Vampire Village
WES BRYANT
Halloween Night, 2014
We were covering operations simultaneously in multiple locations throughout Iraq. The pace was lightning at times. We’d often have two strikes going at once in completely different parts of the country, with JTACs sitting tandem and controlling intelligence and strike aircraft annihilating ISIS wherever and whenever we could find them.
Every evening before leaving for my shift, I’d fill a large travel mug full of French-Pressed brew to sip on throughout the first hours. I needed that to keep my edge, for better or worse. I’d catch the dinner meal at the chow hall, sometimes linking up with my JTACs off shift or in-between missions with their Special Forces teams. We’d bullshit about the last few days’ events, at least as much as we could in the non-secure environment of the chow hall dining room that bustled with a mix of conventional soldiers, State Department personnel, and military contractors.
Vern and I would try to link up for dinner when we could since it fell toward the end of his shift. That was nice when it happened. He’d be able to fill me in on what had gone on during the day in order to expedite our handover an hour or so later. It was also our only real time to small talk. We’d chat about our lives back home, our families, and the job.
If I didn’t see Vern at the chow hall, I knew he was on a busy shift and hadn’t been able to break away for dinner. That gave me a feel for how much more coffee I should guzzle down before I pushed out to the cell. On those nights, I knew we were likely going to step into chaos.
Our shift changes could be incredibly busy. Sometimes the incoming crew would come in during a strike in progress. In those cases, our established rule was that they stand by and observe, quietly absorbing all the details of the situation so they could jump in and replace the on-shift JTACs seamlessly and take over at the best opportunity without affecting the operation or any of the strikes.
Other times, the previous shift was actively targeting or tracking enemy forces but not yet at the point of requesting strike approval. There might be a few more pieces of information yet needed to close the loop—such as the location of the closest friendly forces or final verification that we weren’t looking at a neutral militia group or some other unit that no one was previously tracking. There were times when it took hours, even days, to fully develop a target.
Those instances always created a bit of amicable jealousy on part of the outgoing crew. We’d shake hands and pat shoulders, and the guys on their way out would affectionately nudge “you’re welcome for the target on a silver platter, fuckers.” JTACs always wanted to get the kill for themselves, it was our nature and what we trained for. But that was just how it went sometimes.
There was one incredibly frustrating target we’d been building intelligence on for weeks. None of us had been able to pinpoint any enemy forces at a place where the Iraqis insisted was saturated with ISIS. Then the opportunity finally came.
In a suburb of Ramadi, ISIS had previously taken control of two large Iraqi Army compounds. Weeks before, they’d driven out or killed most all the Iraqi forces in the area. North of the largest compound, only about 200 meters and across a main road, was a third compound. There, a handful of stubborn Iraqi forces were strongpointed and continued to defend.
At best, a platoon-sized element of Iraqi forces remained at that northern compound—around thirty-to-forty soldiers. To complement their force they had one M-1 Abrams tank and a couple of armored Humvee gun trucks. The number of ISIS fighters at the other two compounds wasn’t known for sure, but we knew from intelligence reports that it was more than the Iraqi contingent and that they were well-fortified.
We deduced that the ISIS force was also utilizing the suburban residential area further to the south to hide most of their fighters and mask their activities. Time and again over the course of the preceding weeks, we’d receive word that the Iraqi holdout forces were being attacked. Yet, every time we pushed aircraft overhead we were unable to identify any ISIS forces or positions.
Numerous times over those frustrating weeks, the Iraqis had asked us to just strike the remaining compounds. But they were huge, multi-storied structures that used to house multitudes of Iraqi troops. We couldn’t just destroy the compounds without real-time verification of ISIS occupying them. Not only was that against our ROE, it would be an irresponsible use of ordnance and a detriment to the Iraqi forces’ ability to eventually re-take the compounds and utilize the facilities.
Finally, that Halloween night as our children back home trick-or-treated through the relative safety of our American neighborhoods, the commander of the small Iraqi holdout force in the Ramadi suburb decided he’d long had enough of being caged-in by ISIS. He relayed to our strike cell that he was going to aggress the ISIS positions in a bold counterassault. He declared he would take his remaining tank, gun trucks, and his soldiers and retake the compounds to the south—and that he’d be manning the tank himself. He adamantly requested airstrikes from our strike cell to support the maneuver.
Hell yes! We relayed our enthusiasm back to him. We were ecstatic to finally see some aggression by those Iraqi forces!
The Iraqi field commander took time to ensure that he was in direct contact with his rear operations center before he pushed out, so he could keep good communications with our strike cell throughout the assault. His senior commander at the Iraqi operations center was side-by-side with our embedded Special Forces team, and the team was in-turn on a secure conference call with our liaison in the strike cell. The communications flow for the operation from the forward commander to us and back would be near real-time.
Within an hour, we watched as the Iraqi commander’s modest force of one tank, a couple of armored Humvees, and a squad of dismounted Iraqi soldiers pushed out from their strongpointed building to engage the fortified ISIS fighters to their south—a force that we well knew outnumbered them.
“This guy’s a fuckin’ badass!” one of the guys in the cell yelled out.
The small Iraqi assault force made its way across the road toward the largest ISIS-held compound, landmarked in the center by a 100-meter long, three-story building. Immediately upon crossing the main road, the Iraqi force got into a couple of skirmishes—taking fire from ISIS fighters holed up in the large center building and a couple smaller buildings to the east and west.
We couldn’t tell where the ISIS positions were at the time, though. ISIS was holding ground easily and we had a difficult time identifying their firing positions in order to strike. Even though we were watching the firefight through our drone and aircraft feeds and we could see rounds impacting our Iraqi forces along with their counterfire, we still couldn’t pinpoint the origination of the enemy fire. After weeks of enduring our airstrike campaign in Iraq by that point, ISIS had become incredibly adept at masking the muzzle flashes of their weapons inside buildings so that we couldn’t make out their positions with our aircraft.
Our liaison that night, a keen and forward-thinking Navy SEAL, interjected with a simple but ingenious idea. He told us he was going to direct the Iraqi commander to start pointing the tank’s barrel at the enemy locations as soon as they took fire, so that we could shift our aircraft sensors to the identified ISIS positions immediately instead of waiting for an information relay through the Iraqi operations center.
The tactic worked perfectly. The Iraqi commander maneuvered the M1 tank and its barrel like a boss, pointing the cannon at every ISIS fighting position he needed us to strike. As soon as we’d see the Iraqi tank maneuver and point its barrel another direction, we’d direct our drone sensor and inevitably pick up ISIS ground fire directed toward the Iraqi forces. With that overt of a verifier, we knew we were looking at an ISIS fighting position. We were able to quickly identify the ISIS fighters before they withdrew back into their concealment.
What transpired was a night of pure, unadulterated annihilation against a series of long-standing ISIS fortifications. We soon came into a beautifully harmonized effort between our strike cell and the forward Iraqi force. We began destroying ISIS machine gun positions and building strongholds with strikes while the Iraqi gun trucks and dismounted soldiers maneuvered into flanking positions and suppressed ISIS fighters at every turn. We pummeled machine gun nests and fighting positions in the main building compound as well as multiple buildings to the south that we’d previously had no idea ISIS even occupied.
Soon, we began massing ground fires with our airstrikes—synchronizing gunfire from the Iraqi tank’s 120mm cannon, the machine guns of their Humvees, and bombs and missiles from our American F-16s, coalition fighter aircraft, and Predator drone. Eight 500-pound bombs, three 100-pound missiles, and countless 120mm cannon and heavy machine gun rounds later and we’d taken out five ISIS command and control buildings, a slew of ISIS fighting positions, two 23mm direct-fire artillery nests, a sniper hide-site, and at least a few dozen more ISIS fighters.
The mission was, in a word, epic.
Because of our success that night, the small Iraqi force was able to take back the two Army compounds to the south and, within days, drive the remaining ISIS fighters from the urban area further south—where it was soon discovered ISIS had established an extensive command and control network.
I was one of only a couple of JTACs in Iraq at the time with the call sign Vampire. My Combat Control JTACs used the call sign Titan, and our SEAL and Special Forces JTACs had completely different call signs. Our call signs had been utilized throughout the previous Iraq War for all SOF TACPs and CCTs in country, but they’d been decommissioned upon U.S. withdrawal in 2011. They had a whole lot of history behind them, so we’d had them re-assigned as soon as we pushed in for the crisis back in June.
Since our strikes that night had decimated what could viably be termed a small village of ISIS fighters, I unofficially labeled the objective area “Vampire Village” in a fitting term of reverence for the legacy of the Vampire call sign and that epic Halloween night mission.
• • •
The successes of Vampire Village, and of all the operations we’d accomplished from the start of the campaign against ISIS, were a reflection of what the American-led coalition would evolve into over the ensuing months and years. They were testament to the fact that, with courage and aggression from our partnered and allied forces combined with assistance and air support from America and its coalition, we were an absolutely unstoppable force regardless of the enemy we faced.