The Enemy in the Wind (III)

Part two is here.

The New York Times, after the dust settled:

A few wars ago, the potent dust storm that pummeled American-led forces in Iraq last week would have roared out of the desert with hardly any warning.

This time, the troops knew that it was coming more than five days in advance, allowing commanders to tailor battle plans to the choking, blinding conditions.
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''It's one thing to say there's going to be a big storm, but another thing to say where and when it's going to be sand or a thunderstorm or where there'll be cloud cover and rain,'' said Lt. Col. Thomas B. Frooninckx, who commands the 28th Operational Weather Squadron of the Air Force. The squadron, at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., is the main source of weather forecasts for the forces in Iraq.

''We hit this one pretty darn well,'' said Colonel Frooninckx (pronounced FRAW-nix).

And they did. The New York Times, March 23rd:

For the first time since the war began, American-led forces in and around Iraq will face the fury of a powerful dust storm and sandstorm starting Monday night, meteorologists are predicting.

...the approaching storm system is particularly potent, the forecasters said, and will probably create significant challenges for forces in the desert.

In fact, the forecast was in the news as early as March 21st.

But predictions don't always change results:

A howling sandstorm Monday in the desert of southern Iraq -- rather than Iraqi resistance -- slowed the advance of the US Army's 101st Airborne Division toward Baghdad, a US officer said.

Army meteorologists said bad weather could hamper movements through Wednesday in the four-day-old campaign to unseat Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The division was moving up from the southwest on the left flank of the US Army's Third Infantry Division but was stop-and-go, buffeted by strong winds and hampered by poor visibility.

The dust storm was so strong it blew over a 5,000 gallon fuel tanker, injuring one soldier, officers said. They wanted to send in a Black Hawk helicopter to evacuate him but were unable because of the winds.

"The big sandstorm was even worse than predicted." General Tommy Franks recalled, "Reddish brown dust formed a high dome in the western desert and rolled over southern Iraq -- and over 170,000 coalition troops. Visibility dropped to 10 meters or less. Rain pounded down through the red dust, turning the air to mud."

Whether well predicted or not, as noted in part one of this series, the forecast doesn't always make it to everyone on the ground.

Rick Atkinson, with the 101st:

At dawn on Tuesday, March 25th, the skies began to cloud. By mid afternoon the weather was not only worse than it had been on Monday, it was worse than it had ever been in the long, sorry history of Mesopotamia, or so we preferred to believe. A fierce storm that, like this one, blows out of the south is known as a turab, but everyone in the 101st Airborne Division insisted on calling it a shamal - which is a wind from the north - perhaps because shamal has a plague-of-frogs ring. Begoggled soldiers pulling guard duty sat in burrows with neck gators pulled up around their ears. Helicopters flew briefly before being grounded again, and even vehicle traffic all but ceased as visibility dropped and the odds of getting lost shortened. Except for the grumble of generators, the normal racket of an Army bivouac faded, overwhelmed by creaking tent ropes and the shrieking wind.

The shamal grows into one of the worst storms anyone has experienced so far in the Middle East. The sky looks like someone picked up a desert and is now turning it upside down on top of us. Then it rains, which comes down as globs of mud. To top it off, it starts to hail. A junior officer walks a few meters out into into this weather to take a dump and becomes hopelessly lost. A team of Recon Marines is organized to go look for him (and he is eventually found, dazed and sheepish, several hours later).

Embedded with the 3d Infantry Division on the road to Baghdad, Jules Crittenden would relate a similar tale:

March 25, 2003

A dusty haze turned into a full-blown duststorm by mid-afternoon. It was like a blizzard, engulfing everything, reducing visibility to a matter of feet. We hunkered down in our vehicles, barely able to make out the tracks just 50 feet away from us.

The air around us was yellow at mid-day, orange in the late afternoon, blood-red at dusk and pitch black when night fell.

None of the surrounding vehicles were visible at all, and except for the radios, we were entirely cut off from each other. When Smitty and I went out into it to share a butt, Smitty was a dim shadow, standing just a few feet away. Grit flew into my mouth and formed a layer of mud on my lips. I looked down, and through my dust-covered goggles, I could make out something darting around my feet. It was a desert rat, eyeballing the open leg of my baggy J-list chemical warfare suit, a dark hole that probably looked inviting. I kicked at it, and it bolted to safety under the Bradley.

Word passed early in the evening that Spec. Terrance Johnson was missing. He had left his tank in the afternoon to go visiting at the next tank 200 feet away, and never showed up. Parties were formed to go looking for him, with their GPS pluggers for guidance and, for those who had them, thermal imaging devices to see through the storm as best they could. They were out all night.

"I was driving around, I couldn't see shit," the XO, Lt. Tomlinson, told me later. "Maybe three, four feet in front of the vehicle with the lights on. When we turned off the lights, closed our eyes and opened them, no difference. We could have driven right past him and never seen him."

(To learn the fate of Spec. Johnson, see Jules' follow up report here.)

"As the night went on it rained mud." Jules wrote, "The wind got colder. Enemy raiders attacked somewhere nearby, and we heard the clatter of small arms fire and booming artillery muffled by the dust cloud."

Ironically, some of that small arms fire could have been from Staff Sergeant Gerry Thompson, an Air Force weather forecaster at the tip of the spear with elements of the 3ID. Thompson would later relate his experiences as part of a Weather Channel documentary on the role of forecasters in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Halted that night with the rest of the division by the storm, Thompson and a fellow soldier were alternating guard duty "somewhere near Najaf".

"I would go out for a while, he would go out for a while... in between we'd try to catch a little cat nap in the vehicle. But the vehicle was shaking because of 40-knot winds."
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Sergeant Gerry Thompson walks the perimeter, suddenly a hail of bullets rip past him.

"It was very chaotic," Thompson recalls, "because you couldn't tell where the shots were coming from. All you could hear were vehicles getting hit, weapons going off..."

"You couldn't see who was shooting, where they were shooting from. Bombs were going off around us. I was lucky to have a really good First Sergeant who pointed everyone in the right direction. From the northwest to the northeast we were under attack..."

Part four is here.