More Tales From the Front

First Person Reporting
More Tales from the Front American Citizen Soldier- Buck Sargent

'The Lil' Fella's Okay'

All American casualties are given the opportunity if able to place a call home from the CASH (combat support hospital) to inform their loved ones of their injuries and to head off the Army’s vague and impersonal notification process. (If they are incapacitated, the unit’s commander will typically make the call himself to provide families an honest account of what happened and how serious the injury really is.) These calls also serve to stymie any resultant hyperventilation on the homefront by apprehensive hausfraus. But not always.

Some soldiers fear having to make this ominous call home more than the actual reason behind it. When Sgt. Blakely and I had tried to get Sweet to roll over on his stomach for treatment, the first words out of his mouth through a grimace and clenched teeth were, "My wife is going to be pissed." He was already dreading having to make The Call before the bleeding had even stopped.....

Iraqi Five-O

I'm willing to bet you didn’t hear about any of this in the Stateside press, although it did merit a small blurb deep inside last week’s Stars and Stripes:

U.S. and Iraqi security forces rescued three Iraqi hostages on Tuesday who had been held in Mosul, U.S. military officials said Wednesday.

The three hostages were reportedly chained to the wall of the basement in a house in the northern Iraqi city; there was no information on the hostages’ identities, whom their captors were or why they were kidnapped.The rescue team included U.S. soldiers from the 172nd Stryker Brigade and the Iraqi 3rd Battalion, 4th Brigade, 2nd Iraqi Army Division, and members of the Iraqi police. There were no casualties during the rescue, which followed tips from local Iraqis, officials said.

I can vouch for this story: we were there. 3rd Platoon was launched as a quick reaction force to back up the IA and a fellow Stryker platoon on the scene providing outer cordon. The hostages were indeed chained in a veritable dungeon whose stairwell was concealed by a false floor tile, admittedly something we may not have been capable of discovering on our own. But the Iraqis are old hat at such tricks. Dungeons were par for the course under the Baathist reign of terror.

But not all of the story is accurate, however. We were not supported by Iraqi forces, the Iraqi forces were supported by us. They worked the lead, they conducted the reconnaissance, they initiated the raid, and they ultimately secured the hostages. They did make one big mistake in tipping off the kidnappers by reconnoitering the site a little too closely and indiscreetly (a hamfisted tactic they likely learned from us), but they later made up for it. Their emplaced sniper/killer teams (SKTs) overwatched the house long enough for the suspects to foolishly return to it and stroll right into the dragnet waiting for them. Bravo, fellas. Another step forward......

Mosul’s Most Wanted

Major Fallah, the supercop of southeastern Mosul, while appearing as a guest on a local Iraqi talk-radio show, took a call from a Moslawi citizen forwarding a tip about a suspicious person in his neighborhood. Fallah listened intently between sips of chai tea, asked a few pointed questions, and then stood up and declared: "I’ll be back." He then turned and walked right out of the studio leaving the radio host likely dumbfounded.

Within the hour he returned and theatrically announced over the airwaves: "He’s been detained."

From what I've seen and heard about Major Fallah, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if he'd performed a spot-on "Shatner roll" across the hood of his SUV on the way out.

Read the Entire Article at American Citizen Soldier

From the Milblog Wire