Posted on 04/08/2003 3:42:27 PM PDT by hotpotato
BLACK HILL, outskirts of Baghdad, April 8 — It took an anti-tank missile to blow a hole through the steel-reinforced wall surrounding the Special Republican Guard's headquarters at the foot of this hill overlooking the capital.
An Iraqi soldier on a roof — or perhaps two or more, in the chaos it was not clear — opened fired as Company B of the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment poured through the breach this morning.
Spec. Sylvester A. Prince, 19, was among those who rushed the sprawling complex under a volley of covering fire aimed at the roof. He clambered over concrete rubble and the corpses of Iraqi soldiers, the grim results of air and artillery strikes that led up to today's raid.
"They were decapitated, bloated, stinking," he said of the dead.
The American bullets that spattered off the two-story headquarters building, known as the Secretariat of the Special Republican Guard, rained concrete shards on the company, involved in its first significant fight of the war. For some of the roughly 120 soldiers, including Specialist Prince, it was the first significant fight ever.
He ticked off what he had encountered so far. "Carcasses, debris, shrapnel in my face," he said, lying in a covered walkway and aiming his rifle deeper into the Special Republican Guard's complex, described by one officer today as "the Pentagon of Iraq."
"Nothing too small for me," Specialist Prince said with a smirk, deeply unimpressed. His platoon scrambled to its feet and headed toward a row of military barracks behind the headquarters building, where the pop of gunfire still erupted spasmodically.
The 101st Airborne Division's battalion — fighting since Sunday with the First Brigade of the Army's Third Infantry Division — advanced methodically from the international airport, about a mile and a half from here, expanding the Army's control on the western side of the city and bringing its troops ever closer to those now in the city's center.
"We're expanding and squeezing," said Maj. Frank McClary, the operations officer of the First Brigade's 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment.
Despite the presence of the division's tanks into the center of the city, where intense fighting continued today, Major McClary expressed doubt that the pockets of Iraqi fighters would be suppressed soon.
"Tactically-wise, it's going to be going on for a long time," he said, as blasts of cannon fire from Bradley fighting vehicles reverberated around him. The Iraqis that they are encountering, he said, still have rocket-propelled grenades. "Personally, I think it's going to be going on until we leave this country."
He said American forces now needed to step up "psychological operations" to persuade the Iraqis to capitulate or surrender.
After having pushed through mostly open desert terrain, the Third Division's larger mechanized forces turned to the 101st Airborne's infantry soldiers for the arduous, fearsome job of clearing this warren of buildings that had once housed President Saddam Hussein's most loyal troops, those charged with protecting the government itself.
The complex is located on the southern side of Route 8, the main road leading from the airport into the center of Baghdad. By the time the division's soldiers arrived this morning — preceded by the thunderous strikes of satellite-guided missiles before dawn and, after first light, by the belching cannons of A-10 jets firing from overhead — only small groups of Iraqi fighters remained.
"They saw the size of us," said Capt. Daniel W. Kidd, Company B's commander, "and took off."
One A-10 crashed during today's fighting east of the airport, officers said, after it was hit by anti-aircraft fire. But the pilot ejected safely near the Euphrates River in an area to the southwest controlled by American forces and was rescued, military officials said.
The narrow road leading into the complex was a tableau of destruction and debris. The swollen corpse of an Iraqi in uniform lay on the ground where he fell. Those walls still standing were pocked with the impact of bullets and rockets.
Staff Sgt. Anthony J. Hanlon, 24, called the initial infantry assault on the complex "the scariest thing imaginable," as the few Iraqi defenders fired on the 101st's soldiers with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. There were no casualties among the Americans.
The buildings inside, including the main headquarters, were battered shells, their beams exposed and broken. Outside the headquarters stood a statue of Saddam Hussein on a horse. Staff Sgt. Michael T. Young emerged from the building with a photograph of Mr. Hussein pinning medals on a row of officers.
Almost simultaneously, the 101st battalion's Company D assaulted Black Hill, a man-made mound just south of the complex that rises more than 200 feet and overlooks the international airport to the west and the farthest homes of Baghdad to the east. A little to the southwest between the hill and the airport lies a new presidential palace, still under construction.
Since the Third Division seized the airport last Thursday night, Iraqi forces have used the hill's commanding view to direct at least one artillery attack on the airport itself and to shoot at soldiers who have inched along Route 8 to Baghdad's city limits.
Today's battle raised the specter of urban fighting — close combat in and around buildings. And when Delta Company's soldiers attacked this morning, they ran into a thicket of gunfire from Iraqis who at one point were only 50 yards away. Within minutes, however, the Americans overwhelmed the Iraqi fighters, who fled through a grove of trees into the city.
At the foot of the hill, soldiers found a cache of weapons in a guardhouse, including 53 AK-47's, as well as grenades and a mortar launcher. There were enough arms for two platoons, said Sgt. First Class Patrick E. Keough. The brief firefight lit a locker of wool blankets that spread to a grove of trees, sending choking white smoke rising around the hill.
With the American troops on the hill, the Iraqis opened fire from three single-story houses across an irrigated field. American artillery rounds exploded in the field, moving steadily closer and finally destroying two of the houses, which smoldered in the haze. An anti-tank missile flew into the third, punching through the glass, before exploding inside.
On the opposite side of the hill, American mortar rounds landed with whipsawing cracks in a green lake surrounding the new presidential palace. The battalion's commander, Lt. Col. Patrick L. Fetterman, grew angry about the inaccurate fire. "Tell them to stop shooting," he shouted to no one in particular.
"If they want to shoot, tell them to put it on the tower," he added, pointing to a tower on a causeway leading to what appeared to be a palace boathouse. The mortar rounds soon landed closer and closer to the causeway.
A grass fire raged as the division's troops moved into a grove of palm trees on the palace grounds, but by this evening, they had not yet occupied the palace itself.
At the top of the hill stood the remains of a monument — dedicated, according to its inscription, by Saddam Hussein himself on April 10, 2001 — that had been heavily damaged. It had included a metal bas-relief portrait of Mr. Hussein, and an inscription that foretold the creation of a new Iraqi civilization.
The hilltop, planted with new, half-dead trees, was cratered with the blasts of artillery rounds and strewn with ragged bits of metal. An outbuilding on the hill lay in a crushed heap.
As for Mr. Hussein's portrait, it was in the back of one of Company D's Humvees.
g
Well, looks like that job description fell to Bush.
Hmmmmm... I wonder what's under that 200ft high mound?
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