Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

XIII BULLDOG AND HIS PACK: AN INCIDENT IM THE WAR

There's a story from the war that merits chapter in itself, so Carl Stiner and I have pulled it out and presented it here.

With something like nine thousand Special Forces personnel in the Gulf, there is no "typical" SF story. However, the best-known deep recon account to come out of the war involved a team led by CW2 Richard "Bulldog" Balwanz. Their experiences illustrate not only the difficulties of SR missions in general, but the challenges (many of them unnecessary) that Special Operators faced during the war.

The warrant officer arrived in the Gulf with the first SF units at the end of the summer. Posted to the border area for surveillance, he also served as one of the "trip wires" in case Saddam attacked Saudi Arabia. He'll now take up the story:

Desert Storm was a defining moment for SOF, in that it validated the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the Goldwater-Nichols Act in setting up USSOCOM. This was really the second time that SOF was deployed in its entirety, covering the full spectrum of their missions.

In the early part of the war, I was up on the border doing surveillance just outside of Khafji. Anyplace that I ran into coalition forces, I always found SF guys with them. We had SF teams down to brigade levels, sometimes to battalion levels, with every coalition force in theater — including the Syrians and the Moroccans. We would traditionally consider those fellows unfriendly toward U.S. interests; but there we were, working side by side with them.

About half a dozen teams covered the entire border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I was with an SF team working with a Saudi Arabian counterpart — their equivalent of a Special Forces team — but they were border guards as well. We'd patrol the border at night; and the Iraqis were obviously doing the same thing just across on the Kuwaiti side. We'd have visual contact with them; and we could see the buildup and the fortifications over there. Every so often, we'd actually get deserters coming over, waving their white flag, particularly after the bombing campaign kicked off.

If you can picture the border, a big berm ran along the Saudi side and one also on the Kuwaiti side. It was like a tank trap, so if the tanks started to come, they'd drive up over the top and drop in a ditch. We had standing orders not to cross that berm.

There was also a space of maybe one to two miles between the berms that we called No-Man's-Land. The border proper was out there somewhere in the center. When the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, the Kuwaitis just came across with anything they had, and a lot of the vehicles broke down; so there were bone piles of these vehicles. One night, we were looking around with NVGs, when we noticed a glow in one of the vehicles out on a little knoll in No-Man's-Land. We figured there must have been a short in the battery.

Obviously, the Iraqis had seen the same thing; and one morning they came up in an armored vehicle — the first time we had seen any type of armored vehicle out there. He came right out into No-Man's-Land up on a knoll just north of Khafji.

My team commander ordered me to get out there and see what they were doing.

I didn't feel comfortable about it, but he's my boss, so okay. We jumped in a humvee, and the Saudis lifted the gate to let me cross the Saudi berm. As soon as I got to the other side, I hung right and hugged the berm, just kind of looking. Meanwhile, the captain was standing on top of the border station directing me through the radio. "No, no, turn left, turn left, get out there."

Well, about that time the Iraqis had hooked a chain to the abandoned vehicle and were dragging it off. They must have thought we were using it, because they dragged it off the knoll. The captain kept insisting, "Get out there, get out there. I figured, well, it's safe to go out there now; they're gone. So I topped the knoll.

But it turned out the Iraqis were there. They swung their guns around on us, and I thought, Man, I'm dead. It was real tense for a brief moment. And then they just continued doing what they were doing, and we drove off.

I had a discussion with my counterpart, the Saudi commander.

"They came into Saudi Arabia," I told him.

"Oh, no, they didn't," he said. He was telling me he wasn't going to go out there to check.

I said, "Yes, they did. I can see the tire marks on the border territory. They have been inside just a hundred meters, but they were in Saudi." And we had a discussion. I said, "Look, I'll tell you what we'll do. The tracks are still there in the sand. We'll go out there. We'll turn on the GPS, take a reading, come back, and we'll plot it on the map. And if it plots on the Saudi side, then that proves that I'm correct. If it doesn't, then I'm wrong."

So he agreed to that, and we did. We drove back out there, did the GPS, came back, and plotted it; and sure enough, it plotted out about a hundred meters into Saudi Arabia. We thought that was significant, because up to that time, there had been no Iraqi incursions into Saudi Arabia.

A little later, all of a sudden, a heat round came back down from battalion, saying, "Hey, what are you doing crossing that berm? You've got standing orders not to cross the berm." It kind of got to be a case of who said what, me or my captain. It wasn't good for anybody.

Later, the battalion commander came up and sat down and talked to me and I didn't know what to expect. I thought I might be in deep shit. But he surprised me. "Well," he said, "I'm going to tell you what. I have a team that's sitting back in the rear down at the Bat Cave" — that was our nickname for the SF base at King Fahd Airport, where the SOC had a team, ODA525.

You have to understand that every team in 5th Group was deployed into the war effort except this one team. Before they'd flown out of the States, their captain had just left for special mission tryouts, so the team had deployed to Saudi without an officer. The company sergeant major had stayed back to run the rear area, and their team sergeant had been picked to move up to the company sergeant major, which left the team without its leadership. As a result, they were basically being choggie boys.[31] The battalion used them to run errands. They're very proud individuals, and they wanted to get involved in the war effort, but they were left out of it. They called them the Catholic girls: They were saving it for the big one.

So the battalion commander offered that up to me when he came up to the border. "I've got this team back there that's sitting in the Bat Cave; and they're really not involved in the war effort, and they need a strong leader. I'd like to offer that to you. I want you to think about it."

Of course, I wanted to kiss the guy. I got in touch with him and with my company commander and said, "Look, I would like to have that team, but if I'm going to have any credibility as a leader, I've got to get them involved in the war effort immediately. I can't go back there and then have things not change. If they stay being choggie boys for the battalion, there's no value to me being there, so I need your assistance in getting these guys involved. We'll gear up, and I think we should get some of the first missions that come down."

So that's what set the groundwork.

When I got to the Bat Cave, what I found was really something else.

The guys in 525 had been back there for several months. They'd been there so long they'd built furniture. They had a putting green. They had cable TV. I don't know where they'd gotten it, but they had it. And — like many other units at King Fahd and elsewhere — they'd set up stills for moon-shining. I'm not saying that these guys were bad soldiers; anytime good soldiers have time on their hands and are idle and are not challenged — well, let's just say they're very resourceful.

When 1 got there, they really had a bad attitude. They were underused.

Not that they didn't benefit the war effort: They taught all the teams in the fifth group how to conduct close air support (which came in handy later), and the guys were also really physically fit, because they spent a lot of time in the gym.

So when I took over, the first thing I did was get them out and involved. We went clear out almost to the Jordanian border, way up in the northwest part of Saudi Arabia, and conducted operations in support of teams that were preparing for some activities. We were doing long-range cross-country movement using humvees and the GPS system.

GPS is a great system, one of the best things we had in DESERT STORM, because navigating in the bare desert can be close to impossible. With the GPS, you just set it up in the windshield and it told you which way to go. It was important to be able to use GPS across hazardous or rough terrain at night, or driving under blackout conditions with NVGs.

After we came back, about mid-January, we got the special reconnaissance mission.

About the same time, they called me in and said, "We want you to look into hide sites." At that time, we had no hide site kit, no standard equipment. There was also no SOP on how you developed and did a hide site, so we had to conduct some research and development on our own.

We went out and actually dug hide sites, to determine the best way to go about it. What's the ideal size for four guys to live in there? How are you going to sleep? How are you going to eat? Because once you go into the ground, you stay in there, for a week, ten days. You're sleeping in there. You're shitting and pissing in there. We had to figure out how to do all that….

The hide kits we developed weighed about a hundred pounds apiece with all the poles and the tarps. You have to keep in mind that all this was carried on our backs.

But then we got the mission, and we went into isolation; we prepped, we studied, we got all the current intel, and we brought in the SOAR guys that were going to fly the mission for us, to do route planning.

The mission was actually for us to get into a hide site and place eyes for real-time intelligence up on Highway 7, a major north-south highway that came out of Baghdad, went south down to An Nasiriyah, and then south-cast over to Basrah. It was a major line of communications. We'd be in direct support of the XVIII Airborne Corps commander. Our reports would go directly back to the SFLO, or the liaison officer — the SOCOR they called it, the Special Operations Coordinator that worked at the Corps headquarters. And he was in direct contact with the Corps commander.

The Corps commander wanted to know what the enemy was doing. Were they reinforcing the front? If they were reinforcing, what type of equipment and what type of troops? What sort of tanks?

The mission statement also said that we had to be able to identify signature items of equipment — equipment that is organic to certain units, and which will identify them. The T-72 tanks, for example, were used only by the Republican Guards. If you saw a T-72, you knew that you were dealing with them.

We got our plan together, and were sitting there, waiting and wondering, when the Battle of Khafji broke out — the Iraqis came across the border, and so we got called up there. The main Iraqi units had already pulled out, but our commanders felt there were still some isolated people left who may have been gathering intel, so we went building to building and door to door, kicking doors, clearing buildings. We really got boned up on our urban warfare, if you will. We never did find anybody, but every door you kicked down, you didn't know.

We were in Khafji when we got the call: "We're going to execute." So we came back down to the Bat Cave, got all our gear together, and went up to King Khalid Military City, KKMC, where our task force was located. We spent a couple of days there, waiting.

One of the things we were waiting for was some special boots we'd ordered. American jungle boots leave a telltale print in the soft loam soil through which we were going to be walking, and we didn't want to leave any tracks like that. Finally, the evening before we were supposed to go in, the brand-new boots arrived. Some of the guys said, "I'm not going to wear them. They're not broke in." So I took plastic MRE boxes, cut them to the shape of the boots, and taped them to the bottom of our old boots, so they wouldn't leave a print.

We were scheduled to go to a place about two hundred meters off Highway 7 and near a small river, the Shatt al Gharraf. There were also agricultural fields and canals and ditches. The ditches were dug by hand, so the dirt was piled up on the sides. Our intention was to use them for moving around, so if people were out there, we'd be able to get down the ditches and walk if we had to.

We were going to put in two hide sites. One of them would watch north-bound traffic, the other southbound. Periodically, about every four or six hours, we had to report back to headquarters, but if we saw something significant — Scud launchers or a company of armor or such — we reported it immediately.

It's now February 23, 1991.

From KKMC, we loaded onto two Blackhawk helicopters, four guys on each one.

We had some really great SOAR pilots, the greatest pilots in the world. The SOAR guys had proven themselves time and time again. We knew they would get us in there. More important, I knew they would come and get me.

A guy named Kenny Collier, a chief warrant officer, flew the mission lead on my helicopter. I went up to him and kind of pulled him close. "Kenny, I have no doubt that you'll get me in there," I told him. "But if I need you, I need you to come and get me. Don't leave me in there." He got a big smile on his face. "I told you, Dawg, you call, we haul."

We took off out of KKMC and flew to Rafhah, an air base up on the border, for refueling. We were going about 150 miles across the border into Iraq — a long way for a Blackhawk. The SOAR guys determined that by the time they flew us in, dropped us off, and returned, they'd have about ten minutes of fuel remaining.

We wanted to be actually crossing the border at about eight that evening. We were all hyped up, camouflaged: We're ready, we're going to war, we're going in there. The guys are excited. We had trained our entire career for this, to support our country and do these types of missions. We had rehearsed. We had gathered all the intel. We had done very thorough mission planning.

We crossed the border at about eight — and then for some reason, we got recalled. They said, "Abort the mission. Return to station." So we turned around.

To this day, I don't know the reason for that recall, but whatever it was, we hadn't even gotten back yet, when they said, "No, no, execute, execute."

We couldn't just turn around, because of the fuel, so we had to get off and refuel the helicopters, all of which put us behind our planning curve. The timing was very tight. If we took too much time on this end, that put us in a potential white-knuckle situation at the other end.

Kenny Collier had been a Special Forces soldier, so he knew the importance of time. They tried to make up some for us. They flew very low and they flew very fast. They may have been twenty feet off the desert floor and just streaming 160 knots or so, going across that desert floor.

I was on the headset with the pilot when I felt the helicopter jump up, and a big thump. I felt her shudder and I didn't know what it was. It scared me half to death.

"What is that, Kenny? What is it?" I asked over the headset. And he was calm as could be, which really impressed me. We'd hit a sand dune and ripped the rear wheel off the back landing gear. "Oh, don't worry about it," he said. "We just hit a sand dune. We're all right." Which calmed me right down.

Because of the delay, the helicopters lost their GPS satellite coverage for a time.[32] They had to use some sort of backup navigational system.

"I can't guarantee you that I'll put you on the exact spot where you wanted to go," the pilot told me.

I said, "Well, Kenny, you get me as close as you possibly can, and we're going to go on with the mission."

As we approached the target area, he made a few "false insertions" — that is, he would lift, come up high, and intentionally get picked up on radar, then he would touch down and sit there for ten seconds or so, so if the enemy came out to find out what was going on, they'd find nobody there. We did a couple of those, and then finally, he stayed low and swooped in, and we rolled out. And then they were up and gone.

It was an eerie feeling as they were going away, because you could hear the blades propping quieter and quieter, and you realized that you were one hundred and fifty miles in the enemy's backyard.

One of the questions we'd asked intel was, "Are there dogs in that area?" They'd told us there weren't. The Arabs don't like dogs. They consider them filthy animals and they don't own them.

However, while this is true for Arabs who live in the city, the country Arabs — the Bedouins and the farmers — have dogs for the same reason our farmers do. They use them for security. So there were dogs out there. As we rolled off the helicopter and they flew out of sight, I thought we'd landed in a pound. You could hear dogs howling all over the place.

Once the helicopters were out of earshot, though, the barking faded, and we realized they were reacting to the sound of the helicopters and not necessarily to our presence.

The first thing we did was to move off maybe a hundred meters and set up a little defensive perimeter and just listen. It's a tactic to take in the night sounds, to let your eyes and ears adjust to your environment. There was nothing but silence, which is what I wanted to hear.

I turned to my weapons sergeant: "Bring out your GPS. Let's see if we have some coverage now." We did. We were actually north of the area in which we wanted to be, but not far, maybe a mile or two. However, each individual on my team had a rucksack that weighed in excess of 175 pounds, which is extremely heavy. That included our two hide-site kits, twenty-five pounds for each guy. Every team member had five gallons of water — that's forty pounds. Each guy was carrying radio equipment.

I went on a leader's recon with my weapons sergeant. We found the area we wanted, determined where we would put our hide sites, went back, picked up the team, and brought them into the area. We pulled out our dehandled shovels and started to dig, and the first thing we realized was that though we had rehearsed in Saudi Arabian sandy loam, this soil up here was agriculture soil. It was hard. There was no way we were going to dig a hide site before dawn with just a dehandled shovel.

The other team, under team sergeant Charles Hopkins, moved back a little bit, found some softer soil, and dug down, but when we tried to do it, too, it became apparent we were going to run out of time. Since we had to get under cover, we decided to put our hide site in one of the ditches that crossed the area. We laid our supports and used that ditch as our hole; we camouflaged it with sandbags up the front as best we could; got some vegetation to put on top of it, and brush, too; and did what else we could in the time we had.

We knew traffic going up and down the highway would never be able to see anything out of the ordinary. It blended in.

Now, we thought that the farmers in Iraq operated the way they do in the States. A farmer plants his fields, then goes out once in a while to check his crops to make sure things are going on. But he's not out there every day looking. However, in this part of Iraq we failed to take into consideration the fact that their technology is very far behind ours. The kids don't sit in the house and watch TV and play video games. They don't have TVs and computers. They play out in the fields. We didn't realize that.

So we were inside the hide sites at first light, four of us in each hide. One guy was on watch at a peephole (Sergeant James Weatherford); one guy recorded what was going on; and the other two guys basically rested. I was one of the guys resting. I had my eyes closed; but I was aware of what was going on, and heard Weatherford say, "Man, there's a lot of activity out there. There's people along the road."

There was a lot more going on than we had anticipated.

About nine o'clock in the morning, we started hearing children's voices. And Weatherford said, "There's kids out there. They're out there playing."

They got closer and closer, and as they started getting louder, I got concerned. And then all of a sudden, the sounds stopped. It got quiet. The children came up; and they actually looked into the peephole where Weatherford was on watch. They looked inside and they saw this guy all camouflaged up, looking back at them, and they gave a little scream and jumped back.

At the same time, two of my soldiers came out of the back side of the canal, carrying silenced MP-5 submachine guns and silenced pistols. The kids saw them and took off.

"Chief, what do we do?" my guys asked. "What do we do?"

Now, there's no doubt in my mind that if I had told them, "Don't let those kids get away. Shoot them," they would have done it. And we'd been cleared to do that, if any civilian came in and compromised the mission.

Two of them were girls, maybe seven or eight years old, and one was a boy, younger. It was an instant decision. "No, don't shoot them," I said.

I was not going to shoot children.

Several things probably went into that. I have a Christian background. I had children of my own about that age. It just wasn't in me to shoot children. Whatever happened to us, I was willing to accept that. If they were going to bring in forces, I could defend myself. We had weapons, and I knew we could bring in close air support and that we could get out of there. But I wasn't going to shoot children.

The kids ran off toward a little village not too far away. We brought up our SATCOM radio and called for immediate extraction. We said, "Hey, we've been seen. We got caught. We need to get out of here. Our positions have been compromised."

While our guys were working on the exfiltration, nobody from the village came back to investigate. I had no idea if the kids had told somebody about us — or if maybe they thought they had seen a boogey man. But after they ran off, nobody came to check us out. At that point, we determined that even though the hide positions were compromised, maybe the mission itself wasn't.

So we moved back up this canal to another area, and set up again. When nobody came, we canceled the emergency exit.

"Look," I said, "I feel pretty secure. Nobody's come. We moved out of the area. We're going to continue with the mission. At nightfall, we're going to find another area and get in and continue on."

All day, we continued to watch, to monitor the highway, to report the traffic. At 1200, we sent back information based on what we'd seen.

Shortly afterward, I was lying on a mound of dirt, watching the road with some binocs, and I caught something out of my peripheral vision back to the side. I looked back and there were two kids, but this time they had an adult with them. I slid back into the ditch real quick, but I knew in my heart that they'd seen me. Even so, I was hoping, well, maybe they didn't. And I told the guys, "Look, I think we just got… somebody's just seen me." And Buzzsaw (Robert) DeGroff scurried up on the side and checked things out. By that time, the folks were moving toward us. "Yes," Buzzsaw whispered, "here they come."

I came out of the hide to talk to them. The adult had on a Palestiniantype checkered headdress, and they were all looking at me; and so I gave them my best "Salaam ala'ikum," and spoke to them in Arabic, thinking of what the intel guys told me: They may be friendly, they may be indifferent. I was thinking hard, hoping in my heart that that was the deal.

Again, the thought of killing these people — that wasn't going to happen. They were unarmed, they were civilians, there were two kids.

Then they took off real fast, moving backward. This time, we weren't as lucky as before. It was just a matter of twenty minutes or so when people started coming.

All of a sudden, these teenagers started approaching, a gang of them, maybe fifteen or twenty getting close to us. They were just teenage kids and were ignorant of what was going on. So I spoke to them in Arabic. I told them to stop, to get away, to leave us alone. And finally I held up my gun, and when they saw that, they scattered.

I decided to move out.

By this time, other civilians were coming, a lot of them, and pulling up on the road were five vehicles — three deuce-and-a-half military transport — type trucks, a Toyota Land Cruiser, which served as a command-type vehicle, and a bus. The next thing we knew, an Iraqi company was unloading from them, probably a hundred-plus people. Pretty soon, all of them were out there on the road, talking.

At this time, we were all looking at each other: "Hey, we're in deep shit."

We called for immediate exfiltration, but they said, "Well, it's going to be a while before we can get extra birds in there. We're going to line up close air support for you."

I said great.

It was time to implement our emergency destruction plan — to make a pile of all the stuff we couldn't take with us and get rid of it. The engineer already had a block of C-4 made up with a one-minute time fuse on it. He reached in, pulled out the igniter, and we put it down. 1 saved one radio from the pile, an LST-5, because it was a SATCOM radio, but it also did double duty as a UHF radio for talking to aircraft. You screwed a whip antenna about the size of an ink pen into the top of it and it went to UHF. I could call close air support on it.

All the other equipment went into the rucksacks.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi army guys were starting to maneuver on us — coming up this side and that sidc — and some civilians had armed themselves, farmers with their hunting rifles and such. If somebody came into your backyard, you'd go out to defend it. That's what they were doing.

At this point, the ground war had started, but we didn't know it. We hadn't been told when we went in, "Hey, the ground war is going to start at midnight."

But the Iraqis did know it, and that's what must have gotten them so excited.

They were also probably overconfident. They didn't realize what they were up against. They probably thought we were a downed air crew — easy pickings — and they could just come out there and grab us.

Anyhow, we set the charge on all our sensitive and classified equipment, and then threw the rest of our rucksacks on top of that to lighten the load. All we had on was load-bearing equipment — just the nylon straps on which you clip your ammo pouches, your canteens, and so forth. I stuffed an MRE into my pocket and had a night-vision device hanging around my neck. We kept a single GPS system that contained our egress route; all our way points were in it.

Then we pulled the time fuse on the C-4 and ran as quickly as we could back up one of the canals. Suddenly, we hit an area where the canal got shallow, and there was a turn. We were basically stuck in this elbow in the canal.

When the charge went off, the Iraqis were less than a minute behind us, and close air support was twenty minutes out. I knew we were in some deep shit. A company-sized element was maneuvering on us, trying to outflank us.

As soon as the charge went off, we came under heavy fire. We waited. We held our fire.

It wasn't easy, though. The most accurate fire didn't come from the soldiers. The Bedouins were hunters, and they were good…. I mean, kicking the dirt around our heads.

As the soldiers came in, they moved in groups of four or five, walking upright, looking and holding their guns up to the ready. They had on low-quarter shoes, office shoes. These were not front-line troops, combat soldiers; they were office workers. They'd been told to grab their guns and go out and get us.

A U.S. infantry squad would have kept a low profile, doing fire-maneuver and bounding and going off to position, but these guys were just standing upright. That was to our benefit.

Buzzsaw said, "Do we fire? Do we fire?"

Finally, I said, "Yes, open fire."

Nobody did anything for a while, because everybody was sort of reluctant to get it going. They knew that once we started shooting, we were in deep trouble. So I gave it again: "Fire."

Buzzsaw opened up with his 203 (a 40mm grenade launcher attached to an M-16). The other 203s opened up. The grenades went out and landed among the Iraqis. All of a sudden, a guy'd be out there with tattered clothing staggering around. The rest of them had dropped. You wondered what in the world was going on.

My guess is that in that opening volley, we eliminated probably forty of them.

All of a sudden, we were in a hell of a firefight, but holding our own, desperate for close air support.

We had to set our SATCOM radio back up in the UHF mode so we could talk to the aircraft. We set up the SATCOM dish, then went to put in the whip antenna. We had lost it.

It seems that when things go bad, they go really bad. We were in the midst of a firefight, and we didn't have any way to talk to the aircraft.

But sometimes you get lucky. Sergeant DeGroff just happened to be carrying a PRC-90 survival radio. He pulled it out, turned to Weatherford, my communications sergeant, and said, "Hey, will this thing work?"

Weatherford looked at it. "It's a line-of-sight radio," he said. "1 don't know if it'll work or not. I doubt it. Not unless somebody's in the area to pick it up."

The air support was out there. We could hear them over our SATCOM; they were calling for us, but we couldn't get them back. So they flew around without finding us.

After a while, one of the sorties took out a nearby bridge over the river because he didn't have anything better to do, and that actually helped us. A lot of civilians had come out for the show, and there were women and children out there, but once things started blowing up and they realized bombs were being dropped, the civilians fled.

About that time, we moved over into what 1 guess you'd call Plan B. We had school-trained snipers on our team, good-quality people; and as the Iraqi troops got up and tried to maneuver, we'd drop them. And we just stayed down in the ditch, which was probably the most secure place we could be. Had we gone up out of it, it would have been the end of things.

For a little while, things got quiet enough for DeGroff to pull out the PRC-90. He made a call over it and picked up an AWACS. And I'll tell you, when that voice came back over it, it was just miraculous. I can't use any other word. It was miraculous that we had a PRC-90 radio — fifties-vintage technology. But it worked, and it saved our skins.

Pretty soon, they got a forward air controller to talk to us, and then they started sending sorties of F-16s. F-16s are not your ideal close air support platform, but they were the ones that could get there the quickest. So the -16s got on the Guard net, and we could talk to them directly on the PRC- 90 radio. We used it to call close air support the rest of the day.

We still had a problem: We were in the midst of a firefight. We were taking fire from the flanks. We had to direct the planes in for close air support — there were a pair of them. But they couldn't spot our position.

We didn't bring smoke. We had pin flares, but it was the middle of the day, so pin flares didn't work. We did have signal mirrors, so we did what we could with them. The two F-16s flew over, and we were huddled down there in the ditch, trying to flash them with the signal mirrors.

That's when it came in handy that these guys had just taught close air support to the entire theater.

Buzzsaw said to the F-16 pilots, "Look, this might sound strange, but I want you to fly from the moon to the sun." Though it was about one o'clock in the afternoon, the sun and the moon were both out there at the same time. "When you're above me, I'll tell you. "

So they came around, and that's exactly what they did. One of the aviators picked us up, identified our position, and relayed it to the other. They went through a long conversation about our precise position, but once they'd done that, we were in business.

Meanwhile, some of the Iraqis had gone out there on the highway and were flagging down other vehicles, trying to get more people into the fray. It happened that an entire convoy of military vehicles, mostly deuce-and-a-halfs, was passing about then, and they got them to stop. So when our first strikes came in, they also destroyed the convoy — a lot of secondary explosions came off those deuce-and-a-halfs.

After that, vehicles would come down the highway, and people would try to flag them down, but they'd see bodies burning and wouldn't stop. They'd keep on going. They'd say, "I'm not going to get involved in that."

Later, I found out that one of the F-16 flights had picked up a column of armor coming into the area and had taken them out on the road before they came close to us.

However, that still left us with a lot of folks out there on one flank that was real hot, and other folks on the other flank, and I was up directing the fire, shifting back and forth. It was working very effectively, and 1 was very pleased: The guys were doing a tremendous job knocking off targets, keeping calm, saving the ammunition. Nobody stood up, like you see in movies, shooting full automatic from the waist. It was very calculated — lowering the barrel, taking a sight picture, pulling the trigger, and dropping the target.

But still, one of the flanks was very hot. We were really getting a lot of fire off it. We had to call in a close air support mission with cluster bombs. It was going to be close — what we call danger-close, which is anything within a thousand meters. It was maybe two hundred meters — not far at all.

We knew there was a risk — there always is, particularly with cluster bombs — that those cluster bombs would get the friendly forces. And that scared the shit out of me as much as the enemy soldiers did, getting blown up by our own Air Force.

But we called in the close air support on the flank. They came in, and again, it was almost miraculous. It was such an effective strike. The cluster bombs came down — looking like they were going to drop right on top of us — and then the clam shells opened up, and we could hear the bombs from down in the ditch.

When cluster bombs hit, they start ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba; it works into a crescendo, then tapers back down. And that's what happened. The bombs came right across and eliminated probably a platoon-worth of folks over on the flank that had been giving us so much trouble.

We did the same on the other side.

Then what worried me most was the ditch itself. It wasn't straight. It was twisty. If you tried to look down it, it wasn't like looking down a railroad track. You could only see maybe ten meters before it twisted out of sight.

By that time, I knew they couldn't come in on the flanks unless they started using fire maneuver and maybe brought in heavier support — but if they wanted to, they could come in force down the ditch and overrun us in really quick time.

Another air strike was coming in, and we called it right down this ditch. As soon as they lifted, my intel sergeant, Sergeant Robbie Gardner, and I went shoulder to shoulder (that was about the width of the ditch) back down the ditch, hoping to catch them by surprise. And we did.

We went maybe fifty meters and came up on the Iraqi point element coming up the ditch, but they weren't going anywhere just then, because the strike had got them down; and their guns were lying by their sides.

We came around, at the ready, and then we were face-to-face. Before they could pick up their guns, we were able to eliminate them.

We then walked all the way back down to the place where we had loaded up our rucksacks, and we found bodies all through the ditch. I recall coming up on one guy in particular. His leg was mangled and blown off, and he was about dead, but he was still breathing heavily. We got close to him and moved the gun away. He took his last breath, and that was it, he was gone. It was profound. It didn't strike me so much then as later, when I looked back.

We went all the way down to where we'd blown the rucksacks because it was getting into evening now and it gets cold in the desert. We dragged out some Gore-Tex jackets and any kind of chow that we could find. Although the jackets had been blown up by cluster bombs and our own explosion, it would still provide some warmth. We grabbed some stuff, moved back up into our fighting position, and hooked back up with the guys. By this time, the firefight had become less intense.

There was a kind of rhythm. A sortie would come in and then leave, and there'd be a lull when we didn't have air cover. At that point, the fireworks would pick up. Once a squad-size element — maybe five or six people — stood up and actually charged us, giving out this crazy battle cry: "Hey tetetetetetete." It was just suicidal for them, because we were able to pick them off as they were coming in.

The Iraqis were actually pretty game early on, but as we got into the evening and the F-16s had hit them a few times, I think we destroyed their morale. They'd thought this was going to be easy pickings, this air crew out there, and all of a sudden they ran into heavy resistance. There're the M- 203s. There're expert marksmen. And there's close air support, with F-16s coming in. And so the later it got, the more the battle died down.

After nightfall, I put on my night-vision goggles, looked out into the battle area, and didn't see any movement whatsoever.

Then we got word that our exfiltration was twelve minutes out.

I couldn't help but think of Vietnam then. One lesson we'd been taught was that the North Vietnamese, knowing there'd be a rescue attempt, would lie in wait. That way they had a bigger target.

Thinking of that, I decided not to give the Iraqis the chance to do the same thing.

Back behind us, maybe another three hundred or four hundred meters, was a berm that I had identified. We moved out and did a retrograde operation across to the other side of the berm. I wanted to put some cover between the Iraqi force and the helicopters when they landed, to prevent the Iraqis from stepping up.

Because the helicopters were flying low, we couldn't talk directly to them. We had to talk through the F-16 that was above us, and he would relay to the helicopter. The F-16 guy came through: "Give me your exact location so that the birds can pick you up." I turned to the weapons sergeant, who had the GPS, to get a reading. But when he pulled it out, it turned out that it was ruined. It had gotten busted up when he had fallen during the fight.

In my mind, I was seeing these guys coming in and getting the shit shot out of them. But then I remembered that that old PRC-90 radio had a beacon on it. So I said, "Can they pick up that beacon?"

They said, "Well, turn it on."

Buzzsaw kicked on that beacon, and within a few minutes we heard the wok-wok-wok and they swooped, and almost landed on top of us. I bet it didn't take us ten seconds and we were off the ground.

And it wasn't until then that it struck me that we were very fortunate. We had had an Iraqi company on top of us, and we had been able to get out of there. It was a tribute to the Special Forces A Team, and to the training that we had gone through.

Later, it struck me exactly what had happened to us and what we had done. I'm sure that battle is still on the minds of those people in that village today. One thing that personally satisfies me is that somewhere there are some kids, probably teenagers now, who are leading productive lives and don't know how close they came, just a decision away, to being shot.

Just before we got ahold of these F-16s, two of the guys, DeGroff and Dan Kostrzebski, one one side of the ditch, one on the other, turned around and waved good-bye to each other. It was like: This is it, we're not going to get out of here.

And one of the things that struck me at the time, and particularly later— one of the gravest responsibilities of a ground commander — is that you are responsible for the lives of men, both losing them and taking them. Losing your own and taking from the enemy.

It's a grave responsibility, and I remember thinking, "We're gonna get overrun here, and if we do, I hope I'm one of the first guys that you're taking out, because I'm not gonna be able to stand it, fighting in this ditch and watching my guys die in front of me." But thankfully it never got to that.