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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Raid rounds up 'ghost' bombers behind medic's death |
| 2004-07-12 |
| Only the dogs heard them. Faces painted, duct tape concealing their names, two 1st Cavalry platoons swarmed into a dozen farm houses in the unruly marshlands south of Baghdad. They snatched any male they found and dumped him on a waiting flatbed. In their barracks before last week's pre-dawn raid, the men of Capt. Rex Blair's Dog Company, attached to the 1-8 Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division, slathered on green and black face paint. "It really wigs them out when they see that," Blair said. Face paint, covered up name-patches and no-names-asked abductions in the night are rarely used in "Big Army" units like the 1st Cavalry. But theirs is an elusive enemy that doe-eyed driver Pfc. Mark Wittemeyer calls "the ghosts." Adrenaline pumped, because this time it was personal. On May 30, these "ghosts," or a cell of insurgents whose specialty is the remote-detonated roadside bomb, set off a 500-pound mine that crumpled Dog Company medic Charles Odums' armored Humvee. The blast ripped off the 19-year-old's legs and folded his remaining half over the back of the driver's seat. The raid in the bomb-infested al-Buetha region lasted more than 40 hours. The final yield was 37 men, 16 of them insurgents. Some were men who had bombed Iraqis and Americans, men whose backyards contained arsenals for guerrilla warfare. While the 1st Cavalry, based out of Fort Hood, Texas, is the Army's largest division with 17,000 troops, it required only two platoons to clinch one of the division's most successful missions. Fearing that higher-ups would cancel the risky mission and its use of psychological warfare, Blair told almost no one about the raid. The sense of conspiracy piqued his troops' excitement. With their Humvee lights blacked out, Blair's two platoons crept up to a dozen houses. The troops were not knocking on doors. Instead they were kicking them in -- muzzles leveled at anything that moved. Going in, Blair instructed his men to expect anything. But the troops found their marks fast asleep. |
| Posted by:Mark Espinola |