The Sunday Paper

Anatomy of an IED Attack

by Sgt. Roy Batty

The chick­ens are dri­ving me crazy. Bonkers. They won’t quit. Surely this counts as ‘cruel and unusual pun­ish­ment.’ After eat­ing noth­ing but MREs for the past two weeks, I am dying for some real food, and the Iraqi ven­dors in our patrol area are not help­ing. You see, while Iraq does not have McDonalds, or even a McHommad, or any other kind of fast food for that mat­ter, they do have a plethora of side­walk cafes and vendors.

In a city that aver­ages three car bombs a day, I’m not con­vinced of the wis­dom of sit­ting next to a busy road while munch­ing on your falafel. Nevertheless, they are every­where. Falafel I can resist, but the locals in our neck of the woods are par­tic­u­larly inge­nious, and they have some­how pieced together these propane fired rotis­series, stocked full of plumb chickens.

At least I think they’re chickens.

Our patrol route today takes us up and down a main busi­ness route, check­ing on the local Iraqi cops to make sure they are actu­ally doing some­thing vaguely defin­able as law enforce­ment. Every time we pass one of the rusty cab­i­nets with their greasy avian trea­sures, my stom­ach growls like one of the junk­yard dogs by the side of the road, and I start bug­ging my squad leader on the SINCGARS radio again:

“Hey, SSG H., can we stop and get some chicken?”

“No.”

“Please? Just one?”

“No.”

“C’mon! I’ll be the test sub­ject. If I’m still alive 24 hours later, we’ll know they are okay.….”

“NO!”

“Pllllleeeeeeeeeeez? Pretty please? I’m dyin’ back here!”

“SGT Batty, if you come down with freakin’ sal­mo­nella poi­son­ing, the pla­toon sergeant would chew my ass. I’d never hear the end of it! Have another MRE, you have plenty in the back of your truck.….”

At which point I shut up, my sol­diers start mak­ing fun of me, and my stom­ach rum­bles away like dis­tant artillery. It fades resent­fully, just in time to pass another cafe, and then the whole rou­tine starts up again.

In the midst of lick­ing my bal­lis­tic win­dow out of des­per­a­tion, our top SINCGARS radio, tuned to our com­pany fre­quency, beeps and crack­les urgently. One of the OPS sergeants comes over the net, and reports a IED explo­sion on another unit, just a few klicks away. He gives the grid coor­di­nates to it, and I grab the wet-​​erase pen that’s hang­ing off of one of the speak­ers, and scrib­ble the num­bers on the wind­shield in front of me. It’s only a cou­ple blocks north of our cur­rent location.

OPS is send­ing our other squad there, but SSG H. knows they will need all the help they can get, so our col­umn of humvees pulls a U-​​turn across the dusty median, scat­ter­ing a group of sheep as it goes, and we gun the lum­ber­ing vehi­cles back down the way we came. Sure enough, we get the direc­tive to head that way a minute later. We’re only sec­onds away.

I pre­pare myself for what we may be about to see. Burned bod­ies. Missing limbs. Humvees blown apart and scat­tered across a scorched street. It wouldn’t be the first time. I brief my team as we rock and lean from side to side, the big truck maneu­ver­ing around the traf­fic on our way in.

“Okay, guys, we’re head­ing to the scene of an IED. When we get there, make sure to do a quick ‘5 and 25′ around us. There may be sec­on­daries in the area. N., if we dis­mount, grab the fire extin­guisher. I’ll grab the extrac­tion tool and the fire blan­ket. C., make sure you’re look­ing for a trig­ger­man, and watch­ing the houses for snipers.”

The radios are full of chat­ter, urgent, clipped. Various units are vec­tor­ing towards the scene. C., my gun­ner, yells down to me that he can see Apache heli­copters com­ing up behind us, and a sec­ond later I can feel the basal thump­ing in my chest as two of them roar over us, low and fast. It’s a good feel­ing to have them over­head and lead­ing the way, not to men­tion hav­ing the extra fire­power in the skies above us.

We’re about half a block away from the scene when the build­ings around us change from res­i­den­tial houses to a mar­ket place. The roads are choked with cars, trucks, vans, makeshift ven­dor stalls, and peo­ple. At the best of times, these open air mar­kets are an exer­cise in barely con­tained chaos, and the addi­tion of high explo­sives, assault heli­copters, and the high speed approach of tan-​​clad Crusaders only increases the effect. The crowd is mostly women, uni­formly clad in their tra­di­tional black robes, and a lot of kids, who stand in stiff pos­tures with open mouths, the way that kids do in third world coun­tries. Nobody wants to get out of the way.

Our progress slows to a mad­den­ing stand­still, made all the worse because we know that our fel­low sol­diers may be seri­ously injured just ahead. SSG H. has a siren on his humvee, and Fish, his dri­ver, fever­ishly works its dial, switch­ing from wail to yelp and back again. The gun­ners on the trucks ges­ture wildly, blow­ing on their whis­tles, try­ing to move the peo­ple and the vehi­cles. A cou­ple of IP pick-​​up trucks fly up behind us, and the blue shirted cops dis­mount, amid their own sirens and some high pitched Arabic scream­ing on their PA sys­tems. Add to this the roar and rat­tle of the gun­ships cir­cling over­head, and the con­stant blare of the SINCGARS radios, with their weirdly mechan­i­cal voices, and you have an idea of the scene in which I found myself.

The IPs soon found the most effec­tive way of mov­ing the peo­ple out of the way, which was to sim­ply shoot at them with their AKs, which IPs like to do. Okay, maybe not at them, but very close to them. This is the nor­mal way of mov­ing traf­fic in Baghdad, and I have to say that it works pretty well, although it’s a lit­tle hard on the nerves if you are not expect­ing it, and you are expect­ing things by the side of the road to go boom. Still, we got through the crowd.

On the other side of the crowd was a large, tri­an­gu­lar field. I guess you could call it a field, although it was really just a large patch of trash-​​strewn mud and rocks, criss­crossed with holes and ditches and gen­eral debris. Pretty stan­dard for the east­side. Pretty stan­dard for any Iraqi city. The term field always brings to mind an Alpine won­der­land of greener-​​than-​​green grass and a riot of wild flow­ers, the kind you see in Bavarian post­cards, but such things tend to get mugged quickly in Baghdad, and most of them left town years ago. This one looks more like a cross between a lunar crater and the after­math of Woodstock.

Across the ‘field’ we can see a col­umn of humvees. We bounce our way across to them, eye­ing every tus­sock of mud and plas­tic bag with dis­trust­ing eyes. The awful truth about IEDs is that they are incred­i­bly easy to con­ceal, par­tic­u­larly in Baghdad with its decades of accu­mu­lated garbage, and this would be a great place to have a sec­ondary one, just wait­ing for us. The insur­gents like to take advan­tage of Good Samaritans com­ing to the aid of stricken peo­ple, and we want to make sure we don’t walk into their trap.

We make it across with­out any unwel­come det­o­na­tions, and my squad leader dis­mounts to check on the stricken con­voy. I get out, along with the other team lead­ers, to pull secu­rity on him, and to ren­der aid to any casu­al­ties. We walk down the road, rifles up and at the ready, scan­ning the facades of the houses around us, ready for trou­ble. I can see the humvee that got hit, the asphalt beneath it scorched black from the blast. The vehi­cle doesn’t look too bad, just some dam­age to the engine and the right front door, but looks can be deceiv­ing. I’ve seen trucks that have been absolutely man­gled, and every­one inside is untouched, and on the other hand, seen vehi­cles with a sin­gle neat hole in a door, with a dead man behind it.

The 82nd guys are out and pulling secu­rity, and quickly tell us that there are no injuries. The truck is dis­abled, and a wrecker is on the way. They have been very lucky, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I don’t know these guys, but in the val­ley of the shadow, you don’t need to. We all have American flags on our shoul­ders, and that is all the con­nec­tion we need.

We relay the info back to our TOC on the radio, and then the ques­tion turns to find­ing the SOB that did it. There is a lot of talk of the trig­ger­man, of peo­ple in var­i­ous shirts of var­i­ous col­ors seen run­ning from the scene. Eventually the ID coa­lesces to a young guy in a green shirt with black stripes, run­ning across the field to the east, and so we decide to head that way. More ele­ments of the 82nd are com­ing in, and they are going to start search­ing houses in the area.

I’m impressed with the response to this IED strike. We’ve got mul­ti­ple squads of infantry and MPs in the area, along with Iraqi Police and EMS, and the Apache gun­ships over­head. In the past few months, I’ve been to the scene of a num­ber of IEDs, and often it has just been us and the ele­ment that got hit, alone, on some deserted street in the mid­dle of the night. The 82nd is rolling out heavy, as we say, and it feels good to have this amount of back-​​up around us. I only wish that we could fix the insur­gents in the process, and put a ton of lead down on top of them. Too much of my time here, we have felt like the hunted, instead of the hunter we need to be.

Now to find that damn triggerman…

Our squad moves into the mahal­lah across the field, and sets up block­ing posi­tions along a res­i­den­tial road. Apparently this is the street that the infantry saw Mr. Greenshirt run down, after the EFP went off. My truck is at the end of our con­voy, and I posi­tion the vehi­cle to block the road, and then dis­mount to pull security.

As usual in Iraq, nor­mal every­day life goes on in the midst of a guerilla war. Apparently a school is just down one of the sideroads, and a steady stream of school­girls walks past our instant check­point, uni­formly clad in black and white robes. The girls all have the same look on their faces, stead­fast, almost fixed, main­tain­ing this aura of dis­dain while refus­ing to look at us, as if we were filthy beg­gars pan­han­dling, instead of just filthy sol­diers look­ing for neigh­bor­hood ter­ror­ists. I scan the rooftops and bal­conies for snipers, a habit that is, by now, so ingrained that I found myself doing it sub­con­sciously dur­ing RnR, back in Germany. That was less than two weeks ago, and already it seems like a movie I once watched as a kid.

“Hey, SGT B, over here.”

One of my coun­ter­parts, SGT Y., is call­ing for me, and I turn to see what he is up to. His weapon is up, and he is sight­ing down another side road. I jog over to him, and ask him what he has.

“That kid just ran into that house over there!” he says excitedly.

“What kid?”

“The one with the green shirt, with the black stripes! The sus­pected trig­ger man.…” he replies, drop­ping his rifle to his side for a sec­ond and look­ing at me.

“Which house? Where?” I ask, peer­ing down the street.

“That one right there, with the old lady out­side it.” He points a dirty nomex glove towards one on the left, just a few houses away from us.

I look over. There is one of the ubiq­ui­tous ninja women stand­ing next to a iron gate and, as I look, a kid of about 12 years joins her from inside. I motion the kid to come over, which he does, appar­ently with­out fear.

I ask him in Arabic if a man just went in the house. No, no, he just left, is the reply, which is sort of a con­fus­ing answer, but I relay it to Y any­way. SGT Y’s reply is short and to the point–bullshit! I ask the kid again if a young man with a green shirt went in the house. Damn, how do you say ‘green’ in Arabic? I pull out my lit­tle phrase book and leaf through try­ing to find the word. How come you can never find the phrase or word when you really need it? Screw it; I point to an olive drab pouch on Y’s body armor, and then to the kid’s shirt. The kid fig­ures it out.

Oh yeah, yeah, he went inside! He ran up to the top floor just a minute ago.

I thank the kid, and then tell SGT Y that yes, the guy is inside. “Let’s get in there and clear the build­ing!” I’m get­ting pumped right away. I spent six years on MP Special Reaction Teams, doing SWAT oper­a­tions, and room clear­ing is just my thing.

SGT Y is a lit­tle more cau­tious. “Just the two of us? Umm, let’s get SSG H up here…”

Just then SSG H. walks up, but before we get to tell him the deal, he chews my ass for leav­ing my team. I look at my truck, only twenty feet away, and then back at him.

“But, but.….”

It’s no use. He’s right, I guess, but my sol­diers are not pri­vates and can han­dle pulling secu­rity by them­selves for a few min­utes. I stomp back over to them, slightly fum­ing. It’s one of those lit­tle dis­agree­ment moments that hap­pens when everyone’s adren­a­line is up. I know that if I just stay cool that SSG H. will be open to lis­ten a lit­tle bit later. I tell myself this a cou­ple times while watch­ing them go upstairs, and move across the bal­cony, rifles at the low ready.

In any case, the dude is not in the house. He prob­a­bly sprinted upstairs, zipped across the roof, and crossed over to any num­ber of neigh­bour­ing houses. That’s the other prob­lem with bat­tling insur­gents on their turf; they grew up here and know the ter­rain far more inti­mately than we ever could. SSG H and SGT Y trudge back out­side, and SGT Y looks at me from the gate, shrug­ging his shoulders.

More ele­ments of the 82nd show up, and they start cor­don­ing off the neigh­bour­hood. It seems that they are prepar­ing to go door-​​to-​​door, and they request that we move down this street and block it off at the other end. We move our trucks down the road slowly, the team lead­ers walk­ing beside the HMMWVs as we go, along with some of the dis­mounted infantry.

The stroll is another one of those slightly sur­re­al­is­tic Baghdad moments. Bright sun­shine, cool breezes, rustling trees. The rum­ble of our vehi­cles next to us, .50 cal­iber machine gun tur­rets rotat­ing as the gun­ners change their tac­ti­cal angles. The feel of rough con­crete through my Oakley boots, and the weight of the car­ry­ing strap of my 203 across my armored shoul­ders, bounc­ing as I walk. Watching rooftops, win­dows, and bal­conies for gun bar­rels, or muz­zle flashes, or any­thing sus­pi­cious, and only find­ing scarfed women hang­ing up laun­dry. The ris­ing tone and flash­ing roar of the Apaches cir­cling over­head, con­trast­ing with the flap of the black mar­tyr flags on the tops of some of the homes. The reac­tion of the neigh­bor­hood peo­ple adds to the dream­like effect. They are not scared, or intim­i­dated, or fazed in any way. They act as if we were tourists out for a stroll, look­ing for noth­ing more inter­est­ing than a good photo oppor­tu­nity. One old guy lies supine on the ground, barely mov­ing as we walk past him. I dunno if he is drunk, or just tak­ing a nap, but he seems com­pletely uncon­cerned at our approach.

We reach the end of the street and set up another road­block, with­out the sud­den report of a sniper rifle. Some of the infantry squads con­tinue on, strik­ing off down alley­ways, while behind us another squad of motor­ized infantry rolls in behind us, and starts dis­gorg­ing more troops. A sud­den “bang bang bang” makes me jump for a sec­ond, but it is only the sol­diers kick­ing against the metal gates to the houses. Apparently it is the kindler, gen­tler method of con­duct­ing a cor­don and search, at least for the 82nd.

I’m joined, after a lit­tle while, by a short Hispanic para­trooper, Jose, sent down from his squad to make sure no one enters or exits the street dur­ing the search. I ask him the usual ques­tions, how ya doin’, where ya from, how long ya been in country–the same ques­tions that American sol­diers have been ask­ing each other through all of our for­eign wars, from Bastogne to Pusan to Nha Trang and now to Baghdad. He answers reluc­tanctly, almost resent­fully, in mono­syl­la­bles. I guess leg MPs are almost as sus­pect to him as Iraqi insur­gents. About the time that abortive con­ver­sa­tion ends, we start get­ting the usual crowd of locals gath­er­ing at our makeshift roadblock–mostly kids, but also some men and a cou­ple of house­wives try­ing to get back to their homes from mar­ket, or school, or work.

Jose’s social skills need a lit­tle work. Maybe it’s because he’s only been in-​​country for two months, or maybe it’s just because he’s Airborne and there­fore of a higher order than us mere mor­tals, but he barks rough com­mands in English at the wait­ing peo­ple, who stare at him uncom­pre­hend­ingly. This is usu­ally just after I’ve done my best to explain the sit­u­a­tion to them in Arabic. He finally resigns him­self to squat­ting across the street and glar­ing at us, the bar­rel of his rifle pointed in our gen­eral direction.

I recently learned the sin­gle most use­ful phrase of Arabic yet. Schloon tgul.…..im Arabii? ‘How do you say.….in Arabic?’ If you fill in the blank with either some earnest point­ing at the object in ques­tion, or some really good Charades act­ing, you can learn how to say just about any­thing. It comes in handy over the next two hours, since that’s about how long the folks in front of me end up wait­ing to go back to their houses. Instead of hav­ing a small riot on our hands, we end up hav­ing a blast. People gen­er­ally love teach­ing their lan­guage to for­eign­ers, whether it’s in a vil­lage in Honduras, a city in Korea, a refugee camp in Bosnia, or here in a back­alley ‘hood on the east­side of Baghdad. It helps if the for­eigner is hold­ing a very large assault rifle, and is fes­tooned with a vari­ety of grenades.

Whenever the search teams find a mil­i­tary age male, they send them down to my group, and presently I have about twenty of these guys sit­ting next to a gar­den wall. We talk about guns, girls, the United States, George Bush, mobile phones, girls, cars, money, pornog­ra­phy (a rel­a­tively new devel­op­ment in Iraq), swear words in mul­ti­ple lan­guages and, oh yes, girls. I hand out cig­a­rettes and bot­tled water, and some­how man­age to keep the mot­ley crew enter­tained and not think­ing about ways to cause prob­lems for the infi­dels, at least not right now.

In the midst of our lan­guage les­son, the radio crack­les with some dis­turb­ing news. One of the scout­ing infantry squads has come across what they think is a car bomb, nes­tled in an alley­way just behind the houses behind us. It’s a old junker with wires and bail­ing wire pro­trud­ing from the hood and the trunk. Kind of a weird place to put a car bomb, since a humvee won’t even fit in the alley­way, but I sup­pose it’s pos­si­ble that they stum­bled across one being put together. Privately, I sus­pect it’s just another Baghdad hoopty, held together with inge­nu­ity and duct tape.

Still, the infantry lieu­tenant wants EOD to check it out, which makes the wait even longer. My crowd gets larger, since it is now late after­noon and folks are start­ing to make their way home. It’s only a mat­ter of time until I am faced with the most chal­leng­ing of Iraqi denizens to con­trol: a very short, very round, Arabic grandmother.

Granny is clas­sic. She’s loud, and alter­nates between being funny, gre­gar­i­ous, tear­ful and demanding–and the cycle rotates every minute or so, with fran­tic energy. There is lots of hand ges­tures and dra­matic plead­ing to the heav­ens. Her black robes swirl about her like an Old Testament cloud, and the beads and metal neck­laces around her thick neck clank and tin­kle against each other as she ges­tures wildly. She’s says she’s tired and hun­gry and her house is only right there and there are no ter­ror­ists in the neigh­bor­hood and even if they are she isn’t a ter­ror­ist and she doesn’t even know any ter­ror­ists and her son is com­ing over later and she has to make din­ner for him and she just doesn’t under­stand what the American sol­diers are doing here any­way and can’t she just go home because she won’t cause any prob­lems swear to Allah the most mer­ci­ful praises be upon him.

After a while, the guys along the wall help me out and try to tell her the deal, too, but even that doesn’t work. Granny is on a roll, and surely the damn cru­sader is about to crack.

It’s at that point that the radio crack­les to life–EOD has decided to blow up the sus­pected car bomb, just to be sure, and also because it’s fun. EOD loves to blow shit up, and usu­ally with­out telling any­one, so I should at least be grate­ful for the heads up. I turn to the crowd and ges­ture wildly, try­ing to remem­ber the word for explo­sion, and finally resort to putting my hands over my ears, and squint­ing my eyes shut, except for one. Everyone instantly fol­lows suit, and the sight of twenty five peo­ple look­ing like the ‘Hear No Evil’ mon­key is pretty funny, if not for the thought that a big freakin’ amount of high explo­sives is about to det­o­nate half a block away.

There is a rea­son­able sized BOOOM from behind the houses. Nothing too crazy, about the noise level of your aver­age hand grenade, but enough to make some of the wait­ing guys jump. The only prob­lem is that the rel­a­tively low noise level means that it wasn’t a VBIED, and we just demol­ished somebody’s fam­ily car.

Ooops.

Jose comes over and announces that all of the guys need to go down the street to be ID’d by some wit­nesses to the road­side bomb. I do my best to explain what’s going on, and we have the lads get in a line and put their hands on the shoul­ders of the guy in front of them, like some sort of kinder­garten field trip, and off they go down the road. Granny tries to join them, and I have to grab her off the end of the line.

Apparently no one fits the pic­ture, as I can see the guys being dis­missed just a few min­utes later. I wave Granny and the rest of the house­wives on, giv­ing them the all clear, and she wafts past me blow­ing kisses with one hand and wav­ing to Allah with the other, bab­bling on all the while. She’s good peo­ple, and I smile at her as she wad­dles down the dusty street.

We load up shortly after­wards, amid the younger kids beg­ging and plead­ing for soc­cer balls, candy and money, none of which I am inclined to give them. We didn’t find a sin­gle piece of con­tra­band, or any sus­pects dur­ing the search, but I still come away with a feel­ing of hav­ing done some good. Perhaps, at the very least, we’ve man­aged to put a human face on the occu­py­ing Americans, and my Arabic phrase book is full of scrib­bled new words and phrases. This is the way that counter-​​insurgency wars are fought–a quick blast, lots of slow search­ing and a ton of effort, and noth­ing mate­r­ial to show for it at the end of the day. If you’re lucky, though, per­haps you made a friend or two along the way. Maybe it will make a difference.

As we pull away from the street, I see a kid run out from behind the houses, and dis­ap­pear down a back alley way, just a flash in the grow­ing dusk of the evening.

And wouldn’t you know it. He was wear­ing a green shirt with black stripes.

Sgt Roy Batty is a pen name for an MP sta­tioned in Baghdad. The pic­ture at the top comes from theten​sion​.blogspot​.com.

(Gouge:DD)

Cross-​​posted at the Military​.com Warfighter’s Forum.

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