Free Hunting Down Saddam by Robin Moore Page B

extremely high altitude. Still, the Iraqis hung on and defended their positions with tenacity.
    By April 6, there was a clear path that ran approximately eighteen kilometers through the gap, straight to the bridge. The “run” down through the Debecka Gap, staying low and avoiding enemy fire, became known as “Sandoval’s Run,” named after SGT (Sergeant) Tom Sandoval.
    Sandoval’s team went straight through the gap in the ridge, and all the way down to the crossroads of Highway 2. The ODA and their Pesh fighters now had several avenues of approach. The problem, however, was that the Debecka crossroads were also protected by Iraqi armored battalions.
    Elements from the 3rd Special Forces Group accompanied the 10th Group strike teams. They carried Javelin Weapons Systems, which they launched at the Iraqi armor on their way down Sandoval’s Run.
    10th Special Forces Group (A) ODAs from FOB 102 and their Peshmerga counterparts assaulted the ridgeline and destroyed a company-sized element of Iraqi tanks and APCs, again with the use of Javelins. Special Forces were really starting to appreciate the surface-to-surface antitank missile at this point. They would later be dubbed “Javelin aces” in The New York Times .
    The Javelins were an impressive piece of weaponry. Once launched, the Javelin missiles would arc high in the sky before coming straight down on the tops of their targets and detonating, catching the Iraqi units completely off guard. Without horizontal flight paths to trace back to the missiles’ origins, the Iraqis had no idea where the Javelins were fired from, or where to shoot back.
    One 10th Group officer remarked: “Those things [Javelins] just fly, and they go up and come down [seemingly out of the bare sky], so when it hits two or three tanks, the tanks don’t detect it. And so the people, the tank, the other tanks were like ‘Where are these coming from?’”
    Unfortunately, the Special Operators didn’t have that element of surprise when it came to their other weapons. The thump-thump of Mark-19s and the tracer-fire of their M2HB machine guns made it easier for the enemy to pinpoint the location of the attack.
    Objective STONE and Objective ROCK were TF VIKING’s first two primary obstacles to a huge push in forward momentum for the American/Pesh combined forces, and it wasn’t long before both of the hostile objectives were cleared.
    These objectives may have been the most important ones, but they were not the only offensive operations in the first few weeks of the war. One Special Forces source on the scene said that there were a total of thirteen A-Teams on the ground in this sector of Iraq between April 2 and April 10, and all thirteen were engaged in offensive operations, either against Iraqi “task force armored battalions” or Iraqi infantry “regiments.”
    There were ODAs on the ground, as well as the CA (Civil Affairs) and PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) units attached to them. Accounts of the numbers of Pesh with the ODAs vary depending on the source, with one estimate conservatively placing their numbers at over six thousand of General Mustafa’s KDP soldiers now under Special Forces command, while others have claimed the number to be around twenty thousand.
    General Mustafa’s KDP “division” was trained by the Special Forces and fought alongside them, but they were not armed by them. The Peshmerga had their own weapons and equipment, in varying states of usability. The Green Berets helped them service, clean, and maintain what they already had, and trained them on effective weaponry. Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services, or PMCS, a concept previously unheard of by the Pesh, could make all the difference in the world when bullets started to fly. Weapon or equipment failure was a matter of life and death, and the Green Berets needed to minimize that variable to the best of their