The Cool Blue Blog: Ambush!

Fighting through the pain
Amid tragic loss, Guard unit prevails in Baqubah ambush

By Gina Cavallaro
Times staff writer

BAQUBAH, Iraq — The pre-dawn patrols were routine for Alpha Company — deliberate sweeps of main supply routes aimed at catching the people who plant killer roadside bombs under cover of darkness.

Danger was more than a probability, it was always present, and contact with the enemy was something soldiers were prepared for.

But on June 24, the soldiers of 1st Battalion, 120th Infantry Regiment out of Wilmington, N.C. — part of the National Guard’s 30th Enhanced Separate Brigade — had no clue they would be ambushed by more than 150 enemy fighters. The fighters had infiltrated and set up firing positions overnight as part of a coordinated multicity attack that claimed scores of lives all over the country.

“It was one of those days we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives,” said Spc. Ralph Isabella, one of the company’s medics.

The 1-120th had spent the previous three months in eastern Iraq near the border with Iran, where violence was sporadic and the climate in the community more like what they were used to back home. But Baqubah is steeped in trouble and has been violent for coalition forces since the U.S.-led occupation began in March 2003.

“We went from about as friendly a place as there could be, where everywhere you stopped, they tried to feed you … to here,” said 3rd Platoon leader 1st Lt. Max Stroud, who was on the early morning patrol that was the first to be attacked.

Two of Alpha Company’s soldiers, including their commander, would become the only U.S. service members killed in eight hours of violence in Baqubah. Six U.S. soldiers were wounded.

The 3rd Platoon rolled out the north gate of forward operating base Warhorse at 3 a.m. and was less than a half-hour from wrapping up its three-hour patrol when insurgents launched an aggressive ambush against them. The sun was coming up, and the patrol were slowing to stop on the side of the road so the drivers could switch out night sights with daytime periscopes.

“I was thinking: ‘In 30 minutes we’ll be off this patrol and I’ll get my laundry, I’ll get my breakfast,’” Bradley gunner Sgt. Charles McIntyre recalled.

Then the first rocket-propelled grenade sailed past the front of his tracked vehicle and exploded.

Within seconds, the 3rd Platoon soldiers were thrust into full combat by masked fighters shooting at them from positions in two- and three-story buildings on both sides of the road. A hail of RPGs, small-arms fire and large-caliber machine-gun fire showered the three Bradleys with lethal projectiles that pinged, clanged and whizzed past.

Heading south, the platoon sped through a half-mile-long kill zone and emerged relatively unscathed on the other side, taking cover with a quick about-face, pointing the frontal armor toward the enemy.

But the enemy kept creeping toward them, expanding the kill zone.

Everyone recalled seeing enemy fighters wielding RPGs, creating such a large number of targets that they couldn’t fire fast enough.

“There were more of them, about 30 to 50 guys, but we weren’t outgunned,” said McIntyre, one of three gunners who returned fire from their 25mm cannons and coaxial machine guns.

“These guys were very organized,” Bradley commander Staff Sgt. Will Murray said.

After regrouping in the area just past the ambush, 3rd Platoon was ordered to maintain contact with the insurgents and bring them out into the open so the threat could be assessed and reinforcements brought in. Stroud directed his platoon to move toward the ambushers, who had already moved closer to the platoon’s position, allowing the enemy to continue its attack from both sides of the road.

The acrid smell of cordite hung in the still morning air, and the unrelenting rain of metal destroyed water cans and boxes of MREs strapped to the outside of the Bradleys. The optical sights on one vehicle were damaged, and the turrets on the two other Bradleys were immobilized when pieces of armor became wedged under the turret, locking the guns into one position.

“On the fourth time through, they started mortaring us, and off of a pedestrian crosswalk, they were tossing down improvised explosive devices, but they missed,” Murray said. The patrol had taken a dozen hits from RPGs, and no one was hurt, but the experience left an indelible impression.

“When they hit the Bradley with an RPG, the explosion was like a white flash of sunlight. It feels like your brain is going to leak out your eyes,” Sgt. Jeff Dedrich said.

Fatal ambush

It was just before 6 a.m. when 3rd Platoon was ordered back to Warhorse north of town so it could refit and reorganize for a fight that showed signs of becoming a long engagement.

Picking up the baton, Alpha’s 1st Platoon was dispatched to secure two bridges in the center of the city. In addition to the platoon’s three Bradleys, the lineup included tracks commanded by Capt. Christopher Cash and his executive officer, 1st Lt. John Wilaby. The five Bradleys pushed into the same ambush and made it to the site of the bridges, but with tragic and irreversible consequences.

It was about 6:20 a.m. when Cash, 36, was felled by a machine gunner perched atop a building. Moments later, an armor-piercing RPG ripped through another Bradley, mortally wounding gunner Spc. Daniel Desens, knocking the Bradley’s commander unconscious and wounding five other soldiers in the back of the vehicle.

The Bradley’s turret was in the nine o’clock position when the projectile pierced the periscope on the left side of the hull and struck the 25mm ammunition rack at Desens’ feet. The high explosive rounds blew, shrapnel flew in all directions and Halon gas filled the back of the track. All communications were destroyed in a magic-bullet shot that sliced through the wiring harness.

“We banged on the turret and there was no response. It was kind of panicky. When you’re in the back of a Bradley, you don’t really know what’s going on,” Spc. Christopher Durham said. Without their ability to communicate with the driver or the turret crew, the men in the back of the track had no idea if the Bradley was careening with no one at the helm, he said.

The only working radio was a manpack in the back of the vehicle, but the thunderous roar of the tracked vehicle overpowered their voices.

The driver was unhurt and in control, but without communication with the rest of the crew — most of whom were wounded. He stayed the course to the bridges, following the Bradley in front of him. It was only when they stopped and set up security at the bridges that the wounded were tended to and evacuated.

Desens, everyone recalled, continued shooting after he was hit, even though his femoral artery was destroyed and part of his leg was blown away by the ammo explosion.

“We had to pry his fingers off the gun,” said Isabella, who confirmed that Desens, 20, killed the man who shot the RPG before he slumped down into the turret.

Sgt. Chad Stephens climbed to the top of the Bradley under fire and hoisted Desens up and out of the gunner’s hole.

”He had lost a lot of blood, but he was breathing and had a pulse,” Isabella said.

The 1st Platoon Bradleys pulled away from the bridges and began speeding toward nearby forward operating base Gabe for medical evacuation and treatment of the other wounded.

Desens stopped breathing and Isabella revived him with cardiopulmonary resuscitation three times, including once when the Bradley carrying the wounded was hit by an RPG and filled with Halon gas.

Both Cash and Desens died on the 10-minute helicopter ride to a combat support hospital in Balad.

New commander

The violence in Baqubah continued throughout most of the day, and the Wolverines of Alpha Company were pushed back into the fight that afternoon. Shaken, they moved to objectives on two missions led by Capt. Ty Johnson.

Johnson, commander of F Troop, 4th U.S. Cavalry, was designated to take charge of the two platoons until the company’s new commander, Capt. Matt Stapleton, the battalion’s headquarters and headquarters company commander, could fly in.

“It was like a double-edged sword,” said Alpha Company executive officer Wilaby about the decision to replace Cash, a popular, savvy and accomplished commander, with an active-duty commander no one knew.

In retrospect, he said, it was a good move. “In the mind frame I was in at the time, if I had gone out there by myself, I hate to say it, but there probably would have been a lot more dead people than there were.”

Johnson, he said, kept pushing them “and making us focus, which pretty much got our mind off of what had happened. Nobody pulled a trigger when they didn’t have to. Probably the best thing they did that day was give us Captain Johnson.”

The two platoons followed into the fray that afternoon, secured the bridges that had been abandoned earlier and carried out a raid on a neighborhood believed to harbor insurgents.

They came up empty-handed, but at the end of one of the longest days for the Wolverines, they felt they had prevailed in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Like a family

Johnson “wasn’t clouded by emotion like the rest of us,” 1st Sgt. Gary Fry of Swansboro said, commenting on Johnson’s ability to step in and pull them together.

In a National Guard unit, some said, soldiers are like family. They know one another and have trained together for years.

“We were all ready to go. You hit one of us, you hit us all. We all wanted to go out,” McIntyre said.

Johnson may not have had that in common with the Wolverines, but he was no stranger to tragedy.

“The thing is that I was clouded by emotion,” said Johnson, who lost six of his own soldiers in a month. “When I was in that turret, all I was thinking about was those guys.”

But thinking of those fallen soldiers only strengthened his resolve to do right by the Alpha Company soldiers.

On April 10, an RPG killed one of his squad leaders, Sgt. William Cody Eckhart. The next day, Staff Sgt. Victor Rosales was killed by an IED on the road to Najaf. On May 3, four of Johnson’s soldiers — Pfc. Lyndon Marcus, Sgt. Greg Wahl, Sgt. Marvin Sprayberry and his executive officer and close friend, 1st Lt. Chris Kenny, who was promoted posthumously — were killed together when their Humvee rolled over into a canal.

Remembering the fallen

The Wolverines have been activated since September 2003 and arrived in Iraq on March 15. Stapleton stepped in for Cash, and the company is busy conducting its regular pre-dawn bomb sweeps and augmenting other operations with F Troop, 1st Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, and 2nd Battalion, 63rd Armor.

Cash, a former active-duty soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division, and Desens, who had been in the unit for about two years, are still very much on everyone’s mind.

“He loved running and he had an aversion to wearing socks,” Stroud said of Cash, who was his neighbor in Winterville. Cash was an exercise physiologist and was known for his love of running marathons to help raise money for cancer research.

“He was the most technically proficient commander I have ever worked for,” Fry said.

Desens was young and energetic and made everyone feel comfortable.

“He was the kind of person that everybody liked. He always looked out for everybody and made new guys, like me, feel welcome,” said Pfc. Trelain Whiting of Havelock.

Spc. Christopher Durham, who was in the Bradley when Desens was hit, was one of his closest buddies in the company and a co-worker back home in Jacksonville. Desens was the best man at Durham’s wedding. He hadn’t liked Desens at first, Durham said, “but it didn’t take me a week for him to grow on me.”

“Before Dan went out, he took quite a few [enemy fighters] out. Those Bradleys can take quite a bit of hits, but it was just a lucky shot,” Durham said.

“It still feels like he’s going to walk through those tents, but it’s one of those things I have to accept because otherwise it makes it harder to do my job.”