The Enemy in the Wind (II)

Part one is here.

Once on the ground at Shell, Atkinson learned what Petraeus' cryptic remark just prior to the dust storm had meant.

Referring to Colonel Greg Gass, who commanded the Apaches scheduled to attack the Medina Division's 14th Brigade that night, Petraeus added, "Destiny Six may have that same look in his eyes as some of those guys you write about in the early days of the North Africa campaign."

I barely had time to wonder what he was talking about - wasn't the 3rd Infantry Division more than half way to Baghdad? Why should Gass be unsettled just because the 11th Regiment had lost a couple of helicopters the previous night?

The 11th's mission, in fact, had been a disaster. Atkinson:

Wallace had arranged for his pilots from the 11th Regiment at Rams to to discuss [with pilots of the 101st Airborne], in a conference call by satellite phone, their star-crossed mission the previous night.

General Franks described a planned

...deep attack by the Apache gunships of the 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment (AHR) on the artillery and armor of the Medina Republican Guard division north of the narrow Karbala gap. These units were the strongest Iraqi blocking force between the advancing V Corps and Baghdad.

The operation was rated a moderate risk, but it had the potential of a high payoff if the gunships could cripple the Medina division in one fast, hard-hitting blow.

Atkinson:

Sixty Apaches had flown 230 miles from Udairi to Rams on Sunday afternoon to stage for the attack that night. Their ambition was to shred three Medina brigades and the division artillery, expediting the 3rd Infantry Division's drive past Karbala into the southern approaches to Baghdad. U.S. intelligence had a precise count of Iraqi equipment - eighty-seven guns in the Medina artillery, and 291 combat vehicles in the three brigades, of which half were to be destroyed - but rather sketchy notions of how that equipment was arrayed northeast of Karbala and south of Baghdad... The attack therefore required what the Army called a movement to contact - groping for the enemy - rather than the deliberate attack preferred by marauding helicopter units.

Franks:

The headquarters phone beside my bed jolted me out of sleep. It was just past 0320 hours. For one disorienting moment, I couldn't remember where I was.

"Bad news on the 11th AHR's deep strike, sir," Gene said.

Bad news was an understatement.

The 11th AHR had been late reaching its refueling point in the desert and there hadn't been enough fuel, so some gunships had to be eliminated from the attack. The staging area was ankle-deep in talcum-fine dust, which became a blinding pall as rotor blades beat the air. And as the mile-long line of helicopters, maintenance trucks and fuel tankers stood in the dust cloud, a bunch of Iraqi civilians -- some undoubtedly fedayeen -- appeared through the haze and disappeared just as quickly.

These intruders had witnessed 36 Apache gunships, loaded with missiles, fueling for a mission. There was only one direction they would fly -- north toward the enemy formations above the Karbala gap.

And there was more. The Apaches were behind schedule. Due to poor communications, the fighter-bombers that were due to suppress enemy air defenses returned to their bases before the gunships departed for the attack.

When the long columns of fast, low-flying Apaches crossed the Euphrates they encountered another nasty surprise. The aviators had planned routes to avoid the villages and towns on their tactical maps. But the maps did not show the network of farmhouses and large farming compounds, all brightly lit, which spread uninterrupted all the way northeast to the bright city glow of Baghdad.

The intensity of this ground lighting maxed out the pilots' night-vision goggles, rendering them useless. Just as seriously, it illuminated the Apaches as they sped north.

Almost as soon as the advancing gunships entered this farm country, entire blocks of lights blinked out for several seconds, then snapped on again -- a signal to perhaps thousands of Iraqi soldiers and fedayeen hiding among the adobe sheds and date groves.

The aviators met a virtually solid wall of small-arms fire. One after another the Apaches were hit. Several crewmen were wounded. Some of the aircraft were forced to abort. Others pressed ahead but the battle damage accumulated.

Atkinson:

U.S. intelligence eavesdroppers had detected fifty cell-phone calls made by Iraqi observers as the helicopters moved north...

Senior U.S. commanders had considered bombing the Iraqi power grid, but ultimately chose to leave the lights burning in an effort to minimize reconstruction requirements. On this mission, the decision backfired. As the Apaches arrived overhead, all of the lights in a large area - including the towns of Haswah and Iskandariyah - were extinguished simultaneously by a master switch. Two seconds later, the lights came back on, a signal for hundreds of Iraqis with small arms to fire into the air. The helicopters flew into a wall of lead...

In the Apache known as Palerider 16, Lieutenant Jason King was shot through the neck; his crewmate in the rear seat could hear breathing over the intercom, but King was unable to talk with a throat full of blood.

Fire came from "all directions, front, back, left, right. We detected no emitters whatsoever," another voice added, which meant that no sophisticated air-defense radars had been employed, just formations of unguided "iron sight" fire from rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and simple anti-aircraft guns. Pilots in the back seat, using the Apache's thermal night-vision system, which revealed heat-radiant objects such as tanks and humans, could not see the Iraqi tracers. Those tracers were all too visible to copilots in the front seat, wearing night vision goggles that amplified the ambient light; only the back-seaters, however, controlled the 30mm chain gun, so the front-seater had to laboriously direct the back-seater's gun onto the target with instructions over the intercom.
<...>
Gunfire had erupted from rooftops, cars, balconies, alleys, backyards, and trees. "They're suburbs are not like our suburbs," one pilot said. Another added, "The volume of fire intensified with each subsequent troop cycling in, and it got heavier the farther north we went. Most of it came from housing areas." Some pilots had been reluctant to fire back for fear of killing civilians. "But after a few hits," a pilot later said, "you get less reluctant." Several Iraqi buildings had been destroyed, including one believed to be a school. "But that's where the fire was coming from."

In the end only one Apache unit reached its objective, a long oasis where 30 T-72 Republican Guard tanks were dug in. But the ground fire there was so intense that the gunships had to withdraw before firing a missile. Not one tank or artillery piece of the Medina division was damaged in the attack.

Thirty Apaches had launched from the refueling point; 29 made it back with some degree of battle damage. But one had its hydraulics shot out and made a hard landing in enemy territory. Its two crewmen were taken prisoner. It's a blessing we didn't lose the whole battalion, I thought.

Apaches limped back to Rams, some without functioning navigation equipment or sights. At least two narrowly avoided a midair collision. Of the twenty-nine aircraft that returned safely, all but one "sustained some damage." "The sun came up and it was eerie," one captain later recalled. "You had never seen helicopters so muddy, so many canopies with holes in them." Stunned pilots sat slumped in the cockpits or on the Apaches' stubby wings. On average, each helicopter had fifteen to twenty bullet holes; one took twenty-nine hits. Sixteen main rotor blades and six tail blades were damaged enough to require replacement, along with six engines and five drive shafts. Forty-six other blades needed repairs.
<...>
Gass thanked Colonel Wolf for his time and signed off. "All right Greg," Wolf replied, "lots of luck to you. Out here."

The 101st pilots filed out of the ACP. No one said much. The wind howled outside.
<...>
If this was bad for the 11th Regiment, in some ways it was worse for the 101st, boding ill for a division that had staked much of its combat reputation in this war on the lethality of deep attacks. Wallace had concluded, as I eventually learned from Army documents that recorded his reactions, that "deep operations with the Apaches, unless there's a very, very, very clear need to do it, are probably not a good idea." Plans to have the 101st clear a zone around Baghdad's international airport were now, in Wallace's words, "in the trash can."

I looked back over the past 24 hours. The fedayeen. The maintenance troops killed, wounded and captured. Now this disaster with the Apaches. And I couldn't forget the weather forecast. Within 24 hours we would have no helicopters and no Predators in the air.

We were in for a difficult period, but I had no doubt of the outcome. We would win this fight.

But between Baghdad and the 3ID, the Medina Division waited, intact.

Part three is here.