Long article but very uplifting if you like reading about soldiers, not lawyers, doing what needs to be done to create order out of chaos...
Only the dogs had time to react. Faces painted, duct tape concealing their names and the American flag patch on their left shoulders, two platoons of the D Company 1-8 Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, swarmed into a dozen farmhouses in unruly south Baghdad on Wednesday, snatching the men they found and dumping them on a waiting flatbed. The raid in the bomb-infested marshland south of Baghdad lasted over 40 hours. The final yield was 16 insurgents, men who had bombed Iraqis and Americans, men whose backyards contained an arsenal for guerrilla warfare, say officials here...
In their barracks before the raid, Blair’s men eagerly daubed on black and green face paint. On the way out the door to their Humvees they pumped their fists and slapped hands. "It really wigs them [the Iraqis] out when they see that," said Blair, explaining his adoption of new tactics for fighting what his doe-eyed driver, PFC Mark Wittemeyer calls "the ghosts." Adrenaline pumped, because this time it was personal. A month ago, these "ghosts" had set a 225-kilogram roadside bomb in the same sector that crumpled Specialist Charles Odums’s armored Humvee, ripped off his legs and folded his remaining half over the back of his seat. Blair’s soldiers spent the next day crawling in the dirt dropping pieces of the vehicles and scraps of flesh into plastic bags...
Males between the ages of 15 and 45 were literally taken in their sleep, no names asked, not an ID checked. Three informants independently corroborated the location of the bombers, giving better-than-usual intelligence...The two platoon officers’ questioning yielded leads, the leads to searches, and the searches ultimately to the discovery of a cache of bombs, RPGs, remote-controlled detonators, rifles and thousands of small-arms ammunition. A senior army official once said that his Iraqi advisers have told him, only half-jokingly, that he must ask Saddam Hussein how to fight the insurgents. He would know how get rid of them.... |