush or a secondary explosion, a group of combat engineers from the Army's 1st Infantry Division starts examining the evidence at the blast zone.

Lt.Col. David Brinkley (a distant cousin to the late newsman of the same name) is one of the Army's top experts on improvised explosive devices.
He begins sifting the debris.

"We approach these things very much like crimes scenes," he says. "There's so much to learn."

"How much do you know about them," I ask.

"Well a lot more than we did seven months ago," he says. "There have been so many."



Roadside bombs have become one of the most common and deadly weapons being used against American forces in Iraq today. And though, exact figures are not available, military sources say out of the more than 400 post-war combat fatalities among U.S. troops, a high percentage have been killed by homemade roadside bombs.

And in addition to their lethality these weapons take a psychological toll as well. Bombmakers pack seemingly benign, inert objects--cardboard boxes, cinderblocks, toys, even dead animals and in this case, a Fiat automobile --with explosives from stockpiled landmines, artillery shells, and C-4? engendering the mundane and ordinary with the power of death.

Brinkley says most Army brigades collect information from each roadside bomb the encounter in their areo of operations and plugs it into a database, creating an ever larger pool of knowledge to learn from.

He says they're beginning to understand that the i.e.d.'s often have signatures, that the type of explosive used and what kind of object it's packed in can sometimes tell them who made the bomb.

Looking over the scorched earth on the side of the road where the Fiat sat, Brinkley notices three distinct craters in the ground. That, along with pieces of shell casings he's collected leads him to believe the Fiat was packed with three artillery shells, most likely 155 millimeter. He can tell by measuring the diameter of some of the larger shell fragments found scattered with the car parts.

"How adroit is the designer of the weapon and how well can he get it placed to attack. That's really what it boils down to," Brinkley says. "In this case they go it pretty close, but it probably wasn't a well-designed weapon-- which is good for us."

Brinkley holds up a cable attached to what's left of the front axle of the Fiat.

"Towed in," he says.

The division commander, Major General James Mattis has arrived on the scene and is speaking with Captain Bronx and Captain Neiland. Mattis strides through the debris field; no helmet, two stars flashing off the front of his body armor. He looks and sounds a little bit like billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot. Neiland tells the general he was in the vehicle that took the biggest hit.

"Well how you doing, obviously you're alright," Mattis says, "you're standing here--probably just perforated eardrums. Nothing to worry about that grows back in a couple of weeks."

"That armor on the humvees, sir?" Captain Bronx shakes his head.

"Saved your lives, huh," the General finishes his sentence.



Many of the humvees originally arrived in Iraq with soft, canvass doors. But were retrofitted with armor plates once it became clear that roadside bombs would be a weapon of choice by insurgents in post-war Iraq.

By this time the security team has marched the Iraqis from the car wash up to the road. A translator has been called to the scene to question them. They're mostly young men; wearing dirty work cloths. Their faces damp with sweat, both suspicion and defiance in their eyes.

"We're probably not going to get much from these guys," Captain Bronx tells me. "Even if they did see something they couldn't tell us here. They'd be marked. Probably just question them and turn ?em loose."

The earlier stress on the faces of the marines in the convoy has now turned to relief. We all know we've gotten away with something. For Captain Bronx, this is the second roadside bomb he's eluded unharmed. It's my third. Simple testaments to just how ubiquitous these weapons are in Iraq.

The military says there are hundreds of weapons stockpiles in Iraq, bunkers packed with landmines, artillery shells, every type of munitions you can imagine. During the war, when the Iraqi army melted away--these storehouses were looted--partly for the money the copper shells could bring, but also, it's now obvious, to be used to make weapons in the ongoing insurgency against the coalition occupation.

Brinkley says a major part of his jobs is destroying what's left of these stockpiles, but they just can't do it fast enough--and so much of it is already in the hands of the insurgents.

So now he and others like him have to study the aftermath, trying to stay ahead of the bomb makers' curve, finding ways to beat these bombs and better protect the troops. That's happening in some cases--with better armor, training and a greater awareness of the danger. But sometimes, like today, time can be on your side.

"I'm sure these Marines have the gamut of emotions right now," Brinkley says, "from absolute relief there alive to potentially all the negative emotions that come with somebody trying to kill you."

After a couple of hours, Captain Bronx tells us to load up; we're heading back to base. No Hurricane Point today. It's getting late in the afternoon and his men need to be checked out at the medical station.

As we arrive inside the gate and the marines clear their weapons to make sure there are no rounds left in the chambers, Captain Bronx watches them, and seems to silently count. Everyone returned safely. For U.S. forces in Iraq today--that's a real "mission accomplished."

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Kevin 7:41 AM