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.
31
A slang term heard mostly in Korea: someone who runs around doing menial work for some organization—"an errand boy."