Twenty-five years ago tonight
This is republished from five years ago;
Twenty years ago, Task Force 1-41 Infantry attached to the Third Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division (from the Third Brigade of the 2d Armored Division (Forward)), was the only US unit in Iraq. We were fifteen clicks from the Saudi border, screening for the sweep east of Schwartzkopf’s “Hail Mary” strategy. For two days we had been watched by Iraqis and had a little contact. with some reconnaissance elements. However on February 17th, my gunner spotted 5 T-55s about 1500 meters in front of our defilade position and I called for indirect fire. The first response came from an Apache unit. The pilot ignored his instruments and fired the wrong grid coordinate, directly to my west, striking two vehicles in our own Scout platoon anchoring our far west flank.
COB6 was the platoon leader of the platoon between my platoon and the Scout elements. Despite the orders of our company commander (a phrase that I use in several other stories involving COB6 and our commander), COB6 pulled his vehicle off the line and rushed to the burning vehicles (An M3 and and an M113 from the GSR unit). COB6 and his crew pulled the broken bodies from the vehicles with burning ammunition exploding around him and shielded the injured Scouts with his own body. Two of those scouts were dead, but three others owe their lives to COB6 and his crew.
Needless to say we stopped calling for Apaches and after slamming two TOWs into a berm about a hundred meters in front of us, we used artillery fire. My first ever call for indirect fire in total darkness. The following morning, M1s found the T-55s 5000 meters north of the spot my gunner had spotted them.
These are the names of the members of 1/41 we lost throughout the war;
Tony R. Applegate
David R. Crumby
Manuel M. Davila
Anthony W. Kidd
David W. Kramer
Jeffery T. Middleton
James C. Murray, Jr.
Robert D. Talley
Talley and Middleton were killed that night.
We had the highest casualty rate of any other infantry unit in the war, I say it’s because both sides were shooting at us.
And, oh, yeah, my granddaughter celebrates her 25th birthday today, too.
Category: Historical
Damn. I remember when that happened. I was doing TOC security for XVIII ABN Corps in Rafha.
I remember the night all to well, sitting in our TOC listening in on the radio traffic between the 2AD(F) and the Apache unit.
Darn, its really been 25 years!
RIP.
You are a good man Jonn Lilyea, much respect.
Happy Birthday to the granddaughter, I hope she has a great day.
Semper Fi brother.
Friendly fire, accidents, medical issues too far from proper facilities etc. all cause added deaths and disabilities during military operations.
These are some of the other things the posers know nothing about when they tell their stories and the real veterans know all too well.
RIP
I was previously a 3/41 Grunt at 2AD(F) but at the time I was in the left hook in 6/6IN 1AD. At the time, this felt close to home for me. RIP
“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” -Robert E. Lee
Amen.
Rest in peace, men.
RIP, Warriors.
RIP and my condolences to you and the families of the brave men you lost…I was with the 3rd ACR; I pumped gas out of my M977 HEMTT (when I wasn’t busy doing Special Dark Ops Ranger Forces James Bond stuff of course)
As I read your narrative, Jonn…..my heart was pounding, let’s say for similar reasons a few years before.
Outstanding article.
God Bless.
RIP to your Brothers and Welcome Home.
I was sitting at NAS Norfolk loading trucks and aircraft, running the Port.
We were there until about April when SECDEF Donald said, “Hey go home, We don’t have any more money for you Reserve Guys, and we don’t want you to go past 179 days anyway.”
Have a nice day.
So I went back to working at a Grocery Store.
Yay.
(Except for the time I single-handedly found and killed Saddam, with a SPORK and a Cheese and Veggie Omelet MRE. )
Seriously, You want to nail a poser??
Ask them to list at least 5 different MREs or C-Rats they ate.
Seriously, I can right off the top of my head.
Bean with Frank Component or Smokey Franks
Beef Stew
Tuna Noodle
Chili Mac
Ham Slice
Dehydrated Pork Hockey Puck Pattie. (BLARF)
Meatballs & BBQ Sauce
I loved the freeze dried Peaches, Fruit Cup and Strawberries.
That with a bag of rum and ice in a blender in a typhoon evac, stuck in the dorms, made WONDERFUL daiquiris.
There was no better C-Rat than ham and lima beans with a small can of cheese melted in it all heated with a piece of C-4. Crackers and warm beer to top it off with 10-year-old Marlboro’s.
Them were the days!
@LIR:
Lies! All lies!
Beef and Rocks was the bestest C-Rat. For reals. Slap the sides of the can with a knuckle to put a couple dents innit, one snick on the top with the John Wayne, set over heat until dents pop out and wallah! Pressure cooked yummy!
The only C-Rat that sat in my greedy gut like I’d eaten something more than a snack.
I also discovered that the Chocolate Nut Roll was actually edible if it was steamed. The Orange Nut Roll, on the other hand, never made it past use in Test o’ Fortitude ceremony.
But, I was New Corps. I don’t think we even had Ham and Mo Fos in our C boxes anymore. And, whenever a rat pack had any tobacco product innit, we took that as a botulism warning and tossed the cans.
Eggs and Ham bro, loved that pound cake.
B-3’s rocked.
Which meal had the simulated nestle crunch bar that didn’t melt when it was 100 degrees outside.
should have been a ? as punctuation not a period….I can’t remember which meal had the crunch bar…
You meaning that “toffee disk” that turned piss green?
Beefsteak. They were in the B-1 unit http://www.mreinfo.com/reviews/mci-reviews/mci/
Ham and eggs C-rats with the white moldy looking chunks that were supposed to be the eggs…plus the best part was the 1/4 inch of congealed fat on top when you opened them…after a while outdoors that fat was like ambrosia, a sweeter nectar seldom found….
The aptly named Spaghetti w/beef chunks in sauce was pretty good and I knew that first meal as Beans and Wieners(I think)…also I recall a Turkey “loaf” that was reasonably tasty…
Being that my German parents cooked a lot of organ meats C-Rats went down rather easily and often tasted amazingly better than what I grew up eating.
Beans and Baby Dicks. Who the hell thought that one up?
And WTF, over? Beans and Meatballs and Spaghetti with Beef Chunks. That had to be done on purpose.
That kind of shit was just too constant to be disorganized accidents.
The Omelet with Ham MRE, there would be fights over that one when the box got nearly empty and the loser had to eat it!
MRE – Meals Rejected by Ethiopians or Mostly Recycled Entrails!
Somalis wouldn’t even eat that one!
Those C-rate were left over from WWII and Korea, you know. I found chemicals in the darkroom at Great Lakes that were left over from WWII and Korea and were so old, they were almost completely oxidized. I guess my photo lab stuff expired before your food did.
Corned Beef Hash
Frankfurters (aka the five fingers of death)
Dehydrated Beef Patty (first MRE I ever got)
Chicken a La King
Scalloped Potatoes and Ham
Corned Beef Hash and Tuna with Noodles (Poodles & Noodles) were two that I actually liked.
Never cared for the Tuna but Corned Beef Hash was probably #2 on my list after the Beef Stew. Beef Stew with a cheese packet, a little water and some heat under a canteen cup and you had a meal.
Omelet With Ham was my first MRE in Basic Training and that was the last time I ever ate one of them. I figured “How can they mess up eggs and ham?” Yeah, the Army can mess up Eggs and ham….
I remember my CSM telling me once that when he was in Australia on an exercise, they had dingo’s coming to their camp sites. He threw a bit of MRE (Pork Slice?) to the Dingo and it wouldn’t eat it. lol
For me the best was a tie between Beef Stew and Chicken with Rice. The Franks one was pretty good though too. I actually liked the Ham Slice, though most of the meats tasted pretty much the same.
I can feel your pain LIRight, the beer no doubt was “Hey Mabel where is the Carling Black Label.”
Oh jeeze, Carling – – just awful stuff, but at the time…..what the hell!! As I recall we got some Schaefer Beer as well…..not exactly what I’d call a cold bottle of Becks.
WHAT? No warm & fuzzy memories of warm Fresca for refreshment? /SARC. *ducking quickly into low crawl*
Anything was better than drinking water out of that damn…I think it was called a Buffalo?? Tasted more like Buffalo urine (I know what you’ll ask, how do I know what Buffalo urine tastes like, lol).
I think you can still find 33 Beer if you really want it.
OMG you’re right! Completely forgot about that one.
Remember the blocks ice stored in brown rice hulls as an insulator?
So I just heard The Clown Prince, Trump Jr., state on Fox that the US “military was defeated in Iraq.”
That was freakin news to me.
By the way, where did he serve? Oh that’s right…
Trump? Oh, he served in Deferment, remember?
Like Ted Nugent, Trump claims he’d have been a great soldier based on zero experience…
Two assclowns who should keep their pieholes tightly closed on those topics for which neither is prepared to discuss intelligently because improvisational speech serves neither one of these two very well.
We were winning when I left
Ditto.
He was in a Private Military High School, so basically he’s pretty much like a Combat veteran with 4 tours….
Thanks for this Jonn, a reminder that far too many young men pay a very dear price as part of their service.
Congrats on your granddaughter’s birthday, proud grandpa stuff is a lot of fun as I am learning these days with my 5 grandkids….
RIP to the Warriors, Jonn. A 25 year old granddaughter? Say it isn’t so… 😉
Good man, Jonn. Never forget the fallen.
Jonn, So sorry, I was on a Task Force Troy right down the road or desert spot from you guys. We were on the Right side near the coast on the MEF side and I brlive you guys were next to task force ripper getting ready to brech the berm. We were part of 460 Man “Ghost” UNIT deception Task Force on the border. We had 5 Tanks Psyops,2 Marine Infantry Company’s, Recon element, Intel,TOW Pl and we were the Engineer element that had to place the Fake Tanks and Artillery we built on the border and make it look like we were breaching in that area so Task Force Ripper could mover over and in place to breach.
On the third night which would have been today we were out of course at night every thing we did was at night for this.
The next morning for the mission brief the Marine Top and COL in charge came over and told us we had a close one last night you guys almost got rained on and not the wet kind and also told use that an Army unit providing some kind of cover took friendly rounds. The top told us that one of the young Marines in the TOC LAV caught a Marine unit requesting Fire on our POS where we were working and he called to let them know that friendly’s were operating out there. Thank god for that Marine because we would have been in a world of hurt and could have blown the mission. Just knowing that put us on edge. One more time sorry, can say we came close but a sharp Marine saved our ass. You probably didn’t even know we were out there because know one was suppose to know but after that they had to let the units know we were out there working. God bless and R.I.P.
C-SPAN was really good about relaying video in its unedited form. This ‘friendly fire’ incident was one they reported ahead of other networks.
I was but a boot Cpl fixing radios and manning a retrains site at an abandoned Saudi border police station. I remember the smoke from the burning oil fields so bad we had to use a flashlight and follow the power cords back to the generator just to refuel it.
Ah, the good old days.
May they Rest in Peace.
It’s always hard to lose people. It’s much harder when that loss is due to someone else fucking up.
It seems you have about the same respect for our wire guided anti armor missiles as I and most of my fellow Dragon gunners had in that day and age.
I was there as a squad leader in the combat engineers attached to the scouts in this task force. We had two M1s knocked out in front of us. I don’t know if it was friendly fire or not – but it came from the ground. I have photos of the buring tanks – taken when morning came. The Bradly that was hit was to my left flank by about 300-500 meters or so.
Spaghetti and ‘meat’ and ham and eggs. Is Carling still made?
Got no words for this …
will crack a bottle tonight. RIP.
Except for this… fuck any that would take credit for being there
Jonn does this every year and every year I recall that night. Probably one of the worst and best nights of a 25 year career in the Infantry. It was men like Jonn who mentored me when I was enlisted and I leaned even more heavily on their advice and counsel as an officer.
That night was a tragedy and I’ll lift a strong toast soon. Sorry, some smoke got in my eyes……
I was a Senior in High School when this was going on. My school was actually fairly talkative about what was happening there between DS and DS. We had some debates and our teachers were giving us news of what was happening to talk about in class. I can’t imagine that level of discussion going on in today’s high schools.
At that point I never even considered joining the military, my best friend had joined as a DEP. But two years after I graduated I ended up joining for “one contract”. lol
RIP to these brothers.