Then we pulled the time fuse on the C-4 and ran as quickly as we could back up one of the canals. Suddenly, we hit an area where the canal got shallow, and there was a turn. We were basically stuck in this elbow in the canal.
When the charge went off, the Iraqis were less than a minute behind us, and close air support was twenty minutes out. I knew we were in some deep shit. A company-sized element was maneuvering on us, trying to outflank us.
As soon as the charge went off, we came under heavy fire. We waited. We held our fire.
It wasn't easy, though. The most accurate fire didn't come from the soldiers. The Bedouins were hunters, and they were good…. I mean, kicking the dirt around our heads.
As the soldiers came in, they moved in groups of four or five, walking upright, looking and holding their guns up to the ready. They had on low-quarter shoes, office shoes. These were not front-line troops, combat soldiers; they were office workers. They'd been told to grab their guns and go out and get us.
A U.S. infantry squad would have kept a low profile, doing fire-maneuver and bounding and going off to position, but these guys were just standing upright. That was to our benefit.
Buzzsaw said, "Do we fire? Do we fire?"
Finally, I said, "Yes, open fire."
Nobody did anything for a while, because everybody was sort of reluctant to get it going. They knew that once we started shooting, we were in deep trouble. So I gave it again: "Fire."
Buzzsaw opened up with his 203 (a 40mm grenade launcher attached to an M-16). The other 203s opened up. The grenades went out and landed among the Iraqis. All of a sudden, a guy'd be out there with tattered clothing staggering around. The rest of them had dropped. You wondered what in the world was going on.
My guess is that in that opening volley, we eliminated probably forty of them.
All of a sudden, we were in a hell of a firefight, but holding our own, desperate for close air support.
We had to set our SATCOM radio back up in the UHF mode so we could talk to the aircraft. We set up the SATCOM dish, then went to put in the whip antenna. We had lost it.
It seems that when things go bad, they go really bad. We were in the midst of a firefight, and we didn't have any way to talk to the aircraft.
But sometimes you get lucky. Sergeant DeGroff just happened to be carrying a PRC-90 survival radio. He pulled it out, turned to Weatherford, my communications sergeant, and said, "Hey, will this thing work?"
Weatherford looked at it. "It's a line-of-sight radio," he said. "1 don't know if it'll work or not. I doubt it. Not unless somebody's in the area to pick it up."
The air support was out there. We could hear them over our SATCOM; they were calling for us, but we couldn't get them back. So they flew around without finding us.
After a while, one of the sorties took out a nearby bridge over the river because he didn't have anything better to do, and that actually helped us. A lot of civilians had come out for the show, and there were women and children out there, but once things started blowing up and they realized bombs were being dropped, the civilians fled.
About that time, we moved over into what 1 guess you'd call Plan B. We had school-trained snipers on our team, good-quality people; and as the Iraqi troops got up and tried to maneuver, we'd drop them. And we just stayed down in the ditch, which was probably the most secure place we could be. Had we gone up out of it, it would have been the end of things.
For a little while, things got quiet enough for DeGroff to pull out the PRC-90. He made a call over it and picked up an AWACS. And I'll tell you, when that voice came back over it, it was just miraculous. I can't use any other word. It was miraculous that we had a PRC-90 radio — fifties-vintage technology. But it worked, and it saved our skins.
Pretty soon, they got a forward air controller to talk to us, and then they started sending sorties of F-16s. F-16s are not your ideal close air support platform, but they were the ones that could get there the quickest. So the -16s got on the Guard net, and we could talk to them directly on the PRC- 90 radio. We used it to call close air support the rest of the day.
We still had a problem: We were in the midst of a firefight. We were taking fire from the flanks. We had to direct the planes in for close air support — there were a pair of them. But they couldn't spot our position.
We didn't bring smoke. We had pin flares, but it was the middle of the day, so pin flares didn't work. We did have signal mirrors, so we did what we could with them. The two F-16s flew over, and we were huddled down there in the ditch, trying to flash them with the signal mirrors.
That's when it came in handy that these guys had just taught close air support to the entire theater.
Buzzsaw said to the F-16 pilots, "Look, this might sound strange, but I want you to fly from the moon to the sun." Though it was about one o'clock in the afternoon, the sun and the moon were both out there at the same time. "When you're above me, I'll tell you. "
So they came around, and that's exactly what they did. One of the aviators picked us up, identified our position, and relayed it to the other. They went through a long conversation about our precise position, but once they'd done that, we were in business.
Meanwhile, some of the Iraqis had gone out there on the highway and were flagging down other vehicles, trying to get more people into the fray. It happened that an entire convoy of military vehicles, mostly deuce-and-a-halfs, was passing about then, and they got them to stop. So when our first strikes came in, they also destroyed the convoy — a lot of secondary explosions came off those deuce-and-a-halfs.
After that, vehicles would come down the highway, and people would try to flag them down, but they'd see bodies burning and wouldn't stop. They'd keep on going. They'd say, "I'm not going to get involved in that."
Later, I found out that one of the F-16 flights had picked up a column of armor coming into the area and had taken them out on the road before they came close to us.
However, that still left us with a lot of folks out there on one flank that was real hot, and other folks on the other flank, and I was up directing the fire, shifting back and forth. It was working very effectively, and 1 was very pleased: The guys were doing a tremendous job knocking off targets, keeping calm, saving the ammunition. Nobody stood up, like you see in movies, shooting full automatic from the waist. It was very calculated — lowering the barrel, taking a sight picture, pulling the trigger, and dropping the target.
But still, one of the flanks was very hot. We were really getting a lot of fire off it. We had to call in a close air support mission with cluster bombs. It was going to be close — what we call danger-close, which is anything within a thousand meters. It was maybe two hundred meters — not far at all.
We knew there was a risk — there always is, particularly with cluster bombs — that those cluster bombs would get the friendly forces. And that scared the shit out of me as much as the enemy soldiers did, getting blown up by our own Air Force.
But we called in the close air support on the flank. They came in, and again, it was almost miraculous. It was such an effective strike. The cluster bombs came down — looking like they were going to drop right on top of us — and then the clam shells opened up, and we could hear the bombs from down in the ditch.
When cluster bombs hit, they start ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba; it works into a crescendo, then tapers back down. And that's what happened. The bombs came right across and eliminated probably a platoon-worth of folks over on the flank that had been giving us so much trouble.