A different enemy

November 16, 2004

Lt. Shannon Keener gathered his soldiers around him in the predawn gloom of Camp Taji.

Keener, of Dallas and leader of 1st Platoon, Delta Company, 3rd Battalion of Arkansas’ 39th Infantry Brigade, warned that things had changed in the north.

“This is a different enemy. They aim. They stay. They fight,” he said.

The Sunni Muslims north of Taji have declared jihad, or holy war, against the Americans.

Fire fights have erupted almost everyday along Highway 1, the main supply route between Camp Taji and Camp Anaconda to the north.

And today, it was 1st Platoon’s job to secure a major stretch of the roadway.

It’s numbingly monotonous most days, but can be hair-raisingly scary others.

Today fell somewhere between the two extremes.

Within the first 15 minutes of patrol, shots rang out.

Sgt. James Hill of Newport shot the median beside a Mercedes truck that was barreling down on the patrol. The men checked on the driver, who had bumped his knee when abruptly stopping the truck, and then continued on patrol.

As Spc. Vester Smith of Newport drove and Spc. Ryan Rainwater of El Dorado eyed the road from the gunner’s turret, they swapped stories about 5th Platoon’s series of fire fights two days earlier.

“They had to throw grenades,” Rainwater said.

“It was in some palm grove,” Smith added.

The palm grove was ahead of them, past a stretch of road battered by recent roadside bombs.

The soldiers in the front humvee saw a box the size of an artillery shell in the median and stopped to check it out. It was just a box.

Then they turned around and went to check out an area where Hill had seen a man run from his vehicle and drop something by a nearby wall.

“We’ll never make to our ending grid square at this rate,” Keener said. “Everything is suspicious, though. I don’t trust these people.”

The day had just started. One hour of patrol down, 11 to go, Rainwater said.

An hour later he’d yell at one of the other gunners that they only had 600 minutes of work left in the day.

The hours crawled by as the soldiers looped the same stretch of highway looking for trouble.

“Sometimes, I see these other battalions getting together and playing football or softball as I head out of the wire and I think, ‘I want to play’,” Keener said.

But there hasn’t been time to play lately.

As the morning ticked toward noon, the patrol came to a sharp halt. Next to Keener’s truck was a white sack with wires coming out of it.

“Back up! Back up!” Keener yelled.

The soldiers studied the suspicious bag and decided to call in bomb experts. They arrived with plastic explosives and a little robot with tank-like tracks for wheels and an arm with a claw on the end. The robot set a charge and blew up the bag.

The result wasn’t a big boom, not artillery size.

The bomb specialists determined the bag was a decoy, set to look like a bomb so insurgents could watch how soldiers responded. The information could then be used to set up a future ambush or build a better disguised bomb.

“These cats are smart,” Keener said, shaking his head.

Posted by Amy at November 16, 2004 04:16 PM