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USAREUR Public
Affairs June 16, 2003 |
173rd Airborne on Peninsula Strike Story and photos by SFC Todd Oliver, SETAF Public
Affairs
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Lt.
Col. Dominic Caraccilo, commander 2d
Battalion, 503d Infantry (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade,
checks a map while speaking with Chosen Company Commander, Capt.
Arie Richard during Operation Peninsula Strike.
The operation, which included more then 400 paratroopers,
resulted in the capture of more then 50 members of the Feydayeen
organization.
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The men and women of 2d Battalion, 503d
infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, are feeling the heat. One soldier’s watch, with a built
in temperature gauge, says it’s 134 degrees.
Who cares. 134, 130, 128 … with body armor
on, sitting in armored Humvees, they just become numbers. It’s just hot, hotter then
anything most people can imagine.
“It’s like turning on a hairdryer and
holding it inches from your face,” remarks one paratrooper, sweating
profusely.
Yes, it’s hot. Bottled water, if not cared for
and tended to, quickly turns so hot as to make it impossible to
drink. Almost impossible,
that is. If you don’t
drink out here, bad things can and do happen.
The paratroopers are unconcerned
though. They handle the
heat in a matter of fact manor. They all know they have to drink water,
they know they have to be ready for anything and they know that there
mission is just about to start.
While Kirkuk once seemed a boring,
tedious place to be stuck, far from the comforts of home and the arms of
loved ones they now view it with an almost loving affection.
Safe houses with air
conditioning units and refrigerators await their return.
For now though they sit and wait on an
Iraqi Airfield, waiting for darkness. As the mid afternoon
inferno slowly, almost begrudgingly, gives way to cooler night
temperatures the paratroopers line up vehicles and prepare their
attack.
As night falls and the earliest hours
of morning creep in the vehicles roll out with a vengeance, kicking up the
fine dirt power into an enormous cloud that covers everything, every crack
and crevice, every inch of everything.
Everyone is hyper alert, everyone is
ready, everyone is nervous.
Everyone who has any brains is scared, if only just a little
bit.
Tracer rounds fly low over rooftops and
the sounds of automatic gunfire crack through the drone of the
convoy. Then again as
the fire is returned and again a third time is what can only be, well who
knows what that can be.
Something’s happened, something up
ahead, something to the convoy.
Something’s happened.
Nothing stops. Everything keeps rolling, making
turns, zipping down streets, around obstacles, around corners and then
into the fight.
Or
rather, where the fight just was.
As the lead element, Able Company,
continues to push towards its objective it drives through the site of the
firefight that occurred seconds before. The bodies of paratroopers
are on the ground, pulled close to barriers to afford them protection,
being worked on by medics.
No one is sure if they are alive or
dead. They are wounded,
who knows how bad, there isn’t time to determine that. As soon as you see them,
you’ve driven past them and on into the city. If this were a work of
fiction, some paperback novel titled ‘men of guts and honor’ or ‘sacrifice
city’ the rest would be a tale of fierce, bloody battles. But this isn’t that and the
rest of the story, to borrow from Paul Harvey, works out a bit
differently.
“The mission of 2-503d Inf (Abn) was a
direct action, a direct attack on an assailant area known to have enemy
actions,” said Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, commander 2-503d Inf (Abn)
toward the conclusion of the seven-day mission. “There have been a number of
strikes in the last few weeks and the 4th Infantry Division commander
decided to do some deliberate attacks in this particular area, surrounded
by the tigress river, to destroy, detain or seize any high value targets
that are suspected to be working in the area.”
Now that it’s almost over and the
paratroopers are preparing to move back to Kirkuk from this small Sunni
enclave just north of Baghdad there is a sense of celebration in the
air. Chickens,
purchased at a local market through the interpreters, are grilling in the
backyard of a temporary safe house alongside the Tigress river as the
brutal sun finally starts to set. Sodas are being iced down
and more then a few hands of spades are dealt. Caraccilo himself is in a
good mood and occasionally tackles one of his staff officers between
cigars and hands of spades, played with his sergeant major, his executive
officer and his S3. The
colonel and his sergeant major win, in case you keep track of that sort of
thing.
Besides the search for and capture of
high-ranking Ba’ath party officials the operation was also meant to show a
strong U.S. presence in an area that, until recently, had been the site of
one U.S. death per day on average, Caraccilo explains, taking a break from
the din of the radios that constantly chatter. Even mid hand in a game of spades
he runs into the house several times to monitor this patrol or that
checkpoint.
No soldiers assigned to the Rock, as
the 2-503d Inf (Abn) is known, were killed. Four soldiers were wounded,
none seriously, when their vehicles drove through an ambush that erupted
only seconds earlier. A fifth
soldier was also injured when he fell from a rooftop during the
operation.
“We also wanted to show a U.S. presence
in an area that has yet to be covered by a U.S. force,” Caraccilo
said. “Forces have driven
over this area but no U.S. personnel have driven or patrolled or conducted
any kind of military operation inside this particular
peninsula.”
“The intent was to come
here and go after some specific individuals, knowing perfectly well that
most of the time when something like this is based off of human sources
that the chances are your target wont be there when you arrive, none the
less there has been a lot of action here so we know there are some
unsavory figures. We
had to screen more then 400 detainees in just the first two nights,” he
explained.
And the screening paid off.
More then 50 of those 300 have been
confirmed as Feydayeen, Caraccilo explained. “That’s a big deal. These people that we’re looking
for are still husbanding the old regime as a way of life. By removing a pocket of Feydayeen
soldiers we’ve done a pretty big thing.”
While no one was willing to call the
locals here friendly there was a change in their demeanor over the course
of the mission. While The
173d comes in full force they are quick to change tact’s, talking to
leaders, talking to merchants and explaining why they are there, listening
to concerns and generally trying to make everyone feel more at
ease.
“I really do think that there are some
unfriendly people here that don’t like Americans but I think you would
find that anywhere in Iraq or even any part of the world,” he said. “But I think that mostly in this
area the people are just confused.
Confused and scared.
When you come in here with 8 large helicopters, a battalion of
Bradley fighting vehicles and a bunch of paratroops to swarm the area you
scare some people. You hit
them hard but then you pull back and you go out and you start talking to
them and you tell them what you’re there for.”
And the colonel isn’t above doing some
of that talking.
“I sat yesterday having tea with some
of the people here. We
were driving by and they waved at us and invited us inside for tea. We just talked to them. We described what it was we were
doing and why. Come to
find out two of the individuals had just gotten out of (an American) jail
in Tikrit. Where else in the
world can you sit with people you just detained for questioning and drink
tea?” he said laughing.
It’s a struggle to understand the
culture. I think we’re
starting to figure it out.
Once you understand the conditions, the right and left limit, I
think you can get a lot accomplished.”
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