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Tuesday, March 14, 2006
‘The day we got attacked’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Keith Hadley/AJC
"It's like your drunk uncle," Monté Franks, 36, a career soldier and father of two from Rockmart, said of the recurring nightmare.
Convoy Support Center, Scania, Iraq — In his nightmares, insurgents are crawling over Sgt. Monté Franks’ tank.
His tank commander and loader are dead. He can hear his driver hollering over the radio, but he can’t make out what he is saying.
Franks raises his pistol to defend himself. A rifle barrel inches through a hatch above him. The muzzle flashes. And that is when Franks wakes up, gasping for air.
“It’s like your drunk uncle,” Franks, 36, a career soldier and father of two from Rockmart, said of the recurring nightmare. “You know he is going to come around and you don’t exactly look forward to it. But you just try to deal with him the best you can and get him out of the house the fastest way you can.”
Franks traces his nightmares to one day last summer in Yusufiyah, a city about 25 miles south of Baghdad in the violent, Sunni-dominated region known as the Triangle of Death. Soldiers with the 48th Brigade Combat Team refer to it simply as “August Fifth” or “The day we got attacked.”
Insurgents made an all-out assault that day on the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor Regiment Task Force’s base in Yusufiyah. Such attacks are extremely rare in Iraq, where roadside bombs are the preferred weapon of the insurgents. Soldiers can serve a whole year here and never see the enemy.
More than six months after the attack in Yusufiyah, soldiers who fought that day still dwell on it. The 108th has been moved to this rest and refueling point for truck drivers in southern Iraq, where insurgent attacks are infrequent, but soldiers still suffer from nightmares, sleeplessness, guilt and regret. Many have sought help from combat stress specialists.
The Aug. 5 attack lasted less than an hour. But the combat was sustained and intense. It was particularly disturbing to some soldiers because of the up-close fighting and the relentlessness of their enemies.
Soldiers who fought that day say they were changed forever. They say they will never forget the day they came close to death, the day they finally got to fight their shadowy enemy face to face.
‘Scary as hell’
It was near dusk when the bombs started raining in Yusufiyah. Franks was on the telephone with his wife. He asked about their 9-year-old son, Tristan, and 6-year-old daughter, Rose. Both were in school.
He was looking forward to going home in a few days. They were planning what they were going to do. Should they hang out at home or take trips to places like Six Flags Over Georgia?
Things were going well for Franks. His life was back on track after a marriage that ended in divorce. He had been married to his second wife seven years and they were happy. “I missed them as much as I do now,” said Franks, who grew up on a farm outside Birmingham, the son of a homemaker and a World War II veteran. “I was juiced because I was a few days from going on leave.”
He was sitting at a desk in a dark, cavernous building when the explosions began. The blighted warehouse was a potato processing plant before the U.S. invasion. It became home to Georgia and Alabama National Guard soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor.
Franks didn’t think much of the first three explosions. The soldiers in Yusufiyah were used to getting fired on by mortars several times a day.
But then Franks heard a fourth explosion, quickly followed by two more. He climbed under the desk. He told his wife he loved her. And then he hung up the phone.
Bullets slammed into the building. Shards of glass crashed in on the soldiers.
Franks had been in the Army 17 years and served as a tank driver in the Gulf War but had never been in such intense, direct combat.
“I was wondering what the hell was going on. How are we going to handle this?” he recalled thinking.
Several soldiers took up positions behind sand-filled barriers, returning fire. Several were still in their athletic shorts and T-shirts. They could see insurgents firing from the rooftops of neighboring houses.
A mortar round exploded inside the base, destroying a Humvee. It appeared as if the insurgents were trying to overrun the base.
Franks and 10 others ran toward their tanks as bullets whined around them. The men scrambled to unlock the hatches and climb in. What took a few moments seemed like an eternity.
“It was as scary as hell. There was so much stuff flying around out there,” Franks said.
Three tanks rolled out the gate with mortar rounds exploding around them.
Yusufiyah appeared deserted except for a suspicious-looking man in a blue sedan parked in a traffic circle. The car exploded as the soldiers approached it, engulfing one of their tanks in flames. The soldiers inside said they could feel the heat through the tank’s thick armor. The explosion left a 10-foot wide, 5-foot deep crater, but did little damage to the tank.
The tanks proceeded to an Iraqi Army checkpoint at a bridge spanning a canal. The post appeared on the verge of being overrun. Two Iraqi soldiers lay dead there. Three more were seriously wounded.
Franks’ tank pulled in front of a bunker to shield the Iraqi soldiers taking cover inside.
Franks could hear bullets hitting his tank with a “ting, ting, ting.”
“It was like everybody who owned a gun was shooting at our tank,” Franks said. “I was scared but I was calm. I was a lot of things at one time.”
Franks spotted two men firing at his tank from close range. He said he shot them with his machine gun and watched them fall.
The tanks rolled over the bridge and into the town of Mullah Feyyed, a Sunni-dominated area at a crossroads for people heading to and from Baghdad.
Franks heard an explosion to his right and saw two men firing at his tank. He dropped them with his machine gun.
“They stepped right into my [sight],” Franks said. “I remember thinking how stupid they were for shooting at a tank with AK-47s.”
Three more men armed with AK-47s were running in a field toward a house to the left of the tank. Franks started shooting and said the first two fell; the third dropped his weapon.
The barrel of Franks’ machine gun became so hot a round exploded inside. Debris sprayed into Franks’ left eye, temporarily blinding it. A small fire broke out inside the barrel, terrifying the crew. Franks slapped at it with his hand until it went out.
The battle was so intense, Franks said, that he contemplated loading and firing the tank’s 120mm main gun.
Franks’ loader, Sgt. Lynn Whitlock of Woodstock, tried to fire his machine gun at the attackers, but it malfunctioned. Whitlock popped up in his hatch and started firing his rifle instead. He ducked back down to reload.
When Whitlock came back up, he noticed the protective shields of ballistic glass around his hatch had been hit with bullets. His machine gun, an ammunition container, a water cooler, smoke grenade launcher and an equipment box had also been hit.
Whitlock refrained from looking at his tank for two days after the firefight. It made him think of his own mortality.
“I just got married in March. Seeing these holes in that ballistic glass — I was kind of uneasy about it,” he said. “I didn’t want to look at the tank. I was not ready to.”
Whitlock is also having recurring nightmares, about his machine gun malfunctioning during the battle. In his dreams, he feels regret for not killing the insurgents in his sights.
“The body and the brain have a lot of secrets we don’t know about,” said Whitlock, 28, a technician at a Woodstock engineering firm. “That day I was the closest to death than I have ever experienced. Aug. 5 will be a day I will never forget.”
Sgt. Steven Gay was among a group of Alabama National Guard soldiers following Whitlock’s tank in Humvees that day. They saw a group of men dressed in black and armed with AK-47s pile out of a van and run into a house in Mullah Feyyed. Gay said he shot down three men running out the back.
“It was kind of like a turkey shoot,” said Gay, 29, a construction worker from Helena, Ala. “It was a good day, knowing you got back at them. You were actually seeing who you were dealing with, knowing who you were fighting. That’s a good feeling.”
But in the days after the battle, Gay dwelt on his feelings.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a good Christian, but I’m trying. You know killing is wrong, but it is different for a soldier. War is different,” said Gay, the father of a 3-year-old son. “These days all I think about is getting home to my little boy.”
Military officials say 20 mortar rounds and rockets landed in and around the base in Yusufiyah. No U.S. soldiers were seriously wounded. The 108th’s soldiers said they were unable to get an accurate count of suspected insurgents they killed because the enemy dragged their bodies away, leaving only blood trails.
The 108th’s top officers still don’t know what prompted the attack. But they say its coordination and complexity point to violent outside insurgent groups, such as al-Qaida in Iraq or Ansar al-Sunna.
“It was not local insurgents. They were foreigners,” said Lt. Col. John King, 42, commander of the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor. “The level of sophistication we saw that day was better than any of the attacks we had seen before and any time after.”
Big picture obscured
Franks returned home for two weeks’ leave four days after the battle. But he wasn’t ready. He was still processing what happened the day of the attack. He did not have enough time to talk about it with his buddies.
He remembers the night he broke down crying on his front porch in Rockmart. He wanted to be home with his family. But at the same time, he wanted to be back with his unit in Iraq.
“I didn’t want to come back but I knew there was no way I was going to not come back. All my buddies were over here,” he said, tears welling in his eyes.
“It’s just screwed up. We don’t get to see the big picture a lot. We do what we are told so we can go home. That’s all we want to do is go home.”
The nightmares started while Franks was home on leave. He said he didn’t tell his wife about the dreams because he didn’t want to upset her.
The nightmares persisted when he returned to Iraq and he started to feel guilty for having them. He said he didn’t believe he had the right to those nightmares, because veterans from World War II and the Korean War, such as his father, had experienced far more intense combat.
“I’m a man who knows his limitations. And it got to be too much,” he said.
Franks sought help from combat stress experts after his return. He said they helped by giving him an opportunity to talk about his problems. They reassured him that his symptoms were normal for someone who had such an abnormal experience. And they helped him see that shooting the insurgents was not wrong.
“They are like us. They have families. But I would rather it be them than me,” Franks said of the insurgents. “They were trying to kill us.”
During the five months 108th soldiers were in the Triangle of Death, they suffered six fatalities and 86 wounded, including 40 sent home for combat wounds or noncombat-related medical problems.
Many soldiers who had grown accustomed to large doses of addictive adrenaline in the Triangle of Death say they hate the boredom here at their new base in southern Iraq and want to be back up north, fighting insurgents.
“They kind of went through a slump when they first got here. It took them a while to adjust to being here. I have heard a lot of them say they would rather be in the combat zone than be bored,” said Sgt. Markaye Staruk, a mental health specialist with the Fort Bragg, N.C.-based 528th Medical Detachment, Combat Stress Control.
Staruk was among the combat stress experts who worked with 108th soldiers.
“It took me a while to adjust, too,” Staruk said. “There, you had a mission. You had a purpose. You felt like you were accomplishing something. But after being here awhile I see there is a mission here. There is a purpose.”
The day after Thanksgiving, Franks was back on the phone with his wife. He said she asked for a divorce. He agreed. He declined to say exactly what brought it about, but he said his long deployment contributed to their breakup.
“The separation brought a lot of things to light,” he said. “It made us realize we were working very hard trying to fix something that couldn’t be fixed.”
Franks, Whitlock, Gay and the rest of the 108th are scheduled to leave for home in early May. Franks wants to stay in the military. But he wants a new job that would allow him to stay close to his children and not have to go back to Iraq.
“Bottom line, I will not come back over here,” he said. “Never. Never. Never.”
