"Balloon Wars" Chapter 12

Chapter 12 — Battle In Al Atiba’a Counter IED and counter IDF scans. Rt Irish. Comparison of the activity near Site One vs Sites 3 and 4. Site One and the towers take fire. UTAMS takes us to fire fight in Al Atiba’a.

For the next few weeks after the balloon was inflated we were on mission most of the time, coming down only to avoid bad weather or to add helium. Most of the time they had us on Counter IED scans, back and forth over the same routes between the same two points for hours on end. Some of the assignments were Counter IDF. Bases and FOBs were receiving rocket and mortar fire all over the city so the Army had us scan known POOs (Points of Origin) regularly.

The west end of the infamous Rt. Irish, which ran from the International Airport to the Green Zone, was right under our nose. It entered the airport property less than a mile from the balloon site. But in May of 2007 “Irish” was not “the most dangerous road in the world” as it had been dubbed in 2005 when the charge for one car for the twelve kilometer trip from the airport to the compound that housed the American Embassy was $3,000. In fact that portion of the city, the southwest quarter, was relatively quiet compared to the east side, which included Sadr (formerly Saddam) City. That portion of the city was under Site Three’s camera. Site Four was in another hot spot, at the north end of the city on the peninsula in the Tigris in the Kadhimiyah district.

The Green Zone, in the middle of town was getting a lot of fire then. One night the operator at Site Three spotted a rocket team in a soccer stadium firing on the Green Zone. That was an incident that PMRUS qualified as a “good news story” and about the only one that made the news back home. The rocket team was killed with missiles and the video from the PTDS camera was declassified and shown on the CBS Evening News.

It wasn’t as intense as it was elsewhere but there was warfare around Site One.

One of the first days we were in the air the night shift brought the balloon down for some reason and while they were out on the platform, with the platform floodlights on, rounds started to come in from just outside the wall. It quickly turned into a storm with thousands of shots being fired. The towers returned fire and tracers were flying in both directions. Two mortars landed on the site. Everyone took cover behind T-Walls but there were no bunkers or overhead cover so a well placed round could have been fatal. No one was hurt and we thought the balloon wasn’t hit but over the next few days lift degraded rapidly so there were holes. They can be hard to find but a diligent crew can find all the holes and patch them.

We had some success in those early weeks too. My first time on the camera we saw a running battle in Al Atiba’a, one of the neighborhoods just outside the wall.

At about 20:00, just as I was about to take my turn at the camera, the UTAMS sensors heard something and the camera slewed to a target just 2 kilometers east of the balloon site. I had just come into the GCS to take my hour on the camera so I took over for Don who moved over to the mIRC station just as the camera slewed.

The timing was fortunate because of one of the things they consistently did wrong at Site One.

At Site One, at the top of each hour, the new man in the GCS went to the camera. The right way to do it is to have the new man in go to the mIRC and the man who was already there switch to the camera. That way the new camera operator knows what transpired during the previous hour. His awareness of the circumstances makes for a smooth transition. Fortunately, this time I came in just as the situation was developing and didn’t sit in the camera operator’s chair until I knew what was what.

Most of the time the UTAMS “service request”, as it is called, doesn’t take the camera to the exact spot of the sound that generated the response, but this time it was close so it only took a few seconds to locate a one-story, Iraqi Police station that was under fire. Men were on the roof taking cover behind the parapets as three police vehicles entered the courtyard. Several IP jumped out of the trucks and took up positions around the building.

The police on the roof were on the east, north and west walls, looking out in those directions and apparently unsure where the enemy was. I zoomed out far enough to see about six houses across the street to the north and quickly panned west and then back east to look for the shooters. I spotted one on the street corner north of the station taking cover behind the building on the corner of the block. Four others were with him all carrying AK 47s or ammunition.

Jason, the nurse, and Winston had come in the GCS so they helped us spot movement and other potential targets. As the mission progressed they continued to assist by identifying objects and people, offering sugges-

tions on camera movements, selections and settings, and even taking over camera control for me if I had to enter target data. I couldn’t have gotten better help than what Jason and Winston were giving.

The pax (all civilians are referred to as “PAX”) with his back against the wall of the shop was waiting for the right moment to turn to his left and fire toward the IP station. The infra-red image revealed the barrel of his weapon to be hot so he had already fired at least once. Because of obstructions on my line of sight I couldn’t tell if he could see the roof of the police station or if he was interested in another target on the street. Either way it was clear he was about to fire again so I kept the IR camera zoomed in on him. There was still daylight so I could have used the narrow field of view, optical camera if it had been working properly but we were having trouble with it and even when it worked the image quality could be poor.

When the shooter stepped out from behind the wall Jason identified the weapon as a Kalashnikov PKM, although from that distance we couldn’t be sure. It was certainly a large caliber automatic weapon so we weren’t going to take our eyes off it until something more lethal came into view.

He shot about thirty rounds from the hip, moving rapidly back and forth, never setting his feet.

He may have scared the people he was shooting at but I doubt he hit anyone. Some of the mortar teams we encountered were proficient and the insurgents could do a great deal of damage with IEDs. There were some skilled snipers too, but their small unit fighting tactics and methods were poor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they accidentally shot each other quite often.

From there the shooter and his gang ran to a house on the edge of the neighborhood while others continued to fire on the IP station from locations we couldn’t find.

At that point, with fire coming from multiple sources, armed Pax on the move and Americans on their way to the battle the instructions and responses going back and forth on the mIRC were too much for Don to keep up with so Jason called the TOC on the phone. He and the Battle Captain spoke to each other while both were looking at the video.

We lost sight of the guy with the PKM when he and the others went in the house but within seconds they appeared on the roof and one of them had a shoulder mounted weapon. I recognized him as the guy who had

the PKM before from the heat patterns on his legs and chest and the way he moved. Now he was going to fire on the Shi’a neighborhood on the other side of the field to the south. Apparently the attack on the station was to keep the IP occupied while this attack took place.

This had become an outstanding example of what was possible with our system and I was very lucky it happened so soon and glad I was on the camera. It was also clear what the limitations were and how multiple ISR assets working together gave the U.S. Army such an advantage in the insurgency. As this operation progressed every fighting position and fighter was recorded and each could be studied after the fact. While the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) was mounting-up and driving to the vicinity of the IP station their commanders, who were viewing the video, were deciding how to direct them and telling them what to expect. If other assets, drones or piloted aircraft, were overhead, which was certainly possible, the scenes we had left and the neighborhood the Sunni were firing on could be under observation.

The RPG was now the highest value target so we were ordered to stay on it. Just about every move during a battle is done according to orders. It’s like operating a camera for a director at a football game.

The team at the original site could have overrun the IP station for all we knew and since I’d saved the location as a target I could have pointed the camera back there in a second but if I did I’d loose PID (Positive Identification) of the RPG operator, which is very bad. The JAG lawyers insist on positive knowledge that the man disintegrated by the Hellfire missile is the man it was meant for and its probably why the “director” didn’t call for me to change my shot.

A second camera on the balloon would have allowed both locations to be observed from the balloon but we found out later a UAV was on station nearby and its camera was providing video of the portion of the battle we weren’t watching.

The Sunni with the RPG took cover behind the parapet on the south side of the house, then stood, aimed and fired as four others provided cover with AK-47s. He then left the others as they continued the attack and ran about a hundred meters northwest. There he and some curious residents, including kids, watched a mortar team fire two rounds to the south, probably to the same Shi’a neighborhood into which he’d just launched the RPG.

It was a well planned attack and apparently we were following the planner or field commander. We were more certain he was a leader of the operation when the mortar tube was put in the trunk of a car which our man drove about two hundred meters north where he unloaded a half-a-dozen weapons, including the mortar tube, hiding them in a trash pile in someone’s backyard. Afterward he got back in the car and drove away.

Someone had to quickly decide what to do so we asked the Army whether they wanted us to follow the car or stay on the weapons cache. They told us to stay on the cache. That’s where QRF was headed. They also told us to that a UAV was on the car and the driver would probably be picked up when he stopped. About thirty minutes later the patrol entered our field of view. Moving very slowly and following the directions we were offering they soon found the trash pile and recovered all the weapons.

We never heard what they found specifically or if they caught the guy who drove away or any other details, which was typical for the missions at Site One. No one followed up in most cases either from our end or the Army’s. We just got our assignments, completed the scans, responded to events and went to the next task.