Posted on 11/28/2004 10:17:11 PM PST by Former Military Chick
CHARD DUWAISH, Iraq, Nov. 28 - As marines aboard fast patrol boats roared up the Euphrates on a dawn raid on Sunday, images pressed in of another American war where troops moved up wide rivers on camouflaged boats, with machine-gunners nervously scanning riverbanks for the hidden enemy.
That war is rarely mentioned among the American troops in Iraq, many of whom were not yet born when the last American combat units withdrew from Vietnam more than 30 years ago. A war that America did not win is considered a bad talisman among those men and women, who privately admit to fears that this war could be lost.
But as an orange moon sank below the bulrushes on Sunday morning, thoughts of Vietnam were hard to avoid.
Marines waded ashore through soft silted mud that caused some to sink to their waists, M-16 rifles held skyward as others on solid land held out their rifle barrels as lifelines.
Ashore, sodden and with boots squelching mud, the troops began a five-hour tramp through dense palm groves and across paddies crisscrossed by deep irrigation canals.
There were snatches of dialogue from "Apocalypse Now," and a black joke from one marine about the landscape resembling "a Vietnam theme park."
But behind the joshing lay something more serious: the sense expressed by many of the Americans as they scoured the area that in this war, too, the insurgents might have advantages that could make them a match for highly trained troops, technological gadgetry and multibillion-dollar war budgets.
The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit conducted the river raid as part of a weeklong offensive billed as a sequel to the battle for Falluja, less than 20 miles upriver from the village where the marines landed Sunday.
The 40-foot river craft they used are called Surcs, for Small Unit Riverine Craft, a high-tech update on the Swift boats used in Vietnam. The craft were flown into Iraq aboard giant C-5 transport aircraft and were first deployed with five-man crews during the battle for Falluja this month, patrolling the stretch of the Euphrates that runs along the city's western edge to prevent attempts by insurgents to escape that way after American troops had thrown a cordon around the city.
Those patrols were judged a success by American commanders. Now they are eager to exploit the potential the patrol boats give them for mounting fast, unexpected attacks along the Tigris and the Euphrates. The rivers run through many of the cities and towns that are rebel strongholds, and the long stretches of verdant riverbank provide ideal hiding places for insurgents and their weapons caches.
The raid, backed by air cover from attack helicopters and pilotless drones, gave the Americans a chance to exploit another new dimension of their strategy for winning the war: twinning American combat units with newly trained Iraqi troops.
After failures earlier this year, when many Iraqi units deserted or refused to fight, the American command wrote a new blueprint for training tens of thousands of Iraqi fighters and used Falluja as the first, critical testing ground. Considered a qualified success there, the best Iraqi units have been an integral part of every major raid in the follow-up offensive here.
In many raids, they have heavily outnumbered American troops, as they did in the operation on Sunday, which included 40 marines and 80 members of a special Iraqi commando unit assigned to the country's powerful Interior Ministry.
As much as they wanted to test their new river boats, American commanders wanted to see how the commandos - many drawn from elite units of Saddam Hussein's special forces - would respond to an arduous and potentially risky mission.
This day, long before the three-mile sweep through the palm groves and citrus orchards and paddies was ended, the mood among the marines had soured as the Iraqis adopted a mostly dilatory attitude toward the tedious business of spreading out in long lines and moving methodically across the terrain, poking haystacks, running metal detectors over piles of palm fronds, peering into thick clusters of bulrushes, and digging in places of freshly turned earth.
"They've just about given up," said Lt. Jerman Duarte, 34, of Houston, his voice edged with exasperation.
Lieutenant Duarte, a native of Guatemala, led the raid in his capacity as commander of a reconnaissance and surveillance platoon that has honed its skills in many of the marines' toughest raids and stakeouts during their five months in Iraq. Among his men, he is known as "El Guapo," the handsome one, for his fine features and his bristling mustache. But his sense of urgency and do-it-by-the-book briskness appeared lost on the Iraqi fighters, who used their rest breaks in the morning sunshine to trade quips about the Americans, not all of them friendly.
As in so much else about the American venture in Iraq, cultural differences played their part. At one point, Lieutenant Duarte bridled when some of the Iraqis resisted his repeated urging that they spread out along the line, preferring to cluster together, ineffectively, at one end. A Marine sergeant told him that the Iraqis were officers and did not feel that they should be asked to work side by side with common soldiers.
One of the Iraqi officers, asked if he spoke English, replied snappily, "English no good. Arabic good. Iraq good." The message seemed clear.
Although recruits in the new Iraqi units undergo strict vetting, American officers say rebel sympathizers have infiltrated some of the new units - some of the soldiers have been caught tipping off rebel groups. If there were sympathies for Hussein loyalists among these raiders, though, the area chosen for the sweep would likely have stirred them. One American officer described the stretch of the Euphrates that runs southeast from Falluja as "Saddam's Hamptons" for the clusters of luxurious villas set along the riverbank, mostly built by favored stalwarts of Mr. Hussein. The territory controlled by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, across the southernmost reaches of Iraq's Sunni heartland, served as an arsenal for Mr. Hussein, with dozens of weapons research facilities, munitions factories, and vast weapons storage sites, including the one at Al Qaqaa, which made headlines last month when the Americans discovered that more than 350 tons of high explosives were missing.
Recent American sweeps in the area have uncovered some of the largest weapons caches found in post-Hussein Iraq. And the raid here on Sunday, about five miles from Al Qaqaa, followed a tip that more large caches might be found there.
But either the tipoff was flawed or the raid missed the target. Altogether, Lieutenant Duarte's men discovered only an old shotgun and three Kalashnikov rifles, two of them in plastic bags that were clumsily buried in a paddy field. They also found two sets of identity documents belonging to a high-ranking member of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party. After a marine stumbled across a yellow plastic bag lying in an irrigation panel with what he identified as a severed human head and intestines, Lieutenant Duarte radioed to headquarters and was told to leave it for investigation by the Iraqi police.
In the end, the day's main yield came not from the raid, but from the brutal chance that comes with every foray into the Iraqi hinterland. On the road back to the Marine base at Camp Kalsu, 40 miles from the raiding site, the unit's convoy of armored trucks and Humvees was attacked near the town of Latifiya with a huge roadside bomb.
Unlike a similar device that killed two marines in a nearby incident later in the day, the bomb caused no injuries or damage. But two Humvees broke away from the convoy and pursued two fleeing men with Kalashnikovs into a house about a mile back from the highway, shooting one dead and capturing the other. The men were said to have been found with a cellphone that could have been used to set off the bomb.
Memo to ny times eds, Marines, capital M.
What supreme fools these arrogant b*stards of the Times are.
Congressman Billybob
Click for latest, "Jennings on Jeopardy! -- Nice Guys Do Finish First"
Still flogging the "dead horse" of Vietnam as a way of condeming the Administration's decisions in Iraq.
When will these "sidewalk experts" wake up to the reality that neither their opinions nor their approval is sought or welcome?
"After a marine stumbled across a yellow plastic bag lying in an irrigation panel with what he identified as a severed human head and intestines, Lieutenant Duarte radioed to headquarters and was told to leave it for investigation by the Iraqi police."
You gotta admire these guys. They must have very strong stomachs.
You've never actually read anything from Burns before, have you? Did you bother to read any of Burns' reports during the actual war? Or preceding it?
It's remarkable that Hussein didn't arrest or expel Burns.
NYT so wants Iraq to be Viet Nam that they will print anything. Credibility lost. The Grey Lady is dead.
OK, one more time. The American military did not lose in Vietnam. Not only did the U.S. military win every single major engagement, Nixon's bombing of N Vietnam won a peace treaty by which the N Vietnamese withdrew from the south.
AFTER Nixon resigned over Watergate, the N Vietnamese launched a major tank assault in violation of the treaty. The American military had withdrawn and the democrats in Congress would not even permit President Ford to send equipment to our allies.
The U.S. military won in Vietnam. Vietnam was lost to a combination of liberal demmocrats and a communist invasion after we withdrew.
Burns' piece was doubtless read with interest and growing excitement by Zarqawi and his followers. Al-jazeera will happily give it broad play, as well.
Sulzberger and Keller aren't stupid. They know full well that, by their editorial policies, they are encouraging the enemy. But they don't care...
The American Military DID NOT LOSE THE VIEATNAM WAR!!
The Politicians and the The Civilians that bought the Line of Crap that John Kerry and Jane Fonda and the rest of the Communist Propaganda Machine was Spewing LOST that WAR!! WHy is the SOB Traitor still in Office in the Senate! Why is Jane FOnda still not in Prison for Treason!
but then their version of Viet Nam is also a huge lie. It was then and is now.
What is this obsession with Vietnam by the NYT? If, as the story states, these guys were born AFTER the Vietnam war, I doubt these Marines gave much thought to that war unless a NYT's reporter asked them about it. I suppose the NYT and other liberal media outlets would love to revisit those glory days of Vietnam.
You may not be aware that reporters generally have absolutely nothing to do with the headline of a newspaper story.
I've seen so much Bulldog journalism in the past few years and a heap of yellow journalism; this latest sinks to a new category.
This Times yocal seems to really have a burr under his saddle. He is working and writing hard to see to it America withdraws. Undermining morale, noting the uncomplimentary comments of the Iraqi unit made about the Americans, and interjecting his own version of past military history which he apparently views as a defeat--seems a clear gift to the cause of our enemy.
How is it this guy did not become lost in the weeds on this mission? His writings and logic are "lost". He could easily have been overlooked, and lost, on the return trip.
Take a long hike shmuck.
You are on the money. At the same time he is spouting the 'failures' he does NOT acknowledge the successes that the Fallujah campaign and other campaigns clearly are.
Hence he is part of the 'Legacy Media'.
If I venture to guess this will appear in the military early bird, news from all over the world. I can only wonder how they feel as they click on the link to read the news and this is what is front of them on their screen.
Good thing there are many positive articles out there, just harder to find, but, I have to believe they see those as well.
Thank you for your post.
Oh give me a break! The left is just getting more and more blatantly biased as the days go on. How stupid this makes them look.
I can only wonder how the Times gets away with such reporting. Do her readers not see what we do? Are they so blinded, that the truth, to them, is some five letter word?
It seems that the NYT feels using the V card, that somehow that gives them more credibility, I say HA, loud and very clearly.
Thanks for the post Congressman Billybob!
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