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Saturday, September 17, 2005
Challenging duty at the checkpoint
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Taji, Iraq - Highway One, Iraq’s first national highway known by the U.S. military as Main Supply Route Tampa, cuts through the battered nation from its northernmost towns to the Persian Gulf in the South.
Its six lanes are often clogged these days with supply trucks and passenger cars at checkpoints set up at the on- and off-ramps and at dangerous locations under bridges and overpasses that provide launching points for insurgent attacks.
Louie Favorite/AJC
Spc. Corey Thomas of Toccoa keeps a close eye on a main North South artery in Iraq, from Checkpoint 57.
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Checkpoint 57 Alpha sits on Highway One in Taji, about 15 miles north of Baghdad. Soldiers from the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team took over the checkpoint about three weeks ago. The Iraqi Army runs the traffic control point while the Georgia soldiers provide security and lend support when needed. Most days are relatively quiet; the hostilities come in spurts, the soldiers said.
But on Saturday, the recent spike in violence caught up to soldiers of the Springfield-based Alpha Battery of the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment.
A series of incidents from drive-by gunfire to Iraqi Army soldiers shooting a traffic violator frazzled some of the soldiers.
“I just got out of basic training in December,” said Pfc. Matthew Simmons, a student from Clarkesville. “This is all new for me. I’ve never even seen a man shot before.”
Alpha Battery soldiers have set up a mobile command center under a massive highway bridge that crosses over a wide irrigation canal. They keep close watch over activities at the checkpoint from posts high up a nearby dirt hill that runs parallel to the highway.
U.S. officials fear insurgents will step up hostilities ahead of the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum in an effort to mar the democratic process. In the last four days, more than 200 people were killed and 600 wounded in a series of shootings and bombings throughout Iraq.
Highway One is crowded at rush hour — it’s the fastest way for Iraqis to commute to Baghdad from northern towns and villages on the capital’s outskirts.
Before sunrise Saturday, Alpha Battery soldiers spotted a man with a rocket-propelled grenade, who was quickly captured by U.S. soldiers from another unit patrolling the area. A few hours later, when traffic was heavy on the highway, the Georgia soldiers came under fire from a car on the bridge.
Soldiers said a 1st Battalion, 118th Regiment security patrol caught two Iraqi men suspected of firing the shots.
Just after noon, a man stepped out of his car at the checkpoint. Iraqi Army soldiers asked the man to get back into his car but he began running over the dirt hill.
Iraqi Army soldiers shot the man when he ran down the other side of the hill, military officials confirmed. The Georgia soldiers treated the injured man the best they could and had him evacuated by chopper to a hospital. The man was bleeding heavily.
“He went from a Middle Eastern brown to Casper white,” said Staff Sgt. Tazz Hardwick, a corrections officer from Savannah who was in charge of the Georgia security team.
A second Iraqi man was found dead in the back of a black BMW that came through the checkpoint. One of the passengers claimed the man was his friend and that the Georgia soldiers had shot him.
“We didn’t fire a single shot,” said Hardwick, adding that there was confusion about how the man wound up in the BMW with a bullet in his head. Hardwick wrote up his account of the incidents for his commanding officers but he himself was puzzled over when, how and why the man had been killed.
“There was no interpreter on site,” Hardwick said. “We’ve encountered situations where we need an interpreter and we don’t have one.”
Many of the Iraqi Army soldiers and local residents don’t speak any English.
“It can be a dangerous situation out there,” Hardwick said. “Sometimes nobody knows what’s going on.”
“Usually, it’s not like that out there,” he added. “But today was tough.”
