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First Lt. Nicholas Bradley encourages an Iraqi
boy to hang in there until an Army medic can come to examine him.
The boy suffered shrapnel wounds in a mortar attack that killed two
other children. (Photo by Terry Boyd, S&S)
BAGHDAD
— Just before 10:30 a.m. Thursday, 1st Lt. Nicholas Bradley crouched
next to an Iraqi boy, telling him he’s going to live. The boy, about
12, was bleeding from shrapnel wounds in his back, near his spinal
column, and his arm.
The boy couldn’t move his legs, couldn’t feel anything as Bradley
probed his feet. But the platoon leader kept talking to him soothingly
as medical help arrived. Bradley held the boy’s hand while repeating,
“Hey, buddy. You’re good. You’re gonna be all right,” sounding like
he believed it, too.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
Bradley and his Company A platoon from the Fort
Hood, Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division’s 91st
Engineer Battalion left Camp Blackjack on Thursday morning at
9:30 for a lightning daylight raid on a mosque in their sector of
northern Baghdad. The brigade command ordered the raid after collecting
intelligence from informants.
The mission was aborted after only a few minutes when soldiers saw
the first roadside bomb and realized they were driving into a trap.
The battle for Baghdad, while not as sensational as Fallujah, is playing
out on a much larger stage, with both sides refining tactics. It’s
21st-century urban warfare scale — ferocious, deadly and unpredictable,
soldiers say.
Anything can happen anywhere, most of it
bad.
The battlefield and the mission can change just like that. So, the
raid turned instantly into a search for more roadside bombs.
Rolling through the Al Khadrah neighborhood just outside the Blackjack’s
gates, Bradley, a 27-year-old from Salt Lake City spotted the fresh
pile of dirt on the side of the road.
“The trash starts to look familiar, believe it or not,” Bradley said
of the second nature scanning skills many soldiers learn.
So, his platoon pulled over to deal with a roadside bomb. With the
area secure, bomb explosives soldiers from the 752nd Ordnance Company
out of Fort Sill, Okla., arrived and prepared to detonate the bomb’s
155 mm artillery shell.
As they worked, locals gathered. Between turns at trying to unsnarl
traffic, Bradley and his team — Sgt. Jeremy Lewis and Spc. Timothy
Heim — talked about how this fit a recent pattern of attacks in which
insurgents wait until bomb disposal teams arrive, then attack with
mortars.
Seconds later, their fears came true.
Three mortar rounds landed only about 50 feet from their up-armored
Humvee.
Miraculously, no soldiers were injured. But two small Iraqi boys lay
dead. A third, older boy tried to drag himself to safety.
Bradley, Heim, Lewis and the rest of the soldiers somehow stayed almost
supernaturally calm. Although they expected rocket-propelled grenades
to follow the mortars, they rushed to check the bodies of the children,
and to drag the wounded boy to safety.
“God, that’s horrible,” Bradley said quietly after the situation stabilized.
But from radio traffic, it became rapidly apparent that as bad as
it was in Al Khadrah, worse attacks were happening simultaneously
around Baghdad.
“They had us pegged,” Bradley muttered. “They had us [expletive] pegged.”
No matter how bad things get, soldiers don’t get to go home.
Hours later, as the team monitors yet another roadside bomb, Heim
and Lewis reflect on staying calm under fire.
“There’s nothing you can really do,” says Lewis, a 25-year-old soldier
from West Monroe, La. “It comes after being here awhile.”
Heim, 21, from Algonquin, Ill., finds a fresh hole in the rear of
the team’s Humvee. He touches it and says simply, “That’s curious.”
Despite their outward nonchalance, Bradley, Heim and Lewis would like
more than anything to fight the enemy straight up.
“We don’t want to hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt,” Bradley
says.
Insurgents lobbing mortars into a crowded neighborhood “shows they
don’t care,” he says. “IEDs, RPGs and mortars guarantee civilian casualties,”
he adds.
“If they really cared, they would wait till we were in an open field,
and say, ‘Let’s do it.’ But they’re terrorists.”
If they didn’t have to fight, they’d rather be helping. Bradley talks
about the school his platoon has adopted, and their ambitions for
it.
“We’ve been helping a lot of people,” he says. “Then days like this
happen, and it changes our focus to total combat.”
Thursday was an especially bad day around Baghdad. But on the positive
side, they found and destroyed two roadside bombs.
“If there’s any good that came out of it,” Bradley says, “that’s two
IEDs that won’t blow up convoys and kill soldiers.”
In the process, they somehow held onto their humanity and to their
morale.
Even after a day like Thursday, Bradley believes the conventional
war with Iraqi forces is won, and the war on terrorism here winnable.
But in Baghdad, the war on terrorism clearly is escalating, he says.
“Today was very coordinated; a very coordinated effort to go get us.”
