G.I. TRUCK STRIPPED - Staff Sgt. James Wilson of Ridgecrest, a member of the Lancaster National Guard unit, takes a break, resting against a former GI 5-ton truck. Desert nomads got to this 3rd Infantry Division truck, abandoned during the invasion of Iraq. Recovery forces most often find only skeletal remains of vehicles. Bedouins have appropriated the rest for domestic use. DENNIS ANDERSON/Valley Press

With our troops in Irag

Guard tracks invasion route into Iraq

By DENNIS ANDERSON
Valley Press Editor

In the past few days, theater command decided to reinstall the 3rd Division's 2nd Brigade at road checkpoints staffed by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The 3rd ACR, a smaller unit, was taking too many ambushes.

In the past few days, two GIs were wounded by grenade fragments outside a Baghdad mosque they were guarding. The mosque was in a neighborhood heavily populated by supporters of the vanquished tyrant Saddam Hussein.

So, higher command elected to reinstall the 3rd Division soldiers in heavy numbers and have them flood the area with armored vehicles, helicopter overflights and armed checkpoints.

The mission of the 1498th Transportation Company, the "Big Awesome Truck Company" with many soldiers from Antelope Valley communities, is to deliver the kind of armor the "spearhead" troops need for conducting checkpoint security.

"We're not going to be leaving here anytime soon," said Lt. Col. James Matties, a former "Screaming Eagle" vet of Desert Storm. "This isn't going to be like where the administration said we'd be out of Bosnia in a year. We're going to be here for a while."

Last week, the 1498th delivered nine 40-ton tracked heavy artillery ammo carriers to Camp Taji, north of Baghdad.

Capt. James Karcanes, commander of a field artillery battery, said the armored vehicles brought in by the 1498th would not be used for waging war, but rather to secure the peace.

To calm down a country still rife with hard-core armed supporters of Saddam Hussein is going to require a massive troop presence, with military police units backed up by combat troops.

"When you put a .50-caliber machine gun up on that armored ammo carrier, you have an excellent checkpoint security vehicle," Karcanes said.

Karcanes and Matties conferred the strategy of their artillery unit at Camp Taji, a base that once housed the Republican Guard and the Iraqi air force. Hangars were blasted to pieces, but there was minimal damage on the landing fields, which were being used by U.S. Black Hawk and Chinook transport helicopters waffling by in the heat.

The base, set amid fields of date palms in a lush, green valley north of Baghdad, had an eerie, ghost-town atmosphere to it, despite the presence of hundreds of GIs from the 4th Infantry Division that had just moved in.

"It looks like the troops who were here just picked up everything and left," Matties said. "They left their uniforms hanging in their lockers."

All along the major highways, an overwhelming presence of American convoys, Humvees with machine-gun crews, M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley infantry carriers and trucks in all tonnages crowd the highways, with MPs directing traffic like the end of a World War II movie.

"This is a sight of the monster, and it shows what the monster can do," said Staff Sgt. Dave Hillyer, a squad leader of the California Guard unit.

Further south, along Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia, Lt. Mike O'Hare of the 54th Combat Engineers pointed out the damage inflicted by the 3rd Infantry Division on its way into Iraq.

"Those are the forces that were, unfortunately, deployed along the border when we came in, and unfortunately for them, we destroyed them," O'Hare said.

Acres of Iraqi tanks and infantry carriers sat in the desert, their gun tubes bent, their turrets tossed like spinning tops. Little evidence of human habitation was there.

Up near the environs of Baghdad, convoy soldiers from the California National Guard unit could see the damage inflicted by U.S. armor and airstrikes.

During the war, cable television news would describe unit actions thus: "The Baghdad Division is 75% neutralized; The Medina Division is 85% combat-ineffective." To see the flotsam and jetsam of war's aftermath amid the date palm groves near Baghdad is to have some glimmering of what happened.

"The 3rd Division and the 3/7 Cavalry just lit up everything in their way," O'Hare said.

Along with armored strikes, Apache helicopters and A-10 Warthogs conducted airstrikes that left little to the chance of war.

If the Iraqi Army or Republican Guard units determined a strategy for the defense of Baghdad, it would be difficult for an observer to fathom.

Tanks, some newer and some old T-55 and T-62 Cold-War-vintage models, were stationed haphazardly at road intersections, with vintage anti-aircraft cannon concealed cursorily in the date palm groves. Of hundreds of tanks and cannon identified by the roadside, virtually none were untouched by U.S. armor or air strikes. Every piece witnessed by an observer was destroyed or disabled, each having been identified by U.S. acquisition systems and, once identified, destroyed.

"I wonder how many of those soldiers might have gotten out of those vehicles," said Lt. Paul Peterlin, who leads the 4th Platoon of the 1498th. "It was difficult to see whether there were people in those vehicles when they were lit up. Every single one of them got lit up."

The 1498th, through the past week and in the weeks and months ahead, is tasked to continue moving fresh American armor into stations once occupied by destroyed and abandoned Iraqi military gear.