Perilous Patrol

[SR-25]

The road is filled with danger, but the Louisiana National Guard has a job to do
Sunday, January 16, 2005
By Brian Thevenot
Staff writer
NEAR CAMP LIBERTY, BAGHDAD, IRAQ -- As they roared off their base and into a land of hungry children, unseen enemies and roadside bombs encased in dead dogs, members of the Louisiana National Guard's Recon Platoon rolled in the Army's most heavily armored Humvee, a $150,000 behemoth they both love and hate.

The massive gun truck will stop bullets and some bombs, but not the most fearsome explosives hidden along their routes. This one has taken a beating from three roadside bombs and flipped over once. They will stay behind its inch-and-a-half glass nearly all day. Still, they would have felt more at ease on foot, nimble and in touch with their surroundings

On this tour through western Baghdad on Thursday, the team, one of two in the platoon, will end up patrolling areas near where nine Louisiana Guardsmen died in two recent attacks. And their three-truck convoy was conspicuously missing two men who died in December, the Louisiana Guard's first deaths in Iraq. All died in explosions from remotely triggered roadside bombs.

The combat deaths have shocked Louisiana, but they come as no surprise to the men in Iraq, who patrol the bomb-laden area every day, nor to their commanders. In the past week, the realities of war have come into sharp and painful focus at memorials for their slain buddies. Amid the emotional tributes, the Iraq war machine and the grunts who drive it have rolled on, perhaps more hardened, at least among the Louisiana contingent.

As members of the Louisiana National Guard, some of these citizen soldiers didn't expect to find themselves on the front lines of the war. But with the volunteer regular Army stretched thin and more reliant on Guard units nationwide, the more than 3,700 members of the 256th Brigade Combat Team from Louisiana find themselves on a yearlong deployment, filling critical and dangerous roles.

Staff Sgt. Eric Alvarez can attest to that. He still carries in his shoulder a 1 ½-inch piece of shrapnel he picked up in a Dec. 23 roadside bomb attack that claimed the life of Lt. Christopher Barnett. Alvarez's purple heart is on order. Thursday's patrol was only his second since finishing the physical therapy for his arm -- and the psychological therapy for losing a comrade.

The team carried coffee, chewing tobacco, a hand-held electronic Yahtzee game and a tame girly magazine. They spew pride, profanity and tobacco spit. They breathe a mix of dirt and diesel fuel. Weekend warriors or not, they are the grunts of modern war, to them the most exalted position in Baghdad.

As they leave each day, deprived of sleep but running on adrenaline, many find odd comfort in a realm of terror. Their aches and pains subside. Their 60-pound armored jackets get suddenly light.

"I suffer from excruciating migraines," said Sgt. Dominick Torti, who drives the Humvee and leads foot patrols when they dismount. "But as soon as I hit that wire, it's good. Nothing hurts."

Although they love their jobs, they hate many of their commanders' tactics. They feel like cops, not soldiers, adhering to crippling rules of evidence they say prevent them from killing or detaining an enemy that adheres to no principle but chaos.

Torti, in particular, overflows with angst.

"We honest-to-God drive around and see if we can get blown up. We've got more . . . space gear than we need," he said. "That's why the enemy is smarter than us. Their IEDs (roadside bombs) get bigger, and we go after Donald Rumsfeld for more gear so we can keep driving their roads and getting blown up."

These men want to be in Iraq. They believe in the mission of liberating and democratizing the country. Some joined the National Guard to fight, not for the college money. But they have a less upbeat view of their current mission's chances than does the brass. If they had their way, they'd live in and around the towns they patrol, walk the streets with their M-16 rifles and loosen the rules on engaging and detaining the enemy. Nearing a village, Torti continued his rant.

"We need to get 13, 14 guys . . . to patrol that town and live there, and I'm willing to do it. I don't have a problem dying. I really don't. But I want to die fighting. I don't want to die in a Humvee."


Dangerous ground

Back at the command center, Brig. Gen. John Basilica acknowledged the complexity and severity of life outside the wire.

The rolling patrols, Basilica said, are in direct response to the mission: More than half of the roughly 3,700 troops under his command are assigned to cover an inhospitable territory that stretches about 50 miles from north to south and 25 miles from east to west. That's not enough for full occupation or foot patrols. But establishing a drive-through presence, with occasional dismounts, protects the U.S. camps. It may be hard for the soldiers to see the evidence of this work, particularly in the face of casualties, but the proof is what is not happening: The bases, for the most part, aren't getting bombed.

The lighter, faster Humvees leave the grunts more vulnerable to bombs, but they let them cover more ground and take harder-to-navigate routes to intimidate, monitor and engage the enemy, Basilica said.

With the 75 to 80 injuries the brigade took before this week, the deaths came as no surprise, Basilica said. The mission is what it is: difficult and dangerous.

"This is a war," he said, "and anybody who doesn't think it is in the fullest absolute sense of the word hasn't been paying attention. We're in the thick of it."


Itching for a fight

That's exactly what some of the Recon Platoon members were looking for, including Torti, who served in the Texas National Guard but volunteered to join the Louisiana force when it was deployed.

Eager to fight in the war, Torti, 29, recently left a 9-year career as an infantryman in the Marine Corps because he had a better chance of deployment as a reservist. In his short time as a civilian, he counseled troubled and abandoned girls in New Braunfels, Texas.

In Torti's Humvee rides Alvarez, 24, who as a civilian is a drill instructor for Louisiana Youth Challenge; Cpl. Lou Wetuski, 25, a student from San Marcos, Texas; and Sgt. Paul Trucinski, 31, of Monroe, a buyer for Books-a-Million.

As they set off into what soldiers in Iraq call "Indian country," Torti gave a blunt assessment of their work. "The only thing we control within miles of here is the FOB," or forward operating base of Camp Liberty and neighboring Camp Victory, he said. "We know we're going to get hit, we're just praying it's not our Humvee."

Alvarez added, "We should have 20 guys with us, and we've only got 13." Their patrol starts with just two Humvees, with a third joining later, but they say the regulations call for at least four at all times.

Worse, they've got a broken machine gun turret, the swivel on top of the truck that allows the gunner, Wetuski, to fire from all sides. "That .50-caliber is just for decoration," he said.


Traffic stop

On their combat patrols, the men face what one commander called a "three-block war." In the first block, they might toss sweets to children and stop to ask if anyone needs medical help. On the second block, they might quell a riot or ask locals for intelligence. On the third, they might be in a firefight. That requires a violent emotional and tactical switch: from aid worker to cop to warrior, and today the Silver Team was not in the mood.

"We're supposed to be nice . . . because they haven't blown us up yet," Alvarez said. "That's because this (other) unit hasn't had their asses handed to them yet -- but they will."

On Thursday, as they cruised through the impoverished village of Al Salaam, the men offered nothing for the residents who lined the streets, waving and screaming for a handout as if the Humvees were the first three floats in the Krewe of Bacchus parade.

"Little beggars," Torti snarled inside the truck. "I think I'm going to try to put an end to the petting zoo."

After they got through the line of children, Torti passed a BMW with four 30-something Arab men headed out of town. He whipped the truck around and gave chase, kicking up sand and scattering about 40 children. The two Humvees behind him followed. He rode the BMW's bumper, and the second Humvee roared past on the left, pulling in front of the luxury car and stopping it.

They got out, becoming cops.

Shouting in Arabic, they ordered the men out of the car, surrounding it in a circle with machine guns drawn, barrels pointed to the ground. They searched but found nothing. The Arabic men stood with their hands in the air in a gesture that seemed to say, "What's the deal? Look all you want."

They shot wry smiles at the soldiers.

The soldiers let them go.

"I still think they're . . . dirty," Trucinski said, climbing back in the Humvee. "They were enjoying it, too."

Torti finished the thought: "Because they know we can't do anything."


War stories

On patrol, the men saw nothing of the third block of the war, the real combat. But they already had stories to tell. Torti started into the one about the roadside bomb that just missed him.

"It was pretty cool, though. You should have seen the flames shoot up past the windows," he said. "We caught one (of the assailants), . . . and he had a video camera. He filmed it."

They said the chase went down like this: Torti saw two men about 300 meters out, they yelled for them to stop and fired warning shots. Torti sent the truck for the one fleeing left and took off running after the one fleeing right.

"But he got away, of course, because I'm carrying all this gear," Torti recalled.

The other suspect couldn't outrun the Humvee, and Alvarez and others zip-tied his hands behind him. Then they found a pair of sandals on the ground, which they knew the enemy sometimes uses to point to weapons caches. They walked in the direction the sandals pointed, to a grove of trees. They looked up -- and found another man up in a tree, hugging its trunk like a koala bear. They ripped him down, and 16 soldiers screamed in his face as they tied him up.

They found the camera in the bushes below. Later, they downloaded to their computers the video of themselves almost getting blown up.

In another favorite story, the men last month found a weapons cache after one of their comrades spotted a new Chevrolet Suburban parked next to a farmhouse, an odd sight. Approaching cautiously, Wetuski peeked into the window to see a massive anti-ship bomb, prompting him to flee, screaming in the bluntest possible terms for others to do the same.

The National Guard issued a news release highlighting their find Dec. 19. In the truck Thursday, they all giggled about how their grimy-grunt quotes were polished by the brigade press officers, making them sound like Dudley Do-Right dorks.

"I said, 'Holy s - - -!' when I saw the bomb, and they changed it to 'Oh my God,' " Wetuski said as the men doubled over in laughter.


Rooftop sentry

About two miles from the market area where a roadside bomb killed two soldiers and wounded four others three days earlier, the soldiers stopped on a narrow dirt road, a fence on one side and a 15-foot-deep canal on the other.

The two soldiers who were killed had been patrolling near a market in a heavy recruitment area for insurgents, marked by black Arabic signs. The men said they read, roughly translated, "We're not trying to hurt the people. We're trying to hurt only the Americans. But we're not responsible for collateral damage," Torti said.

In the gun truck behind Torti's, Spc. Joshua Stapf of Shreveport fidgeted in his seat, agitated.

He picked up the radio saying, "I'm scared s - - -less."

"He's been hit a lot" by roadside bombs, Alvarez said.

A few minutes later, the men spotted a dark figure standing on the roof of a building about two football fields away.

They watched him through binoculars, and he was watching them. Torti watched him through the scope of his machine gun.

"He just pulled his cell phone down. He called us in," he said. "If this was a war" -- as opposed to the police action Torti believes it is -- "I'd be allowed to shoot that guy."

The men took off shortly after, and they happened on a dead dog. On Dec. 16, Alvarez was riding in the gun truck with Spc. Craig Nelson when they ran over a dead dog packed with explosives that burned shrapnel into Alvarez's arm and neck. Nelson died of his injuries two weeks later at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

"We need to call in the sappers about that dog," Torti said, referring to the team that responds to suspected bomb sites. "You know we'll be hard-pressed to sleep tonight if that dog blows up."

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