The Washington Post‘s Soldiers Record Lessons From Iraq shares some startling anecdotes and advice from veterans of Iraq:
As the insurgency in the Sunni Triangle was heating up last fall, Lt. Col. Steve Russell was dealing with a new wave of attacks in which bombers were using the transmitters from radio-controlled toy cars: They would take the electronic guts of the cars, wrap them in C-4 plastic explosive and attach a blasting cap, then detonate them by remote control.So Russell, who commands an infantry battalion in deposed president Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit, mounted one of the toy-car controllers on the dashboard of his Humvee and taped down the levers. Because all the toy cars operated on the same frequency, this would detonate any similar bomb about 100 yards before his Humvee got to the spot. This “poor man’s anti-explosive device” was “risky perhaps,” Russell writes in a 58-page summary of his unit’s time in Iraq but better than leaving the detonation to the bombers.
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Like most of the 28 documents reviewed for this article, Morgan’s is relentlessly specific. One of the most striking lessons the 1992 graduate of Georgetown University passes on: Every soldier in the unit should carry a tourniquet sufficiently long to cut off the gush of blood from major leg wounds. “Trust me,” he writes, “it saved four of my soldiers’ lives.”Morgan also emphasizes to incoming soldiers that they need to be ready to kill quickly yet precisely. “If an enemy opens fire with an AK-47 aimlessly, which most of these people do, you should be able to calmly place the red dot reticule of your M-68 optic device on his chest and kill him with one shot,” he admonishes. “If you do this, the rest will run and probably not come back.”
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In the late fall, reports Russell, the infantry commander in Tikrit, “we began to see many varieties of explosive devices. Doorbell switches became a favorite, followed by keyless locks, toy cars and in one case a pressure switch.”Likewise, the placement of roadside bombs has become more sophisticated. The latest twist is to put a large bomb, such as one built with an artillery shell, in the open so that U.S. troops will stop short of it — and then hit them with a string of hidden bombs along their stopping point.
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Sometimes the solutions in the field are painfully simple. Lt. Matthew Mason reports that during a firefight in the northern city of Mosul, his unit suddenly found that its mounted Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun, could not be swung to shoot at the sixth story of a building. In the midst of combat, his men removed the rear pin on the gun mount, enabling the weapon to traverse to a higher angle of fire. But in the process, he said, they lost “precious seconds in which we could have closed with and destroyed the enemy.”The most effective counterbomb tactic has been the low-tech sniper, Army officers say. U.S. troops have learned to hide and spy on spots such as traffic circles where bombs are likely to be emplaced. “Anyone who comes out in the middle of the night to plant an IED [improvised explosive device] dies,” a senior Central Command official explained in an interview.