Chapter 37: Outpost Zulu and Other Iraqi Delights

July 2006 - September 2006

Things got back to normal. The next day our families flew back home, and Bravo Three was kicked out of the Al Faw Palace and sent back to Anaconda Three. Riley looked even worse that morning; he was storing up debauchery for the future like a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter. We pretty much had to carry him out of there, and Bixley asked us what he had done to get in his condition. “Sarge, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe us. Riley committed every sin in the book, and then went out and bought a new book,” I replied.

Within days the live version of ‘Hold the Line’, the popular name of ‘A Song for Bravo Three’, was the most popular and requested song on AFN, the Armed Forces Network. Within three weeks it was at the top of the charts back in America. Back home nobody knew the actual name, or what Bravo Three meant, but nobody cared either. Riley said we should get royalties. He was roundly booed by all of us.

About a week after we got back to Anaconda Three, mid-tour leaves began to be granted. Word came down from Battalion to Alpha Company that ten percent of the company would be granted leave beginning Monday, July 17. After that, every three weeks another ten percent would get their chance to go home. From Company it went down to Platoon. As we had been told, Bravo Three would pay for our time at the Al Faw Palace by being last in line for leave. Ten percent of Third Platoon worked out to about four guys, so one guy from every squad would be away for the foreseeable future. First to go from Third Squad would be Private Hollis from Alpha Three. Riley and I explained the procedure to Bravo Three, since we had both done this on our first tour.

Otherwise, the smiling little yellow ducks went about their business, the business of getting shot at by everybody with a BB gun. It sucks to be a smiling little yellow duck. At least once a week somebody would start firing at Anaconda Three, which usually didn’t do much but occasionally hit something. If it hit something material, it wasn’t terrible. We could get it driven or flown in from Camp Victory in a day or two. As the saying went, that’s what we kept the taxpayers around for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always something that got hit but was somebody. Nobody was killed or even crippled by these random attacks, but we handed out a few Purple Hearts and sewed up a bunch of wounds. I thought back to that kid I met at the recruiting office on leave. If you didn’t die or go crazy, this place was a great training ground for EMTs in a gang neighborhood in the States.

The real payday for the hajjis was out on the roads. Everything we were hearing from Battalion and above was that IEDs were the most dangerous thing we were facing. Roadside bombs were getting bigger and better. More casualties were coming from them than from everything else combined. More armored vehicles were coming, including more MRAPs, mine resistant ambush protected vehicles specifically designed to be safe from mines and roadside bombs. These were mostly Buffaloes with mine clearing gear, but more were on the way, and they kept slapping hillbilly armor on anything possible. Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes it didn’t. About a month after we got back a convoy was coming in from Anaconda Two and it hit the Bend, the blind spot that was too narrow halfway between Anaconda Two and Anaconda Three. Bravo Three was on the roof of the command post on over-watch at the time when suddenly we all heard a gigantic BOOM and turned to see a massive fireball coming from the Bend. We immediately started looking around to see if anything was coming in on us with that as a diversion, and a reaction force left the compound and headed towards the Bend.

It wasn’t good. The hajjis had managed to bury a huge bomb, at least a thousand-pounder, in the middle of the Bend, and lit it off as a Buffalo went over it. I saw some pictures afterwards. The twenty-ton Buffalo was lifted twenty feet in the air and blown in half, killing the three men riding in it. More dangerous than that, however, was that Route Indigo itself was cut in half. It wasn’t some pissant pothole, it was a twenty-foot wide by ten-foot-deep hole in the road! We weren’t patching it with a bulldozer. It was going to need a lot of guys, a lot of fill, and more time than I wanted to think about. In the meantime, the only way into Anaconda Three was by air. The hajjis stepped up attacks on us that night.

The next day Captain Vernier flew in along with a big-time Engineer to see the damage. Second Squad convoyed them and some engineer equipment to the Bend to see how bad it was and to begin repairs. Similar equipment was being brought in from Anaconda Two, where there was still a road back to Musayib, Mahaweel, and then Baghdad. The problem was that while we could fill the hole in, unless the road fairies protected it with pixie dust, the hajjis could turn right around and cut the road again, any time they wanted to. I know Southerland ended up in a big meeting with Vernier and on the radio to Lieutenant Chelle over at Anaconda Two. They came up with a brilliant and wonderful plan to prevent this.

Thus was born Outpost Zulu. Outposts would count backward down the alphabet and would be smaller than a regular base - a lot smaller! Zulu would be stationed right at the Bend, the back against the canal and the front facing a town full of angry hajjis. The three rifle squads at Anaconda Two and Anaconda Three would alternate one week at a time there. During the day they would act like another control point on Route Indigo. At night they would hunker down and shoot at anybody that tried to plant something on the road.

I am sure that there was some field manual somewhere that thought this was just one great fucking idea. Personally, if I ever found the guy who wrote that manual, I was going to tie him over a barrel, paint his ass fluorescent orange, and park him outside of Outpost Zulu. I had finally found something in Iraq that scared me even more than convoy duty!

The third week it was time for Third Squad to head to Zulu, so we all packed for a week of extended duty and headed over. We drove four gun trucks, Humvees with M-240 medium machine guns and M-19 automatic grenade launchers. There were ten of us, since Third Squad was down a man who was on leave. We drove down to the Bend, slowly and unsurely, but that was the job. I’d never been there before, but the word was that it was kind of minimal.

Minimal was putting it mildly. Bare bones was a much plainer description. It consisted of four walls made of Hesco bastions plopped right on the side of Route Indigo at the Bend. The wall was cut in only one place, where we had a turnstile set up. Since that wouldn’t stop anything, at night we parked a truck in front of it. It wasn’t very large, just large enough to park the trucks inside at night, with enough space to one side for a Hesco-walled barracks area. That was a simple room where we kept the radio and some spare ammo and MRE cases. A water trailer was in the corner of the outpost. Out on Route Indigo itself we put turnstiles crossing the road to shut down traffic at night. The Iraqi Army had outposts of their own on either side of Zulu.

Theoretically a squad could man an outpost like this twenty-four-hours a day. Two guys and an NCO were always on duty during the day manning the gate, with another one or two watching everything else. The night shift would be sleeping. At night the turnstiles would be closed, and traffic would be shut down. The soldiers who had slept during the day were by now well rested and would stand watch all night, guarding while looking for bad guys with NVGs. Reality was somewhat different. Nobody actually got all that much sleep during the day, since convoys would be coming through, and the locals would often be out there pitching a fit and demanding to come through. It was too damn noisy to sleep, what with traffic and the noise of a generator. At night two or three guys on NVGs weren’t enough to keep an eye on all the possible avenues of attack. We had razor wire around the place and Claymores on the walls, but we were very, very vulnerable.

At a real fortification like Anaconda Three we had enough depth of position and manpower that if the bad guys rushed the wall, we could easily absorb the attack and then fight back. If you got hit, you could get pulled away and be treated by a medic. If the hit was bad enough, they could call in a dust-off, day or night. If the attack was serious enough, an airstrike was moments away. None of that applied to Outpost Zulu. We had fewer than a dozen guys plus an Iraqi interpreter. We had no depth. We had no medics. We had no landing space for a Blackhawk in case we needed a medevac. If we got hit and didn’t stop it in the first instance, we could get rolled over by a bunch of Cub Scouts.

Almost immediately after being set up Zulu began getting nightly attacks by the hajjis. They weren’t all that accurate, but they basically kept anybody from getting any sleep. It was mostly random AK fire from nearby buildings, so the second week the engineers came in and bulldozed the nearby buildings. That didn’t happen until a guy in Alpha One damn near lost a leg when his femoral artery got clipped with a 7.62 round. Before that Brigade decided that bulldozing the houses near the Bend wouldn’t win us any hearts and minds. Casualties changed their thinking. The perimeter got pushed back, whether the locals liked it or not.

We also got real picky about letting them anywhere near us. At night we imposed a curfew on the areas we could see, and simply shot anybody fucking around on the road. Since the only people fucking around on the road were trying to plant bombs, that was deemed a pretty good idea by everybody.

During the daylight hours we had a mix of local traffic and Army convoys. Theoretically there was an Iraqi Army post on either side of us. That was because, of course, we were simply there to assist the Iraqi Army in taking back control of their country. Since that was total bullshit and none of us trusted the Iraqi Army as far we could throw one of their soldiers, we didn’t cooperate much with them. Half the time their outposts were empty anyway. In fact, a pretty good way to tell if there was going to be trouble was if the outpost was empty, they knew something bad was about to happen.

Local traffic was mostly restricted to foot traffic. We made any local vehicles drive through the town itself. If they wanted to blow up a car bomb, they could kill their own people, not ours. If they decided to drive down Route Indigo anyway, we’d light them up. Often, there was a big bang.

Foot traffic was generally harmless, if they stayed away from Zulu. We didn’t man the inspection points out on the road, since that was done by the Iraqi Army. Letting the infidels (us) near their women was a lousy idea. Also, if we were outside of the wall at Zulu, we were even more vulnerable. We stayed inside and supervised, calling in updates over the radio and letting Hamza, our interpreter, talk to the locals.

After my experiences at Camp Custer, I just didn’t trust the Iraqis, including the interpreters. I believed they were as much a lying bag of shit as every other Iraqi I saw every day. That belief was severely tested my third day at Zulu. There was some routine foot traffic that day, and I was the NCO on watch that morning. It was a bit before 1100, and we were expecting a convoy coming through mid-afternoon from Anaconda Two. The Iraqi Army outposts were both manned, but understrength, which was nothing new. They were letting foot traffic through, along with pushcarts, but no vehicles. Gonzalez and Riley were manning the gate, watching in each direction.

It was Gonzalez who sang out the warning. “Sergeant, we just had three guys skip around the checkpoint!” I looked at where he was pointing at the eastern checkpoint, to the left of the gate. Three guys were walking along the road, and angling towards Zulu. “They didn’t get stopped.”

“Watch ‘em!” I replied. I turned to Hamza and said, “Order them to stop or we’ll fire.”

Hamza nodded and stepped up to the gate and called out to them to stop. That worked for a second, but then they started moving closer again. “Tell them again.”

Hamza ordered them to stop a second time, and they did so, and this time the guy in front spoke back to him. He was smiling and looking innocent, as were his buddies. I kept watching him, and he wanted to keep inching forward. “What’d they say?” I asked Hamza.

Hamza turned back to me and spoke lowly. “They said they are Kurds traveling to visit relatives, but they lie. They are dressed like Kurds, but they speak like Saudis. Besides, no Kurd would be near here.”

Suddenly there was a commotion to the far right, a car horn or something. Their eyes went to it, and they started moving towards us again. Was there a diversion going on? “RILEY! EYES RIGHT!” I yelled.

The lead hajji started moving closer again. Simply because of how we were standing, Hamza was closer to the wall than me, and for some reason I had my M-14 in my left hand. If I brought it up it would signal I intended to do something, and this guy still wasn’t close enough to hurt us. I stayed where he couldn’t see me and undid my holster for my M-9. “Order him to stop or we will open fire.” I slowly pulled out my Beretta, but kept it pointed at the ground.

Hamza turned around and yelled at him, but that only paused him for a moment. The nonsense on my right was still ongoing, some sort of traffic accident, and I didn’t dare to take my eyes off this guy. Behind me I could sense some other members of Third Squad forming up. Then it happened. The lead guy began to move closer to the gate again, and he began to separate himself even further from his comrades. He moved his hands towards his coat pockets, which could only mean...

“DOWN!” I screamed. I pushed Hamza out of the way and twisted slightly, bringing my right hand up. At twenty meters I put a round right between his eyeballs. He dropped flat on his back.

Out on Indigo the place started going absolutely fucking nuts. Women and children were screaming and running around, the Iraqi guards were running away, some people were standing still, in shock. I was still watching the remaining two Saudi-Kurds, though. They weren’t moving away. In fact, they started forward, towards us. Hamza was yelling at them to stop, but they kept coming. Gonzalez looked back at me, not wanting to murder innocent men. Wouldn’t a bomber have already blown up by now?