“POLICE MUST SECURE THE WILLING CO-OPERATION OF THE PUBLIC IN VOLUNTARY OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW TO BE ABLE TO SECURE AND MAINTAIN THE RESPECT OF THE PUBLIC.”
CHAPTER 19: AL HOREA POLICE STATION
I PLANNED TO CHECK ON THE AL HOREA POLICE STATION FIRST thing in the morning of 18 September, and then spend the rest of the day in my office, meeting with the staff and walking through the company areas talking to soldiers. The “Anbar-is-lost” genie was still not back in the bottle, so I felt it important to spend more time among the troops in order to let them ask questions, and for me to get a feel for morale. Also, the end-of-tour awards for the soldiers in the task force were due to brigade, and we were finishing the last of them.
I was running late and still in the latrine when a massive blast wave shook Camp Ramadi. As I went outside, I saw a mushroom cloud billowing into the sky over 5 Kilo. One of the soldiers from the TOC ran up to me, telling me that a suicide bomber had hit the al Horea police station, and the initial reports indicated it was devastating. Sergeant First Class Roberts had the security detachment ready to go as soon as he heard the blast. I grabbed my M-4, Kevlar, and body armor, and in minutes our four Humvees were racing down the dusty trails of Camp Ramadi.
The Al Horea police station was located on the east side of 5 Kilo in what appeared to be one of the nicer neighborhoods of Ramadi. To get to the police station, we had to travel on Route Michigan for maybe five hundred yards, turn right onto Route Lopez for another two hundred yards, pass through a small business district, and then turn left on the street leading into the police station. There was a grade school immediately next door to the al Horea police station though I had never seen a child coming or going from the place. It normally took us about fifteen minutes to get from the operations center to the police station, with most of that time consumed transiting the dust-choked trails of Camp Ramadi and then making the painfully slow drive looking for IED trigger wires along Route Michigan. A couple of weeks prior to this a Team Dealer patrol struck a pressure plate IED on Route Michigan immediately in front of Camp Ramadi. The explosion blew the tracks off the Bradley and killed three sheep that were grazing on the side of the road, proving that proximity to Camp Ramadi did not mean safety as much as one might think.
Today we made the drive in less than five minutes.
Lieutenant Toby Watson and his engineer platoon had recently upgraded the blast protection around the station, and we considered the place to be damn near impenetrable. Texas barriers backed with steel and sandbag-fighting positions ringed the station, with the only exception the fifteen-foot-wide steel entrance gate to the compound. Jersey barriers on the road in front of the police station formed a serpentine entrance to prevent a suicide bomber from gaining speed if he attempted to ram the gate and force his way in. As a final line of defense, we parked an M1114 up-armored Humvee perpendicular to the inside of the gate, so even if a bomber managed to penetrate the gate, he would immediately broadside a two-ton armored vehicle and detonate at the entrance, away from most of the personnel.
As we turned off Route Michigan and onto Route Lopez, we passed a blackened cube of charred metal barely recognizable as the remnant of a bomb-shattered automobile. Smoke and flame still swirled around the wreckage and as we sped past the burning vehicle, trying to stay on the lookout for IED trigger wires. I hoped that the first report was wrong—that instead, the civilian car had hit an IED and it had not been a suicide attack on the police station—but there was too much smoke rising in front of me for that hope to be a reality.
Arriving at the Al Horea station, we found two Bradleys and a couple of Humvees from Team Dealer already securing the front entrance, as smoke rose from inside the police compound. The Humvees reinforced the perimeter as Roberts, Dragon and I dismounted and ran through the wide-open gate. In front of us was a scene of almost incomprehensible devastation. The front of the two-story headquarters building housing the chief’s office and the American advisor’s command post was simply gone, with the remainder of the structure a sagging, blistered expanse of cracked concrete, exposed wires, and almost indecently displayed interior rooms. Across the courtyard, scraps of truck chassis smoldered nearby, looking eerily similar to aftermath of the attack on ECP 3 months earlier.
Of the four buildings inside the police compound, the main headquarters was completely destroyed, while two others had visible structural damage—exterior walls were torn away, or walls and roof sagging from the force of the blast. The only two things apparently undamaged were a recently installed Civilian-Military Operations Center and the Humvee that should have been blocking the gate defense.
Lieutenant Blackstone was standing in the courtyard, directing the rescue effort and calling for support on his man-pack radio. “Sir, nearly all of the MPs were wounded, some of them are pretty bad. The worse ones are already in the back of a Brad en route to Charley Med,” he reported while pointing to the destroyed command post, “There are a couple of Iraqis trapped in there, and we can’t get at them.”
“Keep doing what you’re doing and let me know if you need anything,” I answered. As I turned to find Lieutenant Colonel Fallah, I realized my interpreter was gone. As I scanned the chaotic scene, I caught a glimpse of Dragon crawling over the shattered concrete and twisted metal in frantic efforts to reach the wounded policemen. Although it incensed me at the time to see my only means of communicating with the Iraqis put his life in danger by rushing into a burning building, it was typical of his character. Caught up in my own reaction, it took me a minute to realize that Dragon trying to save the life of another person was much more important in the larger perspective.
Minutes later the QRF arrived, accompanied by a pair of firefighting Humvees operated by Marines. One crew assisted in the rescue attempt while the other went to work extinguishing the small fires burning throughout the compound—fortunately, concrete does not burn. Despite the best efforts of Dragon, the soldiers, the Iraqis, and the firemen, the two policemen were dead by the time help reached them.
What Lieutenant Blackstone failed to report was that the burning Opel we passed was a second suicide bomber targeting the first responders, timed to attack the police station minutes after the initial blast. Blackstone was less than half a mile away on the north end of Tam’eem near OP Jones in his Bradley when he heard the blast. Reacting without orders, he raced toward the sound of gunfire, trailed closely by his wingman and a Humvee, in order to stop a possible enemy ground assault on the station and render aid to the wounded.
As Blackstone’s Bradley roared through the commercial district on Route Lopez, the Opel sedan pulled out of a side street and tried to pass the three-vehicle formation. The crew of the Humvee, commanded by Corporal Ian Morris, driven by Specialist Sam Van Ryssegem with Specialist Juan Escamilla on the M240 machine gun atop the vehicle, recognized the threat immediately. Morris and Ryssegem yelled to Escamilla, who was scanning a different sector, telling him to engage the speeding vehicle.
Figure 30 Engineer Lieutenant Toby Watson begins assessing the reconstruction of the Al Horea Police Station as firefighters extinguish the last of the flames and soldiers look through the rubble for forensic evidence. Photo courtesy Jeremy Brown. Click on the photo for bonus features.
Escamilla traversed his M240 and opened fire on the jihadist. Both vehicles were traveling more than forty miles per hour, when a steady stream of rounds tore into the speeding Opel. Escamilla’s precise fire detonated the deadly payload, turning the vehicle into a fireball, killing the suicide bomber—whose body ended up plastered to a building twelve feet off the ground. Miraculously, no one else was injured. Later, Escamilla said, “After I knew everyone was all right, I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.” Corporal Morris chalked it up to teamwork, “Everyone worked together, and things turned out well.” Their quick reaction saved the lives of many survivors in the police station.317
Prior to arriving in Ramadi, I had evaluated Lieutenant Blackstone as an average platoon leader. Ian was an infantryman, but the Army was reassigning him to be a logistics officer for promotion to captain. He grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; just miles away from Perfecto Sanchez, but their lives could not have been more different. The son of a liberal New York City lawyer and the administrator of a non-profit charity, Ian graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, before attending West Virginia University on an ROTC Scholarship. Throughout the preparation for deployment and the time in Kuwait, we had only two platoon leaders for the three platoons in Team Dealer. With the loss of Lieutenant Scott Love, we realigned the platoon’s leadership within Team Dealer and moved Blackstone to backfill Lieutenant Love as the first platoon leader. Later, when we had to relieve the third platoon leader and platoon sergeant, I needed a strong leader in that platoon and moved Blackstone again to get the platoon under control. I had been a platoon leader for fifteen months in the same platoon in Germany during the cold war and found it one of the hardest jobs that I ever had. Blackstone was on this third platoon in less than five months, in combat, in the most dangerous city in the world, and he was making it work. I am not sure I could have done what Ian accomplished.
I witnessed Ian expose himself to enemy fire on two occasions. In the end, Blackstone received three awards for heroism, and two administrative reprimands known as letters of concern. As we were walking out of Colonel MacFarland’s office after his being read the second reprimand, he turned to me.
“Hey sir, I’m still thinking about making the Army a career. What effect are these letters of concern going to have?” he asked sincerely.
“Ian, you still have more awards for bravery than you have letters of concern. You’re a fucking hero in my book, son. It’s a split decision, but still a hero,” I told him.
Ian turned out to be a leader who found himself in a terrible situation and rose to the occasion like a champion.
The toll of the attack included two Iraqi policemen killed, nineteen wounded, and eight of the eleven American advisors wounded as well. Without the quick action of Blackstone, Morris, Van Ryssegem, and Escamilla, the casualties would have been much higher.
I found Lieutenant Colonel Fallah getting accountability of the two dozen or so Iraqi policemen who were fit for duty, placing a couple of them around the outer walls of the compound. The remaining Iraqis were spooked and were convinced that another attack was imminent. Every few minutes, one of the shaken policemen thought he spotted a terrorist and emptied the 30 round magazine of his AK 47, leading to many of his comrades also firing in every direction and at nothing in particular—an act known as an “Iraqi death blossom” in local parlance. The U.S. soldiers yelled “Cease Fire! Cease Fire!” and then the Iraqi leadership started yelling in Arabic, and eventually the police stopped shooting, in most cases when they had emptied their magazines. Five minutes later, the whole process would start all over again. This was one of only a few occasions during the deployment when I truly feared for my life. I felt certain one of the policemen was going to shoot me accidentally.
Eventually, events settled down enough that I had time to speak frankly with Lieutenant Colonel Fallah. The police commander told me that he had been in the building when the attack occurred, but escaped out of a window in the aftermath of the blast. It was immediately obvious that a co-conspirator inside the station had given the suicide bomber access. Fallah pieced the story together by grilling his officers who had been standing guard, learning that the policeman manning the crow’s nest overlooking the gate had climbed down from his post, rolled the Humvee out of the way, opened the gate and calmly walked out as the suicide bomber raced into the compound. The five-ton truck detonated directly in front of the entrance of the headquarters building, right where my Humvee would have been parked, if I had not used the latrine that morning. Lieutenant Colonel Fallah had already identified the traitor, who had returned to the station compound and was trying to mingle unobtrusively with his comrades. Fallah was more than ready to shoot him on the spot.
While I did not want to thwart Lieutenant Colonel Fallah’s initiative, I foresaw the terrible negative consequences of a police chief executing a prisoner. First, I would have to arrest Fallah for murder. Additionally, I knew that the famous photograph of South Vietnamese Major General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner during the Tet Offensive in 1968 became a rallying point for the anti-war movement worldwide. A photo of Fallah putting a bullet in the head of another uniformed policeman would have similarly been a gold mine for the Al Qaeda propaganda campaign. More importantly, the rule of law applies in good time and bad, and if we started working outside the rule of law, then we were no better than Al Qaeda. I understood Lieutenant Colonel Fallah’s anger, but could not let him act on it. I also knew that getting into a shouting match with Fallah, or arresting him in front of his men before he acted was not the solution either.
“My friend, not to worry, I will arrest him myself. You just need to point him out to me,” I told Lieutenant Colonel Fallah.
“Colonel, you are much too busy of a man, I will shoot him myself. You do not worry about him,” Fallah replied.
“Fallah, I will arrest him and take him back to camp. We will interrogate him and find out who put him up to this.”
“Please, please, my friend, do not concern yourself. You have other things to worry about. You are a busy man,” Fallah repeated politely.
“Fallah. No, I must insist. I will do this for you, and when we get the information, I will make sure that you and your men come along and get the rest of the gang. I promise you, my friend,” I pressed, also in a conversational tone.
“Are you sure?” Fallah asked, finally wavering a bit.
“It would be my honor,” I assured him.
Dragon and I walked up to the traitorous policeman and told him that we needed to talk to him privately. We stepped outside of the walls of the police station, very close to where our Humvees were securing the perimeter. The two most intimidating members of my security detachment, Specialists Jamison and Ladell, waited for us along with Sergeant First Class Roberts. As soon as the traitorous policemen saw the other member of the security detachment approaching, he started sobbing.
“It was not me! It was not me!” he insisted over and over.
Had we been interested in meting out street justice that would have been confession enough. However, if there was ever an opportunity to send a message to the Iraqi police about the rule of law, this seemed to be it. Jamison and Ladell quickly disarmed the man, zip-tied him, and turned him over to the quick reaction force. They rolled off immediately to take him back to the detention center for interrogation, which was a prelude to an extended trip to Camp Bucca.
When I returned, Lieutenant Colonel Fallah was appreciative, but clearly had other immediate worries. I asked him what he needed, and he seemed a little-taken aback. I wondered if my question had gotten lost in the translation, but over the course of the next few minutes, I realized that Fallah had not expected to be part of the decision on the future of his police station.
However, it was clear that Fallah wanted to stay and was not ready to admit defeat by leaving the Al Horea post. I thought that his resolve was admirable, but wondered how we were going to get this place usable again. By this time, more support had arrived, including an armored bulldozer from Toby Watson’s platoon rolling up to help clear away the debris.
Physically, the exterior walls of the compound remained intact, but the buildings inside the station were uninhabitable. The personnel losses presented an even bigger challenge: the police advisor team had lost its platoon leader, and a couple of non-commissioned officers, as well as most of its soldiers and the communications link to Camp Ramadi. If the terrorists came back later that night, the police station did not have the means to defend itself or to call for Coalition support.
On top of all this, the relationship between the police advisor team and myself was rocky at best. The police advisors based in AO Conqueror did not report to me or the Ready First, a fact that broke every rule of unity of command in my mind, and I did not have much faith in them before the attack. Now only a couple of privates remained, and those soldiers were pretty shaken up over the decimation of their platoon. I had seen too many stories in the news where terrorists had attacked an Iraqi police station, and when the Americans returned the next day, they found the station abandoned, never to be re-established. As for my task force, I was already strapped for soldiers, and simply could not afford to pull forces away from Tam’eem. I had only option, and that was to get the Highlanders of Headquarters Company to scratch up what forces they could to hold the Al Horea police station for the next twenty-four hours.
I called the Highlander TOC, speaking with First Sergeant Kerry Dyer, with whom I had a great personal and professional relationship. He was a dynamic first sergeant who had done an excellent job in a tough situation. Dyer had been the Team Comanche first sergeant in Baumholder when we “promoted” him to serve as the headquarters company first sergeant. A tank battalion always puts its best first sergeant in the headquarters company, and without exception, they all hate the job. Of the two- hundred fifty, men in the headquarters company, only four of us wanted to be there: the command sergeant major, the two majors, and me. Everyone else wanted to be in a tank company.
Kerry Dyer grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The week before graduating from Washington-Marion High School in May 1988, his dad told him that he was going to have to do something once he graduated. Dyer did not have a plan on what to do next, so he went to the recruiter that day to find out what was available for him to see the world. It was a six-month wait to join the infantry, but a slot to be a cavalry scout was available the next week. Five days after graduation, he was on his way to Fort Knox for basic training.318
First Sergeant Dyer was incredulous as I proposed that he put together a team to secure the shattered police station. We would often joke around about who was the better scout, and initially, he thought I was kidding. The Highlanders were good at many things, but securing blown up Iraqi police compounds in the world’s most dangerous city was just not on the list, at least not then.
“Top, I am out of cards, and I need you and Captain Schoenfeldt to round up every tanker in the company and form them up. We cannot afford to lose this police station. Not now. I need you to hold it until tomorrow morning. You and Schoenfeldt are great soldiers. Take your time; get what you need, but figure it out, get your asses out here before dark,” I ordered.
“Roger sir, we got it,” came back, and I could hear the resolve in First Sergeant Dyer’s voice.
Captain Mike Schoenfeldt called me on my cell phone a few minutes later. Mike was an absolute professional to whom I had just handed a shit sandwich, but understood the importance of the mission and was going to make it happen. I stayed on site talking with Lieutenant Colonel Fallah until Captain Schoenfeldt and First Sergeant Dyer arrived with the Highlander contingent of cooks, clerks, mechanics, and tankers. We walked the perimeter with the Iraqis, and Schoenfeldt and Dyer refined their plan and took charge.
When I came back in the morning, the Iraqi police were still there. I rolled up to Captain Schoenfeldt and First Sergeant Dyer and thanked them for pulling off the mission on short notice with a group of soldiers who had not trained collectively for this unprecedented type of event. Mike, with the swagger expected of an armor officer, tried to play off the compliment.
“Piece of cake, Sir. Anytime. Conquer or Die!”
Lieutenant Colonel Fallah had resolve in his eyes as well. I told him that we would have bucket loaders and dump trucks coming soon to haul away the rubble, and that reconstruction started now. The new platoon sergeant from the police advisor team arrived shortly after. He understood the situation and understood how to deal with the Iraqi colonel. I told him to call me personally if he needed anything, and I went back to Camp Ramadi. Things may not have been moving ahead, but I was encouraged that we had not taken too big of a step back with the destruction of the police station. More importantly, we were planning a major operation with the Iraqi army battalion in Tam’eem within twenty-four hours.
As for the men of Highlander, that night their actions went beyond the call of duty, and certainly well beyond their job descriptions. Of course, that was a common practice within Task Force Conqueror and every other unit in the Ready First, but I was incredibly proud of how quickly and capably they had performed a very non-standard assignment. I knew that I asked a lot from my soldiers, probably too much from some. Most had to work sixteen-hour days as a matter of routine. Everyone in the task force, except maybe ten personnel working in the TOC, put themselves in harm’s way daily, either out on patrol, manning the front gate, or up on the wall protecting Camp Ramadi. They worked in hellish conditions—the temperature in the tanks usually reached one-hundred twenty degrees during the day. The soldiers in the Bradleys could at least get some fresh air through the hatches, but they too, heated up to roasting temperatures under the merciless sun. The up-armored Humvees may have been air-conditioned, but they also were deathtraps and no one was happy riding in them. Moving dismounted was probably the safest, but wearing seventy to ninety pounds of body armor and ammunition was backbreaking work in a city where seemingly everyone wanted to kill you.
Leaders at all levels stepped up, and I was especially proud of my amazing company commanders. Even more important, I had phenomenal first sergeants, platoon leaders, and platoon sergeants. They were the ones that actually took the fight to the enemy, and they did it in such a measured, controlled way.
The real backbone of the Dealers was the strong group of NCOs lead by First Sergeant Shaw, the three stellar platoon sergeants, Sergeant First Class Harris, Sergeant First Class Poore, and Staff Sergeant Samuel Frantz, and the great group of squad leaders and team leaders that were behind them. No matter how bad things got in a given incident, the men of Dealer went back out on patrol the next day. They had a job to do, and they were going to accomplish the mission, despite the losses in leadership and personnel.
Figure 31. Team Dealer daily patrol meeting, from Left CPT Matt Graham, Command Sergeant Major Delgado, Sergeant First Class Ray Poore, Second Lieutenant Kellen Blythe, and First Lieutenant Ian Blackstone. 3 August 2006. Click on the photo for bonus features.
Sergeant First Class Poore was typical of the NCOs in Team Dealer. Poore and I were the only Desert Storm vets wearing the Taro Leaf patch of the 24th ID on our right shoulder in the task force, so we instantly had a bond. He grew up as an Army brat with a long family history of military service and had always wanted to join the military. His grandfather was a World War II, Korea, and Vietnam vet and his dad had served in Vietnam as well. Poore joined the National Guard just after his seventeenth birthday during his junior year at Epping High School, and immediately went on active duty after graduating. In addition to the tour with the 24th ID during Desert Storm, Poore had deployed in 2003 with the 1st Armored Division.319 Poore was a quiet professional who was unflappable under fire.
When it comes to combat leadership, my hat goes off to the company commanders, first sergeants, platoon leaders and platoon sergeants in conventional units. Going out on targeted raids or sniper teams with ten other highly trained volunteer Special Forces soldiers is exciting and sexy and makes for good stories sitting around the VFW. Sitting on a checkpoint in sweltering heat for ten hours a day, every day, simply sucks, especially when the Stop/Loss policy kept half of the platoon in the unit past the time, they were supposed to leave, and were having doubts about the war. Motivating the young soldiers to stay alert and aware in such a dangerous environment takes exceptional leadership.
Luckily, my guys had it.
