.When An Ally Turns On You
ZANJILI, MOSUL–For a moment, I thought it was a misfire. The soldier standing in the doorway thought so too.
But after the shortest of pauses - a second or two, no more - that first shot was followed by the long, loud crackling of an automatic burst.
As I slammed my helmet onto my head I saw Sgt. First Class David Neuzil raise his rifle and open fire outside the open doorway. After a few seconds the ear-splitting buzz of sustained fire from American rifles was the only sound. And then the shouts for medics.
When the firing stopped I learned the shooter was not an insurgent but an Iraqi soldier, Pvt. Muhammad Abdullah al-Hadidi. Now dead on the pavement, Private Hadidi wore the standard Iraqi uniform of beige desert fatigues, with body armor and a green helmet.
Altogether, Private Hadidi killed two American soldiers and injured six others, five of them badly enough that they have since been evacuated to the United States.
Having embedded with American forces in Mosul as part of a research project on American military operations, I happened to be there that day, Nov. 12, attending a meeting in an office just off the courtyard where the shooting occurred.
Not much is known about Private Hadidi. A native of Nineveh Province, he had served four years in the battalion that was manning the outpost, and he had been wounded in action more than once.
When soldiers from two American cavalry platoons had arrived at the outpost Private Hadidi rolled back the concertina wire to allow their Humvees to pass, the Americans said.
The platoons, part of K Troop, 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment based out of Fort Hood, Texas had come to the outpost in the Zanjili neighborhood of Mosul so that their lieutenants could meet with Iraqi commanders.
While the meeting was underway, a dozen heavily armored American soldiers settled down in the small courtyard outside. As they stood and sat there, according to survivors I interviewed, Private Hadidi stepped out of a back room and, without hesitation, started firing - first one shot and then the burst.
Specialist Steven Bullock, who was himself shot in the leg, said they were there “maybe ten minutes” before an Iraqi soldier came out of a back room and “started gunning everybody down.”
He added: “We heard a single shot, and after that he wouldn’t let go of the trigger.”
As American soldiers began to fall, Sergeant Neuzil, the senior sergeant in Red Platoon, returned fire. Three other soldiers joined him seconds later. “I figured out afterward I shot him 19 times,” Sergeant Neuzil said later.
After being shot repeatedly the shooter fell to the ground, but then continued to fire until Staff Sgt. Tony Carter, who had also been in the office, shot him.
With the shooter down for good, First Lt. Christopher Hanes, the leader of Red Platoon, rushed out of the office. I followed him.
When the shooting ceased, I stepped out into the courtyard. It was an ugly scene.
One soldier - I later learned that he was Specialist Corey M. Shea, 21, of Mansfield, Mass - was slumped over a flowerbed in the middle of the courtyard. He had been shot in the head. “He’s dead,” Sergeant Neuzil said as he checked Specialist Shea’s vitals.
About 10 or 15 feet to the right of where Specialist Shea had fallen lay the crumpled, bloody corpse of the shooter, Private Hadidi. His Kalashnikov rifle, with a large drum magazine, lay next to him.
To the left of Specialist Shea’s body, five other soldiers lay on the concrete, wounded. They had been standing in a cluster, it appeared, and had been shot in quick succession. A seventh soldier, Specialist David Ashley, was standing alert in the courtyard, his rifle ready, but had a long gash on his face.
As some soldiers peeled off to the right to secure the rooms that the shooter had come from, I walked across the courtyard and knelt beside one of the wounded soldiers, Staff Sgt. William Greenwood. I had been riding in his Humvee for the past few days.
The magazines strapped to his chest armor had been shattered by bullets, and he had two visible injuries: gunshots to his arm and leg. As I opened the first-aid pouch on my armor to dig for a tourniquet, I realized that the soldier kneeling next to me evaluating Sergeant Greenwood’s wounds had been hit. It was Specialist Bullock. He kept working.
Soldiers rushed in from the street where the Humvees were parked, responding to the shouts for medics. A few feet away, soldiers pushed one of the most badly wounded onto a stretcher and moved out. Someone laid a stretcher down next to Sergeant Greenwood, and two soldiers and I pushed him onto it and carried him out, toward a pair of hulking Bradley armored vehicles that would serve as combat ambulances.
After we had loaded Sergeant Greenwood into the back of one of the Bradleys, I walked back into the compound. The wounded had all been rushed out. One soldier was hurriedly gathering up the first aid gear and pieces of armor scattered on the pavement.
Others were maneuvering Specialist Shea’s body onto another stretcher. One asked where they should put him - the Bradleys were full. A Humvee, came the answer. As the last soldiers and I left the courtyard and dashed to the trucks, the body of the shooter lay untouched.
On the breakneck ride through the streets of Mosul to the base hospital, the interpreter and driver cried. Since Sergeant Greenwood had been the vehicle commander, someone else had to do his job. Specialist Ashley, the soldier who had been shot in the face, stepped up to the task. Twenty-five minutes after the first shot was fired, medics wheeled the wounded into the trauma ward.
Waiting outside the hospital for word on the casualties, I tried to piece together what had happened. Where had the shooter come from? From the back rooms of the outpost - there had been no Iraqi soldiers in the courtyard at all when we first walked in. But why had he opened fire? There had been no shouting or commotion from the courtyard beforehand - nothing at all.
Over the next few days, trying to make sense of what I had seen, I talked to as many of the soldiers who had been in the courtyard as I could find.
None of the Americans I spoke to remembered seeing the shooter in the courtyard until the moment he opened fire. Sergeant Neuzil was emphatic: “I do not remember seeing him. I do not remember him walking in, I do not remember him - the only time I was aware of his presence was when he started shooting.”
From the accounts of Iraqi soldiers, the investigating officer for 3rd Squadron was later able to piece together an account of Private Hadidi’s movements, relayed to me by Capt. Justin Harper, the commander of K Troop.
After Private Hadidi had rolled back the concertina wire to let the Americans pass through the checkpoint, “he asked to excuse himself from the checkpoint so that he could use the restroom and wash before he prayed,” said Captain Harper.
He then entered the outpost, according to Harper, went to a back room, and loaded his rifle with a 75-round drum magazine before stepping into the courtyard, where he fired a single shot, paused, and then, at a distance of about 10 feet from the nearest American soldier, opened fire.
Why Private Hadidi fired on the Americans remains a mystery.
After the shooting, Western news reports relayed an account by anonymous Iraqi military sources that an American soldier had spit on Private Hadidi and then slapped him, precipitating the violence. The American soldiers vehemently denied that claim, as did their commanders, who are still investigating the incident.
Nothing I saw or heard that day supported that version of events. The shooter was not in the courtyard when I walked through on the way in, and it is hard to imagine how he could have showed up and gotten into an argument in those seven or eight minutes - an argument heated enough to result in a shooting but quiet enough that you couldn’t hear anything 20 feet away through the doorway.
According to Sergeant Neuzil, Specialist Bullock and two others who were in the courtyard, Specialist Alexander Salinas and Pfc. Jared Viano, the soldier nearest to Private Hadidi when he opened fire, Specialist Shea, was about 10 feet distant, sitting on the edge of the flowerbed. The placement of the bodies of both Specialist Shea and Private Hadidi supported this account. Said Sergeant Neuzil: “I would put my life on it that nobody slapped or spit on this man.”
That afternoon, outside the trauma ward of Mosul’s Combat Support Hospital, the soldiers of K Troop waited anxiously for word about the comrades they had rushed from the Zanjili outpost.
When the news came, it was bad, but not as bad as some feared. Of the eight soldiers who had suffered gunshot wounds one, Specialist Shea, had died within seconds. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t know what happened,” Sergeant Neuzil said. “I think he was killed instantly.”
Medics managed to keep the seven others alive long enough to reach surgery at the hospital. There a second soldier, Sgt. Jose Regalado, 23, of Los Angeles, died from his wounds. In the chaos at the outpost, no one had been sure how to help Sergeant Regalado. Shot in the torso, he was not in good shape, but he was not bleeding badly, either.
By the time he was put on a stretcher and carried out to the waiting Bradleys, Sergeant Neuzil said, Sergeant Regalado was clearly fading: “As we were moving him to the vehicle he kept closing his eyes, so I kept slapping him on the face to get his attention, but he never looked at me, he just kind of looked around. I don’t think he could place where I was.”
According to what doctors at the hospital later told soldiers of the platoon, there was no way Sergeant Regalado could have been saved. Of the six other soldiers, all but one were evacuated from the country for further treatment, but all survived. Specialist Bullock was able to return to duty the next day with only a limp.
Two days after the attack, back at the main base that serves as a headquarters for the 3rd Squadron, I spoke with Captain Harper, the commander of K Troop, a wiry cavalry officer with a shaved head and an intense stare.
I asked him how soon his platoons would be going back out on missions. When he told me that Blue Platoon had gone out again within 36 hours, I must have seemed taken aback. As he explained his rationale for pushing his soldiers back out so quickly, his voice took on an impatient tone.
“Look at it this way,” he suggested. “Twenty-five years ago, the cold war armored cavalry regiment was meant to fight and not be pulled off the line until it reached 30 percent strength, meaning that one lieutenant ís in charge of three tanks and five Bradleys, and that’s all that’s left of the troop, and you’re still fighting.”
He paused. “Just because it’s Iraq and we don’t take that kind of casualty rate doesn’t mean the requirement changes. We are not stopping business.”
Baghdad Bureau
But after the shortest of pauses - a second or two, no more - that first shot was followed by the long, loud crackling of an automatic burst.
As I slammed my helmet onto my head I saw Sgt. First Class David Neuzil raise his rifle and open fire outside the open doorway. After a few seconds the ear-splitting buzz of sustained fire from American rifles was the only sound. And then the shouts for medics.
When the firing stopped I learned the shooter was not an insurgent but an Iraqi soldier, Pvt. Muhammad Abdullah al-Hadidi. Now dead on the pavement, Private Hadidi wore the standard Iraqi uniform of beige desert fatigues, with body armor and a green helmet.
Altogether, Private Hadidi killed two American soldiers and injured six others, five of them badly enough that they have since been evacuated to the United States.
Having embedded with American forces in Mosul as part of a research project on American military operations, I happened to be there that day, Nov. 12, attending a meeting in an office just off the courtyard where the shooting occurred.
Not much is known about Private Hadidi. A native of Nineveh Province, he had served four years in the battalion that was manning the outpost, and he had been wounded in action more than once.
When soldiers from two American cavalry platoons had arrived at the outpost Private Hadidi rolled back the concertina wire to allow their Humvees to pass, the Americans said.
The platoons, part of K Troop, 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment based out of Fort Hood, Texas had come to the outpost in the Zanjili neighborhood of Mosul so that their lieutenants could meet with Iraqi commanders.
While the meeting was underway, a dozen heavily armored American soldiers settled down in the small courtyard outside. As they stood and sat there, according to survivors I interviewed, Private Hadidi stepped out of a back room and, without hesitation, started firing - first one shot and then the burst.
Specialist Steven Bullock, who was himself shot in the leg, said they were there “maybe ten minutes” before an Iraqi soldier came out of a back room and “started gunning everybody down.”
He added: “We heard a single shot, and after that he wouldn’t let go of the trigger.”
As American soldiers began to fall, Sergeant Neuzil, the senior sergeant in Red Platoon, returned fire. Three other soldiers joined him seconds later. “I figured out afterward I shot him 19 times,” Sergeant Neuzil said later.
After being shot repeatedly the shooter fell to the ground, but then continued to fire until Staff Sgt. Tony Carter, who had also been in the office, shot him.
With the shooter down for good, First Lt. Christopher Hanes, the leader of Red Platoon, rushed out of the office. I followed him.
When the shooting ceased, I stepped out into the courtyard. It was an ugly scene.
One soldier - I later learned that he was Specialist Corey M. Shea, 21, of Mansfield, Mass - was slumped over a flowerbed in the middle of the courtyard. He had been shot in the head. “He’s dead,” Sergeant Neuzil said as he checked Specialist Shea’s vitals.
About 10 or 15 feet to the right of where Specialist Shea had fallen lay the crumpled, bloody corpse of the shooter, Private Hadidi. His Kalashnikov rifle, with a large drum magazine, lay next to him.
To the left of Specialist Shea’s body, five other soldiers lay on the concrete, wounded. They had been standing in a cluster, it appeared, and had been shot in quick succession. A seventh soldier, Specialist David Ashley, was standing alert in the courtyard, his rifle ready, but had a long gash on his face.
As some soldiers peeled off to the right to secure the rooms that the shooter had come from, I walked across the courtyard and knelt beside one of the wounded soldiers, Staff Sgt. William Greenwood. I had been riding in his Humvee for the past few days.
The magazines strapped to his chest armor had been shattered by bullets, and he had two visible injuries: gunshots to his arm and leg. As I opened the first-aid pouch on my armor to dig for a tourniquet, I realized that the soldier kneeling next to me evaluating Sergeant Greenwood’s wounds had been hit. It was Specialist Bullock. He kept working.
Soldiers rushed in from the street where the Humvees were parked, responding to the shouts for medics. A few feet away, soldiers pushed one of the most badly wounded onto a stretcher and moved out. Someone laid a stretcher down next to Sergeant Greenwood, and two soldiers and I pushed him onto it and carried him out, toward a pair of hulking Bradley armored vehicles that would serve as combat ambulances.
After we had loaded Sergeant Greenwood into the back of one of the Bradleys, I walked back into the compound. The wounded had all been rushed out. One soldier was hurriedly gathering up the first aid gear and pieces of armor scattered on the pavement.
Others were maneuvering Specialist Shea’s body onto another stretcher. One asked where they should put him - the Bradleys were full. A Humvee, came the answer. As the last soldiers and I left the courtyard and dashed to the trucks, the body of the shooter lay untouched.
On the breakneck ride through the streets of Mosul to the base hospital, the interpreter and driver cried. Since Sergeant Greenwood had been the vehicle commander, someone else had to do his job. Specialist Ashley, the soldier who had been shot in the face, stepped up to the task. Twenty-five minutes after the first shot was fired, medics wheeled the wounded into the trauma ward.
Waiting outside the hospital for word on the casualties, I tried to piece together what had happened. Where had the shooter come from? From the back rooms of the outpost - there had been no Iraqi soldiers in the courtyard at all when we first walked in. But why had he opened fire? There had been no shouting or commotion from the courtyard beforehand - nothing at all.
Over the next few days, trying to make sense of what I had seen, I talked to as many of the soldiers who had been in the courtyard as I could find.
None of the Americans I spoke to remembered seeing the shooter in the courtyard until the moment he opened fire. Sergeant Neuzil was emphatic: “I do not remember seeing him. I do not remember him walking in, I do not remember him - the only time I was aware of his presence was when he started shooting.”
From the accounts of Iraqi soldiers, the investigating officer for 3rd Squadron was later able to piece together an account of Private Hadidi’s movements, relayed to me by Capt. Justin Harper, the commander of K Troop.
After Private Hadidi had rolled back the concertina wire to let the Americans pass through the checkpoint, “he asked to excuse himself from the checkpoint so that he could use the restroom and wash before he prayed,” said Captain Harper.
He then entered the outpost, according to Harper, went to a back room, and loaded his rifle with a 75-round drum magazine before stepping into the courtyard, where he fired a single shot, paused, and then, at a distance of about 10 feet from the nearest American soldier, opened fire.
Why Private Hadidi fired on the Americans remains a mystery.
After the shooting, Western news reports relayed an account by anonymous Iraqi military sources that an American soldier had spit on Private Hadidi and then slapped him, precipitating the violence. The American soldiers vehemently denied that claim, as did their commanders, who are still investigating the incident.
Nothing I saw or heard that day supported that version of events. The shooter was not in the courtyard when I walked through on the way in, and it is hard to imagine how he could have showed up and gotten into an argument in those seven or eight minutes - an argument heated enough to result in a shooting but quiet enough that you couldn’t hear anything 20 feet away through the doorway.
According to Sergeant Neuzil, Specialist Bullock and two others who were in the courtyard, Specialist Alexander Salinas and Pfc. Jared Viano, the soldier nearest to Private Hadidi when he opened fire, Specialist Shea, was about 10 feet distant, sitting on the edge of the flowerbed. The placement of the bodies of both Specialist Shea and Private Hadidi supported this account. Said Sergeant Neuzil: “I would put my life on it that nobody slapped or spit on this man.”
That afternoon, outside the trauma ward of Mosul’s Combat Support Hospital, the soldiers of K Troop waited anxiously for word about the comrades they had rushed from the Zanjili outpost.
When the news came, it was bad, but not as bad as some feared. Of the eight soldiers who had suffered gunshot wounds one, Specialist Shea, had died within seconds. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t know what happened,” Sergeant Neuzil said. “I think he was killed instantly.”
Medics managed to keep the seven others alive long enough to reach surgery at the hospital. There a second soldier, Sgt. Jose Regalado, 23, of Los Angeles, died from his wounds. In the chaos at the outpost, no one had been sure how to help Sergeant Regalado. Shot in the torso, he was not in good shape, but he was not bleeding badly, either.
By the time he was put on a stretcher and carried out to the waiting Bradleys, Sergeant Neuzil said, Sergeant Regalado was clearly fading: “As we were moving him to the vehicle he kept closing his eyes, so I kept slapping him on the face to get his attention, but he never looked at me, he just kind of looked around. I don’t think he could place where I was.”
According to what doctors at the hospital later told soldiers of the platoon, there was no way Sergeant Regalado could have been saved. Of the six other soldiers, all but one were evacuated from the country for further treatment, but all survived. Specialist Bullock was able to return to duty the next day with only a limp.
Two days after the attack, back at the main base that serves as a headquarters for the 3rd Squadron, I spoke with Captain Harper, the commander of K Troop, a wiry cavalry officer with a shaved head and an intense stare.
I asked him how soon his platoons would be going back out on missions. When he told me that Blue Platoon had gone out again within 36 hours, I must have seemed taken aback. As he explained his rationale for pushing his soldiers back out so quickly, his voice took on an impatient tone.
“Look at it this way,” he suggested. “Twenty-five years ago, the cold war armored cavalry regiment was meant to fight and not be pulled off the line until it reached 30 percent strength, meaning that one lieutenant ís in charge of three tanks and five Bradleys, and that’s all that’s left of the troop, and you’re still fighting.”
He paused. “Just because it’s Iraq and we don’t take that kind of casualty rate doesn’t mean the requirement changes. We are not stopping business.”
Baghdad Bureau
posted by madtom at 8:09 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home