The Javelin Missile
Posted on 09/22/2003 9:10:38 PM PDT by Pharmboy
The Javelin Missile
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Sept. 16 — The low-slung ridgeline overlooking a strategic crossroads in northern Iraq offered scant protection for the small band of Green Berets, vastly outnumbered and under attack from four T-55 tanks, six armored personnel carriers and hundreds of infantrymen with artillery on call.
"We all made a mental promise," Staff Sgt. Jeffrey M. Adamec recalled of that battle on Day 18 of the war. "Nobody had to yell out commands. Everybody just knew. We were not going to move back from that point. We were not going to give up that ground. We called that spot `the Alamo' "
In what is becoming one of the most celebrated missions of the war, just 26 Green Berets, along with three Air Force bomb targeters and two others faced off against a reinforced Iraqi motorized rifle company numbering in the hundreds.
After a four-and-a-half-hour firefight, not only did they seize their first objective, a crossroads, but they also moved on deeper into enemy territory to sever Highway 2. That way they could halt the Iraqi Army's ability to maneuver across the north, and at the same time secure a route to the Kirkuk oil fields.
Soldiers are known for what they carry into combat. And the Green Berets who battled and bested tanks and armored personnel carriers that day had no armored vehicles of their own. In fact, they had no armor at all save body armor, useless against a direct hit from the artillery and tank shells that rained so close that dirt was tossed in their laps.
Soldiers are also known by the stories they carry home. Ones like this are often shrouded in the secrecy of Special Operations. But this previously classified mission was illuminated at an awards ceremony this week for two of the combatants.
The battle is reconstructed here from interviews with five participants: three sergeants, a captain and a major, all far removed from efforts in Washington to recapture the glory of the military victory in this current much-debated period of postwar reconstruction.
Sergeant Adamec was cited this week for gallantry and valor in the battle, as was Staff Sgt. Jason D. Brown. Officially, they received Silver Stars. Within the elite community of Army Special Forces, they have earned the title "Javelin aces" from the encounter, which was the first major offensive by American forces moving south from Kurdish-controlled zones and into government-controlled territory of northern Iraq.
Under fire from artillery, tank shells, mortars and antiaircraft artillery bursts fired in a low arc toward them, Sergeant Brown squatted and fired shoulder-launched Javelin antitank missiles to take out two armored personnel carriers and ignite a troop truck full of Iraqi infantrymen. An hour before, Sergeant Brown had fired his very first Javelin at an Iraqi troop truck in the distance.
During the peak of the battle, Sergeant Adamec also used his Javelins to destroy two armored personnel carriers and a troop transport.
The remaining Iraqi forces abandoned their offensive and drove into defensive trenches. They gained no more ground.
"Two guys shut down the attack," said Maj. Curtis W. Hubbard, commander of Company C, Third Battalion of the Third Special Forces Group, in charge of all the Green Berets along the ridge that day. "Two guys turned an organized Iraqi attack into chaos. They halted an entire motorized rifle company."
The battle of Debecka Pass, as the mission is called in briefings that Army Special Forces gave at the Pentagon and to Congressional staff members, and now to a reporter for The New York Times, began just after first light on April 6.
But it was not without devastating loss to Kurdish allies. A bomb dropped by a Navy fighter that had been summoned by an Air Force tactical air controller missed its intended target, an Iraqi tank firing from the south. Instead, it hit an abandoned tank at a crossroads to the north where allied Kurdish fighters were regrouping.
Seventeen people, among them Kurdish fighters, were killed, and 45 others were wounded. Military investigators continue their inquiry into the worst so-called friendly fire incident of the war.
Capt. Eric M. Wright, a Green Beret "A Team" leader, was conferring with the Kurdish fighters less than five minutes before the bomb hit, but then moved to rejoin his team's battle against Iraqi armor and mortars. Grabbing some of his men, he ran back to the carnage to oversee emergency medical care.
"We were dragging the wounded to safety even as their own ammo was exploding all around us," Captain Wright said, recalling rocket-propelled grenades flying. "I remember this one went right by me — whoosh!"
Their mission, near the village of Debecka, was to capture a crossroads. It easily fell to the Green Berets, but it did not offer the desired control of the area.
"We could see Highway 2, with a roundabout and a tall statue in the middle," said Sgt. First Class Frank R. Antenori, a Green Beret team sergeant. "We could see vehicles driving along as if nothing was happening. We couldn't just sit two kilometers away and watch the Iraqi Army drive back and forth all day long. We were already way beyond our objective, but we decided to occupy that next junction. We figured we could stay all day and shoot up anything that came through."
The day was thick with haze, when the soldiers saw three trucks approaching, blinking their lights. "We thought, `Don't shoot, don't shoot,' they might be surrendering," the sergeant said.
But it was the start of a disciplined attack following classic Soviet mechanized doctrine, which Army officials now say was one of the Iraqi Army's last coordinated offensives.
The Iraqis fired smoke grenades. Six armored personnel carriers drove out of the fumes, three on each side of the troop trucks, firing. The Green Berets returned fire with .50-caliber machine gun rounds. The Iraqi vehicles slowed and spread out — but only to make way for the next phalanx, four T-55 main battle tanks that rumbled from the smoke at a distance of no more than 900 yards.
Realizing they might be overrun before they could arm and fire their antitank missiles, the Green Berets hustled up the ridge to their Alamo. Sergeants Brown and Adamec jumped from their vehicles, and let the Javelins fly. It was moments later when the Navy bomb hit the Kurdish position and Sergeant Adamec left to grapple with its toll. Meanwhile, the Iraqi mechanized assault fell into sudden disarray.
There was a move by some Iraqis to surrender. More than a dozen Iraqi infantrymen left their trenches waving pieces of white paper. But two white S.U.V.'s drove up, and six men got out. Their flowing robes suggested that they were enforcers for the governing Baath Party; fedayeen fighters favored combat gear.
"Through our binoculars, we could see a heated discussion, and then these guys in robes started executing those guys who were trying to surrender," Sergeant Antenori said. "They shot every one of them, and then walked around to make sure they were dead."
The massacre was over in less than 30 seconds. The Americans decided something had to be done.
"We called in an F-18 to drop a 750-pound bomb on those S.U.V.'s," Captain Wright said. "It was like a magic show. You know, now you see 'em, now you don't. The S.U.V.'s, the guys in the white robes — they simply vanished."
The Green Berets spent three sleepless nights holding their ground as the Iraqis lobbed artillery and mortars down on them. In a prescient decision early in the mission, Captain Wright had ordered his team to gather Iraqi land mines by hand and blast a breach in an Iraqi defensive berm, and that gap now provided a route for needed supplies , including more Javelins.
By the time the entire engagement was over, the Green Berets had destroyed two T-55 tanks — one was hit by a Javelin fired by Sergeant Antenori and one by a 10th Group soldier — eight armored personnel carriers and four troop trucks.
With the crossroads secured, the Green Berets crossed to Kirkuk to secure oil facilities and to prevent their destruction by Iraqi forces.
Note: the picture did not come from the Times; the pictures that accompanied the print article were not posted online, so I improvised.
Amazing story by itself, but for the Times to publish a piece like this is DOUBLY amazing...
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"We all made a mental promise," Staff Sgt. Jeffrey M. Adamec recalled of that battle on Day 18 of the war. "Nobody had to yell out commands. Everybody just knew. We were not going to move back from that point. We were not going to give up that ground. We called that spot `the Alamo' "
Brave American heroes, mega-ping!
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