Foreign Service Firefight

Foreign Service Journal ^ | June 1, 2004 | Phillip S. Kosnett

[dagnabbit]

FOREIGN SERVICE FIREFIGHT

AN FSO DESCRIBES A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH IRAQI INSURGENTS ON THE ROAD FROM BAGHDAD TO NAJAF.

BY PHILIP S. KOSNETT

March 5, 2004.

We were southbound on the main highway from Baghdad to the Coalition Provisional Authority provincial headquarters in Najaf late on a Friday afternoon. Our three-car convoy carried six American personnel and a sixman Salvadoran personal security detachment from a Spanish/Salvadoran base in the city. By agreement with the Salvadoran commander, his U.S.trained personal security team was assigned fulltime to protect us. The Cuscatlan Battalion, based in Najaf, is the best in the Salvadoran army, as we were soon to learn.

Contract admin officer Lionel, a recently-retired 82nd Airborne NCO, was driving the lead car, an unarmored Chevy Suburban. He had his own AK47 next to the seat and (along with everyone in the convoy save one) a Glock 9mm sidearm. Beside him was the "shotgun seat" shooter, our USAF staff sergeant Arabic linguist Sam, armed with an MP5 machine pistol. In the right rear seat was our civilian contractor information technology officer Mike, armed with a folding-stock AK47, designed to be easy to maneuver inside a vehicle. In the left rear seat was a Salvadoran sergeant nicknamed "Tauro," armed with an M4 - the short-stock carbine version of the M16, also good for use inside vehicles.

The second vehicle was a fully armored Ford Excursion, with Private "German" driving and the detachment commander, Sergeant First Class "Gato," in the right hand seat. Both were armed with M4s. I was in the middle seat. In the rear seat were Rick, then the governorate coordinator (the senior CPA official in the province; I was his deputy) and our development program manager Grace, a DOD civilian (the only unarmed passenger). Like everyone in the convoy, we wore ballistic vests and Kevlar helmets. In the trail car, another unarmored Suburban, were Corporal "Zorro" and Sergeants "Alcon" and "Cuervo," armed with Glocks, M4s...and a surprise.

Afternoon Ambush
Ahead of us, "noncompliant elements" or "NCEs" - a goofy new military acronym meaning "people still shooting at us in Iraq" - had attacked and disabled a truck, leading to a frenzy of looting by motorists who had stopped along the road, filling the highway with pedestrians. As we approached the scene, Lionel radioed the trailing vehicles to stay close and stay sharp. We had to slow down from our usual 100 mph to negotiate the crowd, whereupon shooters popped up on both sides of the road, from at least two cars a hundred meters apart on our left, and from behind a berm farther up on the right. They opened fire with AK47s on full auto, shooting wildly ("spray and pray").

Lionel increased speed to lead us through the ambush. Of the three shooters in the lead car, Mike was the first to return fire. He drew a bead on the guys behind the berm on the right and unloaded a full 30-round magazine, effectively suppressing their fire (i.e., they dove for cover). Mike then suffered our only injury - in his haste he had steadied the AK against the wrong shoulder, his left, and the brass cartridge casings consequently hit him in the chin, producing a little blood. Only later did he figure out why he was bleeding.

In the "hard car," I was looking the wrong way and saw nothing when the shooting started, but Rick saw the first team of NCEs on the left pop out of their car and raise their rifles. The distinctive pop-pop sound of multiple AKs started up, but although I’d heard and even fired AKs on the range, my brain refused to accept reality until Rick shouted, "They’re shooting at us!" Since we couldn’t fire back through the bullet-resistant windows, Rick, Grace and I hit the floor of the truck.

I could see nothing but truck flooring but here’s what I heard: A steady drumbeat of AK fire. Gato shouting orders over the radio in Spanish. Lionel on the radio, asking if we were OK. Here’s what I smelled: burning tire and the sulfurous odor of gunpowder.

All three cars had now lost a tire on the right side. Evidently the NCEs had planned cripple the vehicles with fire from the berm on the right and finish us off with fire from the left and left rear. Our right front tire had been hit but German maintained control, even as the tire shredded. Then the pop-pop of the 7.62mm AK's slacked off, replaced by another sound from our tril car: the zip of a 5.56mm light machine gun.

MiniMe Strikes Back
The enemy was used to seeing CPA and other civilian vehicles with riflemen poised to pump out fire from the sides. However, the rear is usually the weak spot of a CPA convoy (unlike a military convoy, which will have a humvee or other heavily armed combat vehicle bringing up the rear). So we think they were surprised when the sergeant the other Salvadorans called Cuervo, but whom the Americans had dubbed "MiniMe" (from the Austin Powers movies) - a runty, shaven-headed guy with a gold tooth and a scary grin - opened up with disciplined, sustained Squad Automatic Weapon fire through the rear window of the trail car. He fired two full belts - 200 rounds - at the 12 or more guys now firing at us from behind, with such careful aim that he shot only a small circular hole through the rear windshield. (We later told him he would have to pay for the windshield, horrifying him until he realized we were kidding.) Meanwhile, Tauro and Alcon were blazing away through side windows with their M4s.

MiniMe claimed one confirmed kill (I’ll spare you the description) and two probables; Lionel saw them go down hard in the rearview mirror as enemy tracers continued to pass the vehicles on both sides. Still lying on the floor, I felt the hard car vibrate as the right front tire disintegrated. We rolled on through the ambush and continued for perhaps two or three kilometers.

By now all three of our vehicles were running on three good tires and one wheel rim. It was enemy doctrine in such situations to pursue escaping to vehicles to finish them off. Lionel observed that the heavy Excursion had slowed to about 60 mph and was unable to keep up. Demonstrating selfless courage, he turned the lead car around and radioed us to stop and form a perimeter.

All southbound civilian traffic had stopped a couple hundred meters up the road from us and traffic was beginning to back up all the way to Baghdad. Unlike rubberneckers at your ordinary highway accident, the northbound drivers took one look at our little band across the median and hit the accelerator.

With Gato and Lionel directing the defense, the six Salvadorans went prone on the road and on the shoulder looking back at northbound traffic, waiting for the NCEs to come up on us from behind. Everybody, including the civilians, was calm and businesslike - until MiniMe, repositioning, tripped, dropped his SAW in the dirt, and did a header. Blackclad, he looked like a Mayan bowling ball rolling down the shoulder, and those who happened to catch this sight couldn’t help but laugh despite our circumstances. He laughed, too, shy and embarrassed, before recovering his weapon and resuming his position.

Sam, with his MP5, knelt on the west side of the vehicles, scanning some mud huts and intermittent traffic on a dirt road a couple of hundred meters away. I couldn’t see Mike, who was covering the east with his AK. Lionel and Rick, weapons at the ready, were using satellite phones to call for help and warn coalition forces of the danger. And I was kneeling in the dirt on the south side of our position, covering the traffic coming from the south with my sidearm in case the NCEs had another team in place to swoop in while all our firepower was pointed in the other direction.

Let me be clear: I was not enjoying this. I was intensely aware that the first time in my life I had fired a handgun was in the Diplomatic Security Iraq course two months earlier. I had fired a total of maybe 40 rounds that day in West Virginia and subsequently at the firing range in Najaf. I had no illusions about my ability to hit a moving car or a concealed sniper with a pistol. I knew that if a carload of bad guys came zipping up the road with Aks hanging out the windows, the best I might manage would be to get off some rounds in the right direction to alert the Salvadorans to the threat to our rear.

The wait seemed to last a very long time, and my sidearm felt very small.

After maybe 15 minutes, I was relieved to see two U.S. soldiers in full battle rattle with M16s come upand join me looking south. A couple of humvees full of Signals troops had happened upon us and stopped to help. By now, we were pretty sure the NCEs were not coming back, having lost any ardor for pursuit after MiniMe opened up. A couple of our guys got out jacks and started to change tires. Grace, unamred, was quite rightly still sitting in the "hard car" complaining about not having a weapon. I asked her if she wanted to take some photos and she jumped out with my digital camera and started snapping away.

Then a group of vehicles approached at high speed from the north, weaving through the tangled mass of stopped Iraqi civilian traffic, and jumped the median to roar south in the northbound lane. The Salvadorans drew a bead on them as they neared - but it was another party of CPA participants from the conference we’d gone to in Baghdad, on their way home to the regional base at Hilla. Their personal security detail jumped out to strengthen the perimeter, which was now feeling quite secure. After a brief consultation, Rick, Grace and I hopped into the Hilla-bound cars for the 30-minute drive there.

Only after we were on the road did I realize that Mike, Sam, Lionel and the Salvadorans were staying behind to recover the vehicles. A wave of guilt hit me, even though I knew that they hardly needed me and my sidearm to stay behind; in fact, Rick, Grace and I were distractions.

At the heavily fortified Hilla camp, CPA security debriefed Grace, Rick and me while we were still fresh. I called my wife Alison in North Carolina, catching her at her office. We prayed together for the rest of the team to make it safely to Hilla. Almost immediately after I hung up, Lionel led our three vehicles onto the compound. It turned out that shortly after we had driven off, an MP patrol had come on the scene, securing the perimeter along with the Signals team until the tires were changed. So they had been in good hands.

Lessons Learned
We started slapping backs and counting the bullet holes in all three vehicles. The ones in the "soft" cars should have disabled the drivers and caused everyone’s death; somehow, they had struck glancingly or buried themselves in the doorframes or roofs. One had hit the passenger door of the hard car head on and been stopped by the armor. Had the vehicle been unarmored, it would likely have hit the person sitting there, who happened to be me (though I may have already been on the floor by the time that bullet hit).

Besides poor Iraqi marksmanship, I see two other reasons we survived the attack. One was the sheer speed and firepower we demonstrated - more than the enemy was used to from a CPA convoy. Needless to say, Lionel and Mike far exceeded their work requirements as contract admin staff, and Rick nominated them for Civilian Service medals. He also nominated the Salvadorans for the Bronze Star, one of America’s most distinguished decorations.

But in my view, the most important factor was divine intervention. Either you believe in this or you don’t. I do.

I also offer the following lessons for the 21st-century diplomat based on our experience:

1. If you are ever offered firearms training, take it. Then go find a range and practice.

2. If you are ever offered evasive driving training, take it. To my utter amazement, somebody decided that Foreign Service personnel would never need to drive in Iraq and dropped driver training from the DS Iraq course; in fact, I and other CPA FSOs have been behind the wheel in mixed CPA/military convoys, which takes some practice. More to the point, if a driver is disabled every passenger must be prepared to take over. And let’s not sugarcoat what that could mean: it could mean climbing over the seat to shove a wounded or dead driver aside.

3. If you have the option of wearing earth tones to a firefight, take it. I have been counseled that my pink Foreign Service-issue, button-down dress shirt was not a traditional choice for battlefield camouflage.

Afterward
The rest of the day was anticlimactic. It was too late to drive on to Najaf before dark (plus the cars needed repairs and new spare tires), so we arranged to stay overnight at the Hilla HQ, a converted hotel. We had a steak dinner with real silverware.The hotel even had a bar, where the Salvadorans joined us to drink Corona, shoot pool, watch a little baseball on the Armed Forces Network, and analyze the day’s events. There was no macho posturing; we all knew we’d been lucky. I found a few quiet minutes to sit alone on the hotel balcony looking down on the palm trees and the moonlit Euphrates - through a screen of RPG netting - and call my wife again. Throughout the evening, our Hillabased friends and coworkers searched us out to offer congratulations and commiseration. Our good Spanish Army friend, Major "Kiké," had experienced two ambushes of his own in previous weeks, and it was a running joke that nobody wanted to ride with badluck Kiké. So his first words to me that evening were, "Phil, this time it’s not my fault!"

The regional Women’s Programs Coordinator, Fern Holland, rushed out along with her local assistant Salwa Oumashi to offer hugs and sodas. We last saw Fern late in the evening sorting piles of children’s books for delivery to schools. Bob Zangas, a media development officer (and a Marine Reservist who had fought in the liberation of Iraq, then sought a CPA job so he could help to rebuild the country), joined us in the bar.

When Grace had gone off to her hotel room for the night, the rest of the team gathered in a cozy bunkroom of our own and prepared to sack out. It was a real bonding experience with the Salvadorans. None of them spoke more than a couple words of English; three of our team had good Spanish but for the rest of us, the relationship was built on pidgin and hand signals.

Over a final quiet drink in the bunkroom (the Salvadorans aren’t supposed to drink in Iraq; please don’t tell their colonel we made them, although he is intensely proud of them for bringing honor on the Salvadoran Army and might look the other way - once), we told them, not for the first time, that we were proud to have such professionals on our team, and that we always felt safe with them. (Besides the odd firefight, these guys have stared down mobs for us.) They told us, also not for the first time, that they were proud to work with us and would willingly die to protect us. We responded with Patton’s well-known line about how you’re not supposed to die for your country; you’re supposed to make the other guys die for their country. The squad found this quite funny.

Then Gato, who had been wounded in action as a teenage soldier fighting communist guerrillas in the 1980s, told us that he and his men were in Iraq to fight for peace, and they hoped Iraq would become a nation at peace. He added that they were especially pleased to be supporting the U.S., which had done so much to end terror and support democracy in El Salvador. Gato might barely have heard of Iraq a year earlier. He doesn’t have the most nuanced view of geopolitics. But at that moment I would happily have put Gato on CNN or BBC to explain the concepts of good and evil to the talking heads who have forgotten.

Safely back in Najaf four days later, we learned from Kiké that Fern, Salwa, and Bob had been ambushed and murdered on the Karbala-Hilla road. They were the first CPA civilians to die in Iraq. Their deaths hit the Najaf team hard, in part because we knew them, and in part because of the reminder of how close to death we had also come on the highway. But we also grieved because Fern, Salwa and Bob had devoted themselves to helping Iraqis build a foundation for peace and freedom in their tormented country.

We grieved. Then we got back to work.

I am very proud of what we are trying to accomplish here, and proud of the people around me.

Philip S. Kosnett, a 20-year FSO, was detailed to the Coalition Provincial Authority in Iraq as deputy governorate coordinator for Najaf. He is now the coordinator (the senior CPA official) in the province. He has also served in Ankara, Nagoya, The Hague, Pristina and Washington, D.C.

[dagnabbit]

A few photos are included in the .pdf version of the article at the source URL.

[mcshot]

Thanks for the excellent read showing the importance of international cooperation and the protective spirit of our allies.
mc

[B4Ranch]

Ping to a good firefight

[ChinaThreat]

I guess their is some gut left down at Foggy Bottom.

[dagnabbit]

I liked:

"I would have happily put Gato on CNN or BBC to explain the concepts of good and evil to the talking heads who have forgotten."

[dagnabbit]

[FreedomPoster]

Ping.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Good read.

[musicman]

Very good post.....BTTT