Guardsmen recall Iraq dangers

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BANGOR – The IED detonated as Tech. Sgt. Michael Jewett of Bangor and Staff Sgt. Richard Fish of Bangor traveled by Humvee down Iraq’s dangerous main highway. Shrapnel from the improvised explosive device sliced through the cab of a fuel tanker, and glass sprayed into the arm of the driver, a civilian contractor.

Fish rushed to the driver’s aid and set the man’s dislocated shoulder back into place, then looked to his side and spotted two 155 millimeter rounds resting in a ditch six feet away. He alerted Jewett, who cordoned off the area and called an explosives disposal team. The rounds were detonated, the disabled tanker recovered, and the convoy continued on its way to Forward Operating Base Endurance near Mosul.

The attack was unlike any other faced before by Maine Air National Guard members. Jewett, Fish and Staff Sgt. Chris Cowan of the Belgrade Lakes area spent seven months in Iraq in what marked the first time the Maine Air Guard has ever been deployed to conduct ground combat operations.

The three traditional Guardsmen – along with supervisor Master Sgt. Grady Thurlow of Burlington and Senior Airman Joe Snider of New Hampshire – were deployed in an unusual arrangement that placed them under the command of the U.S. Army, which began sending Air Force personnel to Iraq in 2004 after running short of truck drivers, Thurlow said. The Army assumed command of active duty and Reserve Air Force vehicle operators, who soon found themselves in the much more dangerous job of guarding convoys instead of driving buses and operating forklifts.

The Maine Guard team arrived in March 2005 outside Tikrit at Forward Operating Base Speicher to conduct the same mission, having received Army combat training in Texas before departing. The men volunteered for the unprecedented opportunity, which Thurlow, now back in Maine, likened to the Super Bowl.

“No matter how dangerous it was, it was a once in a lifetime thing,” he said.

In recognition of their service, Fish, Jewett and Cowan will be awarded the Army Combat Action Badge on Sunday at the Bangor base. It honors military members who have direct contact with enemy forces through combat.

Thurlow, who oversaw the four men from the base command center, was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for Meritorious Service for his work in Iraq. Snider was assigned to computer operations on the base.

The Maine Guardsmen, operating as the 1058th Gun Truck Company under the 13th Corps Support Battalion out of Fort Benning, Ga., had plenty of contact with the enemy, leaving the safety of their base to travel “outside the wire” three to four times a day to escort civilian contractors. One of their Humvees racked up 10,000 miles in less than a month.

Guarding convoys that stretched to 3 miles long, the men traveled from base to base with few landmarks and even fewer road signs, past Iraqi Army checkpoints staffed by soldiers who could be bribed by enemy forces to look the other way.

They escorted Third World nationals – largely Turkish civilian subcontractors who spoke little English and transported food and military supplies – as well as American civilians driving fuel trucks for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton.

The KBR drivers, many of them ex-military and familiar with Iraqi terrain, proved invaluable as a source of information, the men said. The Maine Guardsmen forged a unique relationship with the drivers, who would warn them of dangerous areas or provide directions.

“We treated them like they were one of us,” said Jewett, a Bangor police officer. “They had civilian clothes and we didn’t.”

“We became real good friends with them,” said Fish, who works for a frozen foods company. “They’d basically request us when they went out.”

The relationship with the drivers in Iraq was an unexpected advantage in an otherwise surprisingly disadvantaged situation, the men said.

“At first, our armor was just an old Vietnam-era flak jacket bungee-corded around the door,” said Cowan, a patrol sergeant with the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office.

Jewett recalled a trip to Balad with Fish in a 5-ton truck with a loose windshield and no protection but for some “hillbilly armor,” or steel welded onto the side.

“I got there and started looking at the vehicles and thought, oh my god, the reports on CNN and all that are true. This is crap,” Jewett said of his first impression of Iraq. But they made the best of it, he said. “What can you do? You’re there so you know you have to be focused and ready to go.”

The Vietnam-era communications equipment – “glorified,” unencrypted CB radios – failed regularly, leaving the men unable to contact other members of the convoys, they said.

“We were running blind,” Jewett said.

The poor equipment once sent the men into the dangerous heart of Mosul, after radios died and the lead gun truck missed an instruction to take a right turn. Out of their Humvee windows, the men watched as some Iraqi civilians in the bombed-out city dragged their fingers across their throats in a threat to behead them, Cowan said.

“They do not like us in Mosul at all,” he said. “It’s funny because different areas, they’re very friendly, but the big cities, forget it.”

The communications equipment also compromised their ability to transmit back to the base.

“Here we are the greatest military in the world and our communication system failed on a regular basis,” Cowan said. “You’d have extended periods of time where you didn’t have any communications with the base.”

“Once you leave the wire, you are on your own,” Jewett said.

Equipment upgrades through the Army either were too costly or required excessive paperwork, Grady said. “We were almost at the point where we were gonna all pitch in a hundred bucks apiece and buy it ourselves,” he said.

The Maine Air Guard did, however, spend $5,000 per man for helmets and armor, as well as provide GPS systems, binoculars and hydration systems, prompting some envy from the active-duty members, the men said. Looking back, it could have been worse, Cowan said.

“Compared to what guys did in World War II and Vietnam, we did nothing,” he said. “We had it easy compared to some of the other units over there.”

Learning to work with other units was among the more practical challenges, as the Air Guard team was forced to deal face-to-face with the military’s long-standing rivalries between not only the Army and Air Force, but the Guard and active duty. The Guard tends to be more flexible in its operations and less focused on rank, the men said.

The different styles sometimes became irritatingly absurd, such as when one of the men was lectured after a long and dangerous day on the road for failing to button a cargo pant pocket, they said.

The Maine Guard team lived side by side with their counterparts, with four men to a room in their billets, which once housed students of the Iraqi Air Force Academy. The structure had previously taken fire, possibly during Desert Storm, and dust filtered through the patched-up holes, Grady said.

Three showers accommodated 150 people, including a dozen women, and thin plywood walls separated the rooms, he said.

“You could hear the guy breathing next to you,” Grady said.

Cockroaches, mice and bats were regular visitors, “but it was hard and sheltered” and air-conditioned, Cowan said.

The men spent many nights sleeping on top of their trucks under the stars, when the temperature dropped to a comparatively cool 90 degrees. Sometimes the KBR drivers would set them up inside a small trailer with beds, they said.

“It was like a seven-month camping trip,” Cowan said.

The men returned from Iraq in October 2005, and said they still find themselves yearning to return. While happy to be home with their families and appreciative of public support, the men acknowledged missing the adrenaline rush of making life-and-death decisions, of being responsible every day for the lives of others. Even for Jewett and Cowan, both police officers, returning to their jobs has proven anticlimactic, they said.

“The decisions I make today seem irrelevant to the decisions I made over there,” Jewett said.

Admitting fearing for his safety at times, Cowan remembers the sounds of IEDs and small arms fire with excitement. “I liked it,” he said. “It’s the highest-stakes game you can possibly play.”

Grady missed his son’s Little League Championship at home in Burlington, as well as spending time with his wife, but for him, too, the sense of duty remains strong.

“I had these guys as family,” he said.

The deployment

525: Missions off the base

508, 206: Miles traveled

14,871: Vehicles escorted

10,814,016: Pounds of cargo moved on and off Speicher base