The difference was mind-boggling…the difference, that is, between what I saw with
my NVGs (night vision goggles) in the up position (disengaged) versus in the down
position. The motor of the armored launch thrummed as we skimmed east northeast,
downstream along the Euphrates River (Nahr Al Farat, in Arabic), skirting the northern
border of Ramadi in the black of night, My eyes, without the benefit of NVGs, had
adjusted to the dark; my view was of a grey, moonless sky and a similarly grey river
below. Bisecting the two expanses of grey was a featureless, thin black strip of
land. Blacker still to my near left was the prow of the SURC (small unit riverine
craft), or ‘zawraq’ as the Iraqis called it. Above either side of the prow I could
make out the dark shapes of the two bow gunners with their machine guns poking past
armor plating, one looking right, one looking left. Scattered randomly over the
black strip of land glimmered ever-so-faint house lights, echoed in the dim sky
by a faint star here and there. Once in a while, a flare from one of the helicopter
gunships circling the area as part of our security would arc like fireworks through
the sky, petering out after a few seconds. An unknown orange shape glowed low above
a bend in the river ahead. It was mid September, the night temperature between 85
and 90. Wearing my body armor and helmet, obligatory for all military or contractor
personnel going ‘outside the wire’, I knew I wouldn’t be cold this evening; the
breeze generated by our travel was refreshing. I lowered the NVGs and an astonishing,
grainy-green world sprang to life before my eyes. The dim stars gleamed brightly,
while the distant lights from the houses shone a warm, haloed green, dancing again
in reflection off the lively surface of the water. The black strip of shore was
now a detailed landscape with a sort of Holy Land aspect to it, peppered with groves
of date palms and eucalyptus trees sheltering small hovels, with a large, palatial
villa here and there, undoubtedly the property of some Saddam stalwart. Powerful,
laser-like beams from the gunners’ IR (infrared) flashlights panned the reed-lined
river banks, pausing momentarily at each break where an insurgent sniper might be
hiding. The dozen or so members of the bomb disposal company of the Iraqi Army’s
5th Infantry Division sat or lay all across the foredeck between me and the gunners.
I could see them plainly, even recognize most of their faces, although all were
wearing Kevlar helmets and some, like me, wore their NVGs down over their eyes.
The faces I could see glowed green in the light cast by the UV chemlite sticks we
had clipped to their helmets. Chemlite even shone through uniform pockets here and
there. I was amazed by the brightness of these lights, invisible to the naked eye.
The unknown orange object I’d seen in the sky was a bright quarter-moon, known in
this part of the world as the hilaal, the symbol of which adorns the pinnacle of
many a mosque. As I looked at one large villa with its balcony and well-lit window
behind, the bright searchlight chased along the angles of its walls and intruded
right into the window. It looked as if that should certainly alert the inhabitants,
but when I lifted my NVGs the villa fell back into the near-total darkness of this
Arabian night; the entire landscape regaining its midnight pall. No light invaded
the empty darkness of that villa’s window. Were it not for the location, the time
and the purpose of our trip, this would pass for a lazy midnight boat trip on flat
water.
This was our second night mission on the Euphrates River here at Ramadi. Our mission
the previous night had been to search several mid-river islands for ordnance, reportedly
hidden by insurgents to use later in the making of IEDs (improvised explosive devices),
but mission planners had neglected to take into account the rise and fall of the
river, controlled by the Haditha Dam. Unfortunately for that evening’s mission,
the level had been high and all the islands submerged, although their locations
were readily discernible from the tall cane-like grass growing on them…bulrushes,
as I call them. The secondary mission that night had been to burn off the bulrushes
to deny use of the islands as hiding places for insurgents, but it had been too
wet even for that, and the incendiary grenades had fizzled. That mission had been
enjoyable for me, and having it behind us helped us all to relax and enjoy the current
one. I was again surprised by the speed of the river’s flow, and wondered what the
CFS might be. I’m told the clear, travertine water comes from snowmelt up in Turkey
and Kurdistan. They tell me there is good whitewater up there.
The mission tonight was slightly different from our previous one, but once again
it had a double-pronged objective. We were to launch at a location I’m not at liberty
to disclose, somewhere below the Jisr Ar-Ramadi, a weir built by Saddam to help
divert water to feed huge artificial lakes by means of which he shrift the so-called
‘Marsh Arabs’ of the water that fed their marshes and comprised their birthright.
We would then motor downriver, past Ramadi City to a suspected weapons cache on
the river bank. Secondly, a raid was planned this evening. Several other boats had
launched with us; one of them containing a special forces raiding party whose object
was the home of a reputed insurgent about a half kilometer north of a sharp curve
in the river. My job, as the Arabic linguist, or ‘terp’, was to stay on the boat
and act as liaison between the Iraqi and the U.S. contingents of the mission. I
had two radios, one a hand held Motorola with which I could speak to LTC Abdel Mejid,
(name changed to preserve OPSEC) the Iraqi bomb disposal commander, whose company
would sweep the area with metal detectors. The other radio, a clumsy headset called
an imbiter perched precariously under my helmet, was for contact with Warrant Officer
Garza (name likewise changed), the U.S. Marine Corps bomb disposal advisor, who,
along with 1LT Hammond, would be set ashore in another area and would maintain contact
on another band with the boat crew. Again the water level was rather high, and it
seemed for a while we might not find a place for the Iraqis to disembark without
stepping off into knee-high water. At the first attempted landing, I felt the boat
rise and scrape to a stop, stranded on the muddy bottom about fifteen feet from
shore. The mighty engines howled into reverse, finally managing to pull us free.
At last we found a good landing, and the excited Iraqis filed down the gangway,
their spots and strips of chemlite bobbing into the blackness. The boat backed off
and we set the lieutenant and warrant officer off a couple hundred yards downstream.
Then we heaved off again and held a position in mid river, the gunners keeping vigil
and the engines working at a low growl to keep us level with the onshore working
parties. My only worry now was whether my Arabic would be up to the job of translating
all the commands accurately and quickly. I learned Arabic as a boy in Egypt, where
my parents were lifelong missionaries, but that was a very long time ago, and Iraqi
Arabic differs substantially from the Egyptian dialect.
‘Giib,’ the radio crackled with LTC Abdul Mejid’s voice. ‘Jahizeen, jahizeen (we
are ready, we are ready)’. The warrant officer, through me, had instructed him to
line up his men perpendicularly to the shoreline and search downriver. The going
was rough, due to all the bulrushes, and at one point the LTC’s voice came through
laughing over the radio. Khaldoon, his sidekick, had just fallen up to his waist
in water. Once in a while WO Garza’s voice came through on my headphones, speaking
in a hush. ‘Tell the colonel to veer off to the left a little’. He must have been
able to see the Iraqis, although I couldn’t. There was a bright light (bright per
the NVGs) in a window behind a balcony in a large villa several hundred yards from
where the search was being conducted. Suddenly, the light flicked off. Garza’s voice
came over the imbiter in my ear,‘Tell the colonel to stop moving…somebody knows
we’re here.’ Awhile later the colonel reported that somebody was walking nearby.
All was quiet for a long while. My mind wandered to other river trips I had taken
in the past few years, trips also exciting and dangerous, but in totally different
ways. I moved from the gunwale to sit on the less comfortable floor as the thought
occurred to me that, should I happen to fall overboard, my 40-lb body armor and
Kevlar would not make a very good PFD (personal flotation device). I looked at my
watch. It was 1:17AM. We had been on the river about two hours.
The radio crackled; it was the LTC speaking to Mahdi, the Iraqi warrant officer
who was carrying a Motorola and presiding over the search at the other end of the
line. He was asking him what he had found. I thought the answer included the word
‘itaad’ (ordnance). When the Iraqis speak to one another I understand only bits
and pieces of what they’re saying, they speak so quickly and with such localized
slang. But most of them are good at imitating the Egyptian dialect or at speaking
in classical Arabic, which helps them to communicate with me. I informed Garza of
the find; he was closing on the Iraqis’ location, and had them in view. I then heard
his voice again, but not on my headset; it was coming over the radio at the boat’s
bridge; he was reporting the discovery to the captain. ‘A bunch of blasting caps,
some wire, two 122s and about six 80 mike mikes’. He was enumerating by type the
weapons and bomb-making paraphernalia found in the small cache. Soon his voice came
over my headset again, instructing me to tell the LTC to bring the Iraqis back to
the same point at which they had disembarked. Our boat made its way from mid river
back over to the black mass of the island.
Out of the darkness I finally made out the chemlight on the Iraqis’ helmets. They
spoke in hushed tones as they came aboard. ‘Giib,’ the LTC said as he joined me
on the deck, ‘waynak’. He had wanted me to come ashore with them, but I was glad
to have stayed on the boat. It had been both more comfortable and more efficient
to do it that way; the radios had worked well and the translation had not been difficult.
But Garza told me later that the object of the raid, the suspected insurgent, had
not been home… possibly tipped off. The warrant officer and lieutenant came on board
long enough to get the demolition, fuse and blasting caps they would need and to
radio higher headquarters about the impending controlled detonation. We put them
back on the island to set the charges. Fifteen minutes later they climbed back up
the plank; ‘We’ve got ten minutes,’ Garza announced. The engines revved and we pulled
away from shore, peeled out into the current and began the upriver journey back
to our launch point. After a while Garza’s voice broke the silence, ‘ten seconds’.
I saw a flash first, far behind, followed several seconds later by the sound of
the explosion, rocking the predawn silence. Now the insurgents had several fewer
pieces of ordnance with which toconstruct their IEDs…I envisiond the local farming
families awakening with a shock, then rolling over and going back to sleep as they
had probably done a thousand times now since 2003. At any rate, our mission, insignificant
as it was, had been accomplished.
Back at the launch site our boat bobbed in a river left eddy as we waited our turn
to be hooked up, reminding me of takeouts during kayak trips, when boats jostle
in an eddy awaiting their turn in the limited space. We all remained aboard as the
boat was winched onto the trailer, then we traversed over into the back of the 7-ton
armored troop carrier after it had been hauled up onto the flat of the upper river
bank. As our convoy crossed the Jisr Ar-Ramadi Bridge, we could see, through the
all-enveloping dark, the seething whiteness of the water below us, creating frothy
eddy lines and exploding waves behind the weir. LTC Abel Mejid told me the Arabic
word for the sound of whitewater, khareer al maa’.