Avoiding Flaming Arrows to the Chest and Head in Indian Country

Bob Newman

My father is a retired street cop out of Washington, D.C., and my mother was FBI. Perhaps that is why I have always looked for the facts amid a sea of crap.

In February 1991, I was sitting atop a Marine assault amphibian vehicle (AAV or “amtrac”) after charging through a series of minefields and obstacle belts at the “elbow” where Kuwait and Saudi Arabia join. The air was fairly thick with oil smoke the smoke from exploded ordnance of all sorts. I was 33 and this was my first experience in mechanized desert warfare and it was coming on a grand scale.

Below me in the “trac” were more than a dozen Marines from my 60 millimeter mortar section and various grunts from 3rd Platoon, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. We were maybe two miles into Kuwait. So far no fire from the waiting Iraqis had been directed at us and we had avoided the tens of thousands of mines in the sand.

Suddenly, several large explosions went off to my left front a few hundred yards away. I recognized the detonations as mortar rounds and knew right away that an Iraqi mortar platoon was attempting to hit us. I stood up to see if I could see them but could not. (If I could see them, I could call in a fire mission on them with artillery or bring in an air strike by getting a compass bearing and estimated distance from my position.) I sat back down and was reaching down into the bowels of the trac to grab a radio handset in order to tell the company commander we were about to be engaged, when I heard artillery rounds going out from our rear. Assuming what I should have assumed, I threw the handset back down into the trac without saying a word.

Maybe 10 minutes later, my unit passed what was left on the Iraqi 120mm mortar unit that had been so foolish. Marine counter-battery radar had picked up the incoming rounds and opened up with 155mm howitzers using the back azimuths of the rounds. The destruction and carnage live with me to this day.

It was beautiful.

The smoke on the battlefield had become very thick after we crossed out of the minefields and obstacle belts. Still atop the trac with my M-16 in my lap, the trac’s 50-caliber machine gun opened up, the orange tracer rounds zipping ahead of us.

I instinctively brought my rifle up to my shoulder and began sending rounds into the smoke bank ahead of us along the same path the trac’s “50" tracers were taking. Looking back, I surely hit nothing but air and sand, but as I heard the crack of enemy rounds whizzing past my head, but I knew that I had to be doing what I was doing because I was never going to hit this currently invisible enemy unless I shot at him.

Nevertheless, I had to be atop that trac because I could not do my job from inside. A young second lieutenant in my unit tried to get me to take cover inside the trac and I had to explain to him that you can’t very well engage the enemy with a rifle from inside the trac if he is directly in front of you because of the way the trac is configured. I also explained to the lad that the enemy was quite a distance off, that we were out of the minefields and that my risk was very minimal.

And so we come to the unfortunate case of ABC News co-anchor Bob Woodruff and his veteran cameraman Doug Vogt, both grievously wounded by an improvised explosive device, 200 per week of which went off in 2005, making them the most dangerous means of attack upon US and Iraqi forces and causing more than 50% of the casualties. This is why US military members do not ride around with their upper torsos sticking out of armored vehicle hatches. Tactically, the situation is 100% different from my situation in the Gulf War.

Since no one else will, I will ask the difficult question while hoping Woodruff and Vogt pull through: Had the duo been told while riding in the US Army vehicles not to stick their bodies out of the hatches? After transferring to the Iraqi armored vehicle in the same movement, did they then feel free to ignore the advice of the Americans and try to film and report while standing in the open hatches?

If they did this, they were doing what is called “hotdogging” by the military. Hotdogging is doing anything stupid just for the thrill that you didn’t have to do for a tactical reason. I certainly hope that Woodruff and Vogt were not doing this just to get some “Oscar Mike” (on the move) video through Indian country.

But I do have to wonder why no other journalists I am aware of are asking about the details of the attack. Are they afraid someone might get riled? Why hasn’t ABC released the specifics of the attack and how Woodruff and Vogt came to be standing in the open hatches of an Iraqi armored vehicle while traveling through extremely hostile country where IEDs are so commonly used? Is ABC trying to cover up a major tactical mistake by the two? I certainly hope not.

In war, there are necessary risks and unnecessary risks. I wonder how many men have died or been wounded in combat for taking unnecessary risks.

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Bob Newman, a decorated, retired US Marine, is host of the “Gunny Bob Show” on Newsradio 850 KOA in Denver, and host of “Anger-Management Hour” on 630 KHOW, also in Denver. A ground-combat veteran, he is the director of international security & counterterrorism services for The GeoScope Group and is the military science & terrorism columnist for The Denver Daily News. He can be reached at bobnewman@clearchannel.com.

bobnewman@clearchannel.com