"Balloon Wars", Chapter 78

Chapter 78— UTAMS Project UTAMS is useless at Site One. UTAMS functional description. Work at the towers on the sensors. RPC, the Radwaniyah Palace Complex . Prison at Camp Cropper. The scream from inside the prison. Game animals on the RPC. Names of the neighborhoods around Site One. KIA numbers for 2007 After my return to Site One from Paris the lack of results from the UTAMS hits started to get on my nerves. At Site Three the UTAMS system had pointed or “slewed” the camera to numerous mortar launches and small arms discharges. It made the system more effective and the job more interesting.

There was a UTAMS “base station” on the balloon and sensors on towers around the VBC at Site One and around the FOB at Site Three. The sensors were microphones on tripods. If enough sensors picked up the same sound and the sound matched the sonic signature of a weapon, the location of the sound was determined and a “Service Request” was generated at the JSWS. If the CLAW was configured to automatically act on the service request the camera would instantly slew to the point located by the sensors.

So while conducting a route scan back and forth on a road that you’d looked at every night for the past month wondering if the pack of dogs that was there every other night would appear again and if the little one who limped would be following behind as usual the camera would take off on its own to a location miles away from the dogs in less than a second. Every pixel became a horizontal streak until the camera stopped somewhere in the city, or outside it. Sometimes, the new scene was of someone holding a shoulder mounted weapon or a man kneeling next to a mortar tube preparing to launch the next round, or a cloud of dust and debris and people still in flight from a VBIED or suicide bomber. I’d seen all that, two seconds after hours of staring at empty streets and fields. When the boring, motionless scene was replaced by war fighting, that quickly, it was exhilarating. It was disturbing too but at those times I could assume the roll of the TV viewing technician and stay emotionally disconnected.

At Site One the UTAMS equipment wasn’t working. The number of useful Service Requests steadily diminished over a period of several months until there were none. Operators began to configure the CLAW not to accept Service Requests because the response from the mIRC operator was always the same, “NTR”, which stood for “Nothing To Report”.

The problem at Site One was the equipment, primarily the tower sensors, wasn’t being maintained. In order for them to work, the wind screen on the microphone has to be clean, the sensor has to be level and properly aligned, the equipment has to be powered, the software properly configured, etc. When I and the rest of Team 4 arrived in Iraq, Mike Barron, the lisping, aspiring Congressman, was maintaining the sensors around the VBC. He shipped out months ago and as far as anyone knew no one had been to any of the towers since to maintain the equipment. I decided to go to each and do what was needed. As it turned our Charley Coghill was a UTAMS expert so he not only gave me permission to do what was needed he told me how.

I located the sensors according to their MGCS (Military Grid Coordinate System) coordinates and Google® Earth. They were on eight towers fairly evenly spaced around the thirty mile perimeter of the VBC. At FOB Loyalty there were four sensors around the perimeter which was about a mile-and-a-half. Another difference between the two sites was how each of the guard towers were manned. At Loyalty the tower guards were soldiers in the same unit, 2nd ID, 2nd Brigade, Base Defense. At the VBC the towers were miles apart, on different camps and manned by different units. The guards in the tower nearest Site One were Ugandan contractors managed by a South African company and the tower on the west side of the VBC, the one furthest from the site, was unmanned the few times I was there. The other towers and structures on which sensors were mounted were under the jurisdiction of other units.

Nobody on the site knew who to contact to get access to the towers but for most of them contacting someone ahead of time wasn’t necessary. All I had to do was shout to get the guard’s attention and tell him what I was doing and he would let me up and help me through the hatch to the roof.

Once on the roof I had to work quickly. It wasn’t uncommon at all for snipers to take shots at the towers. What happened to the Captain who was shot on FOB Loyalty was on my mind every time I went through the hatch. Dave Jenkins went with me to one of the towers and while I was on the roof he and the guard were talking. Dave called up to me when I was about half done and said, “Rob, you better hurry up. They took fire here yesterday.”

UTAMS Microphone Windscreen Encrusted With Dirt

Nick Berg’s job was more dangerous and there were others whose jobs involved more risk but tending to equipment on the roof of a guard tower in Baghdad had to rank as one of the more dangerous jobs a civilian contractor could do. The Iraqis going about their business on the streets outside seemed to realize it too because a lot of them called to me, waved or shook their heads.

I did have to call ahead for permission to service the sensors on Camp Cropper, which was a prison, and the one on the roof of the Radwaniyah Palace. Finding out who to call wasn’t easy. There’s no phone book or central operator for the VBC. You can’t call 411. Half the time if I was trying to find someone in Baghdad I had to know who to call back home so that they could give me the DSN phone number of the person I needed to speak to. Getting access to the roof of the palace on the “RPC” (Radwaniyah Palace Compound) was the hardest but eventually I got through and got clearance to go.

While I was in the tower on the prison grounds I heard a scream. It was a long, low and loud howl, from sorrow and despair, not pain. It chilled me from sixty meters away and I thought how it must have affected the other prisoners.

They said that Hussein and his sons used the grounds of the Radwaniyah Palace as a game preserve and hunting ground. In 2003 when the site was under attack by the 3rd ID some of the animals got free and I was told that they were still roaming around.

I replaced all the windscreens on the microphones, leveled and aligned all the sensors, cleaned solar panels, and made sure that everything had power and the switches were on. In one of the towers the AC power supply was unplugged.

I cleaned the GPS antennae, called “pucks”, which were thick with dust and replaced one of the tripods. At one of the towers the guards would throw the switch on the Power Control Units or turn off the switch that fed the outlet the PCU was plugged into. There’s no explanation for that but to prevent it from happening again I hard wired the power, eliminating the switches.

The results of my efforts were fewer service requests to nothing but there was also almost none that pointed the camera to mortar launches or any other real action. The great thing about that was there was no real action. The Sunni and the Shi’a had stopped shooting at each other or the Americans as much, at least in the neighborhoods around Site One; Al Furat, Shurta, Ajnadin, Suwaib, Makasib, Al Atiba’a, Jihad, Al Amriya, Ghazaliya and Abu Gharab. The most important statistic reflected the trend. In May, the month we arrived, there were 120 Americans killed in action in Iraq. There were 93 KIAs in June when the last of the surge troops arrived, 67 in July, 56 in August and 14 in December. The total in 2008 was 221 compared to 764 in ‘07.