For G.I.’s in Iraq, a Harrowing Day Facing a Trap

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 25 — The enemy was a phantom who never showed his face but transformed a neighborhood into a network of houses rigged to explode.

And the soldiers from Comanche Company’s First Platoon confronted this elaborate and deadly trap.

The platoon’s push began shortly after 4 a.m. on Saturday, as American forces continued their effort to wrest the western section of this city north of Baghdad from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Tracer rounds zipped through the air as the soldiers fired antitank weapons, mortar shells and machine guns at the abandoned houses they planned to inspect across the street.

They calculated that the firepower would blow up any bombs the insurgents might have planted in the houses, while providing cover so the first squads could move south across the thoroughfare.

The use of house bombs is not a new trick, but as the soldiers were to learn, the scale was daunting. The entire neighborhood seemed to be a trap.

After darting across the road, Sgt. Gerard Mennitto, 23, checked the front door of a partly constructed house and peered through a window looking for telltale signs of enemy explosives. The house was free of explosives and the operation seemed to be going as planned.

But there were a few early indications that the bomb threat in the area might be more challenging than the Americans had expected. The street the soldiers had raced across was strewn with slender copper wires, which the insurgents used to set off buried bombs powerful enough to upend armored vehicles.

As the platoon watched from its new foothold south of the road, a Buffalo vehicle, a heavily armored truck with a V-shaped body to dissipate bomb blasts and a giant mechanical claw, began to scour the nearby roads for bombs. It found three, which were exploded by American combat engineers.

“Controlled dets,” a soldier called out, referring to a deliberate detonation of a discovered bomb. The good news was that the buried bombs had been found and neutralized. But some had been deeply buried on the road the platoon had just crossed.

The street bombs were probably little threat without a triggerman to set off the blast. The houses where the soldiers had secured their toehold seemed to have been abandoned, but soon after the platoon settled in, a small line of weary Iraqi civilians carrying a white flag emerged and slowly walked away. If some civilians had been lingering in or near the neighborhood, perhaps some insurgents were, too.

To blast a path through the next bomb-ridden stretch of road, combat engineers brought in a mine-clearing device. A bright fireball appeared over the street and a cloud of gritty dust engulfed the platoon’s house as the soldiers huddled in the back and plugged their ears.

Afterward, as Sgt. Philip Ness-Hunkin, 24, walked to the house next door, he saw copper wires leading to the home. The gate was unlocked and the front door was invitingly open.

“Right in the front door there was a pressure plate under a piece of wood,” he said, referring to a mine that is set to blow when it is stepped on. “Over in that neighborhood there were wires going all over the place.”

“H-BIED,” a soldier called out, using the military’s acronym for a house-borne improvised explosive device.

The last place the platoon wanted to be was next door to a house bomb and a series of structures that had not been cleared. If the soldiers got into a firefight and had to dart in and out of the houses along the road, they might be diving into a series of deadly booby traps, explained First Lt. Charles Morton, 25, the platoon leader.

The explosive-rigged house needed to be destroyed by an airstrike or artillery fire. So the soldiers were instructed to move back across the road they had just crossed.

Once there, the troops clambered into a two-story house. When Sergeant Mennitto got to the second floor, however, he spotted antiaircraft ammunition and a detonation cord next to two propane tanks. The platoon had escaped from one house bomb, only to encounter another.

“Everyone get out!” he yelled.

Next, the men found a nearby building American troops had recently occupied. They were safe, but the insurgents’ bombs had forced them to the starting point. The temperature soared to over 110 degrees and the soldiers had been sleeping on floors of abandoned homes, without a shower or clean clothes for days.

Three soldiers sat down on a couch facing a large rectangular, blown-out window and looked at the street as if watching a large-screen television.

The insurgent strategy appeared to be to use deep-buried bombs under the road and small-arms fire to force the soldiers to take refuge in the houses adjoining the route — and then to blow them up. Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, which carried out the assault on western Baquba, said the network of house bombs here was the most extensive he had seen in Iraq. He said that in the first seven days of the attack, the brigade destroyed 21 house bombs. The platoon had encountered more than its share.

The radio traffic was crackling. Capt. Isaac Torres, the commander of Comanche Company, was impatient. An airstrike was called in on the house with the propane tanks. But now it was late afternoon, and he wanted to know what the platoon’s plan was to resume the mission to clear the area south of the street.

The platoon thought it was time to pound the houses across the road with airstrikes or artillery. There were 84 days left in its 15-month tour. Apart from the fleeing family and a stray man who came bearing a white flag to beg for water, no civilians were in sight.

“I don’t know how realistic it is to ask for this, but I really think we could destroy this block, not cause any damage to the civilian populace and reduce a lot of risk to ourselves,” Lieutenant Morton said over the tactical radio. “This entire place is literally rigged.”

The final decision was to pound the houses fronting the street and to declare the rest of the homes in the section off limits until explosives experts could be brought in.

“It is too painful to deal with right now,” Colonel Townsend said. “We need some expertise to come in here and find out, is there a way to reduce those house-borne I.E.D.’s without destroying the whole block? We need real bomb-squad kind of guys to come do this for us.”

The next morning, an M1 tank arrived. The neighborhood reverberated with enormous booms as soldiers blasted the homes suspected of containing bombs with antitank missiles, artillery and tank fire. The platoon’s advance had been stymied for a day, but there were no American casualties and more bombs had been cleared out.

Lieutenant Morton, the platoon commander, sought to put the hectic, anxiety-filled day in the arc of a long war. He said, “It is one of those days when you’re not doing anything, but stuff happens.”
NYT