Members of an East Greenwich-based National Guard unit battle rough terrain to learn how insurgents are placing roadside bombs

12:09 PM EDT on Tuesday, May 10, 2005

BY JOEL RAWSON
Executive Editor

SAMARRA, Iraq -- The shapes rise from the dark, with the marsh grass blowing in the draft of the helicopter's downwash. The crew chief jumps out, into the darkness, and the soldiers heave their rucksacks into the back bay of the helicopter and climb in. Then the crew chief is back in and the helicopter lifts and tilts as it rises. The river passes underneath and the lights of houses can be seen again.

The 12 men in Teams 4 and 5 of the 173rd Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the Rhode Island National Guard have been lifted out of a 72-hour mission and are on their way back to base. It has been a mission of long days of heat and thick brush and 15-foot tall reeds. Staff Sgt. James Leonard of Waldwick, N.J., who has flown out to meet them, passes back 1.5-liter bottles of water.

Journal photo / John Freidah

Spc. Carl Lallier, 21, of North Kingstown, joins members of the 173rd Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the Rhode Island National Guard as they exit a Blackhawk helicopter after a 72-hour operation southwest of Samarra. This photo was taken with the use of a night vision device.

The men arrive at their base at 11:42 p.m. and walk into the detachment's quarters. As they come in, other members of the unit greet them. Everybody is excited and talking. The returning men have thick beards and they are dirty. They wear green camouflage instead of the standard tan and brown desert uniforms.

On the floor around them are their rucksacks and weapons, including the M-14 sniper rifles and the M-24 rifle with a scope for shooting precisely at night.

The operations sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Robert Saquet, calls the two team leaders and their assistants into the operations tent for the debriefing. Saquet wants to know what they did, what they saw and what they learned.

Their mission was surveillance and what the Army calls denying the enemy the use of the terrain, which means if you can see them acting against us, you can shoot them. The teams were put in at night to watch a road -- frequently used by Americans -- where the enemy have frequently set off roadside bombs.

At the debriefing are Saquet, of Brockton, Mass.; Capt. Michael Manning, the unit commander, of North Kingstown; Staff Sgt. Dave Raymond, the Team 4 leader, of Wrentham, Mass.; Staff Sgt. Tim Halloran, the Team 5 leader, of Stonington, Conn.; and Sergeants Joseph Voccio, of Cranston, and Phillip Wagoner, of Bristol.

The briefing starts with everybody talking at once, and Saquet brings order to the discussion by taking it from the beginning.

How did the insertion go?

There was water everywhere. The river had risen since the unit first looked the area over to plan the mission. The helicopter couldn't land at the planned spot.

The soldiers found the brush thick and brittle and difficult to move through in their heavy rucksacks.

Halloran says weight was an issue. The packs they carried weighed up to 100 pounds, loaded with radios, batteries, ammunition and water.

Voccio says leaving the body armor and helmets behind would save weight and make it easier to move. Manning has insisted his men wear their armor, but they don't all like it. It saves lives, he says.

They talk about the way they use their radios and if they need to carry as many spare batteries. The batteries weigh a lot.

Manning is concerned about the amount of water they needed to drink, up to 12 or 14 bottles per man. Halloran says the temperature on one day rose to 124. Raymond says he recorded temperatures of 108 and 114 degrees.

Was that in the shade?

No, that was lying in the open.

The teams moved several times. Each time, the reeds and brush and rising water made the march difficult.

From positions back in the brush, they would watch the river and the road.

They describe a red-and-white, 15-foot aluminum boat with two men, who would motor up the river and then drift back down.

"Did they have poles?" Saquet asks. "Did they have the electric thing" -- a device for catching fish?

No, they didn't have any fishing gear.

"We lay there with four sniper scopes trained on these guys," Halloran says, "and all they did was sit there and drink tea."

"Were they early warning?" Manning asks.

"No," Halloran says, "they definitely weren't patrolling."

"I don't get that," Manning says.

Later in the debriefing, Saquet suggests: "So ask them, 'What the [expletive] are you doing?' If what they say isn't what you saw, they're lying."

The talk turns to the real reason the two teams were out in the heat and the brush: finding who's planting bombs that blow up Americans on the road.

They discuss how their enemy might have approached the road and where he might have waited to detonate the bombs.

"He hits them every time," Voccio says of the bomber. "He's good. You know he could be sitting in his house with a Motorola drinking tea." A bomb can be triggered by a device as simple as a garage-door opener.

It is during this exchange that you realize that this is not a discussion about how hot the weather was or the weight of rucksacks. It is talk among men who are trying to kill other men who are trying to kill them.

Joel Rawson, executive editor of The Providence Journal, and John Freidah, staff photographer, are on assignment in Iraq to cover the 173rd Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the Rhode Island National Guard.