SPC Roby Vs. IED: The Movie

Well, I promised you guys the movie of SPC Roby blowing up an IED. And here it is. It's my first time, there isn't much cool music or editing so bear with me. I'm no SPC Camp. If the movie doesn't show up as "IED", just hit refresh. SFC Kennedy is in the front seat of the humvee that Roby is in. He is laying Roby's shots onto the IED. You can hear SSG Terry coaching Roby and telling SPC Benton that Roby knows he's shooting short.

If you haven't done so already, go to January archives and read about SPC Roby on Election Day.


1)0:00 - The night prior to Election Day. My crew in a M113 PC. SGT Pritsolas is on the .50cal. PFC Hutto was sent to my platoon and was a bigtime FNG(f*cking new guy). He was smart, had some college time. He had the potential of an officer. As the only guy in our company from Utah, he took a lot of flak and was frequently questioned on his first-hand knowledge of the movie Orgasmo. When my tank company returned from Fallujah, Hutto was waiting in our barracks. He was fresh out of basic training and doing shit details while we were gone. We returned to FOB Scunion feeling victorious and accomplished. This kid was itching to prove his worth. Unfortunately, he had already missed the Battle of Baqubah and Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah. All he had left was to hope for a seat in a vehicle during elections. I remember SSG Terry coming up to me at some point prior to elections and telling me about a conversation he had among the soldiers.

First, you readers must understand, SFC Kennedy and I dealt with the big picture. He handled business with the First Sergeant and all things detail-oriented. And I handled everything from the Commander that was mission oriented. SSG Terry managed the soldiers. Since we were more than just a tank platoon(humvee, PC and dismounted missions), we had more than 16 soldiers. And by now, the R&R program was finished and everyone had had a chance to go home. So with 26 bubbas back in the saddle, we could always put guys down for a mission. But no one wanted to sit on the bench for elections.

"Hey Sir, Hutto really wants to be out on Election Day," SSG Terry said.

"Yeah that's fine. He's gonna need something so I can write an accomplishment on his service award."

"Yeah well, if you're gonna have the interpreter, then someone's gonna have to sit out, if you're gonna take Hutto."

"That's fine, I don't care," I replied.

"I told Mewborn he's sitting this one out and he told me that wasn't gonna happen. He said I can take this up with the Lieutenant."

"HA! He said that?" I laughed so hard, flattered that Mewborn would use my name in vain. I always encouraged my guys to do crazy shit and say "The Lieutenant told us to..." or "We saw the the Lieutenant doing this..." And I was all about having my soldiers tell people to take it up with me, no matter what the issue. But I rarely had conflict with my NCOs. They were usually right on point. And with things like personnel management; hell, I just needed 17 more meatsacks like myself with which to stuff humvee seats on Election Day. "No, Hutto's gotta come out with us on this one. He's dying to prove to us he's worth a damn. He won't shut up about killing bad guys."

2) 1:09 - Bravo section of my humvees taking shots at the spring of the 1st IED which I thought was a fake. SSG Terry is riding in the AOA. Normally, I always took the AOA. I hated the idea of having to choose someone to ride in the jalopy so it was just easier for me to take it. On Election Day, I needed the FIPR which was like an e-mail system because we were sent to a sector that had no radio communication and the only way to communicate to battalion was with the FIPR. I'm glad we took one of the Up-Armored humvees that day because the FIPR was critical and the IED ended up exploding on us.

3) 1:44 - These were the police who spotted the IED, and pointed it out to us. These guys also taxied voters back and forth from their homes to elections sites. That was something they did completely on their own accord.

4) 2:10 - This time Red 9's gunner(SPC Riley) is taking some shots with his M240. My section is up on a levy. We know that 7.62mm won't detonate an IED but we were hoping to uncover something. Nothing doing. I'm convinced it's a fake and I decide to drive up and take a picture.

5) 2:42 - The IED just blew up on us and we drove back up the levy to try to get a visual on a possible location of the guy who command detonated the IED on us.

6) 3:50 - Now I need a picture of the crater.

7) 4:15 - SPC Rodney "All The Way Ponapei" Roby.

By Chris Boggiano: 5 November - The Recon Rehearsal (D-3)

The First Leader’s Recon

Three days before the battle kicked off, each platoon in our task force got to take one truck for what was supposed to be a reconnaissance of the city. Since I could only take one vehicle, I put the top leadership of my platoon all into one truck and we rode out along with the rest of the task force. Our little reconnaissance consisted of about 15 humvees with all of the different people that wanted to come along. Even though we were very heavy on leadership, I wasn’t too worried about the enemy trying to mess with us since we were going to stay outside of the city at a safe distance. Plus, we were rolling deep with 15 gun trucks.

Anyway, we took off from the base and were driving along the Military Bypass up to the city. SGT Cowles was driving, SSG Danielsen was sitting in the truck commander’s seat because I wanted to make sure he knew exactly where he was going when he led the task force into the city, SSG Amyett was in the gunner’s seat, and the XO and I were sitting in the back of the truck. The Military Bypass is basically the road that runs on the safe side of the highway that is along Fallujah’s eastern border. About halfway up the city, there is the large cloverleaf intersection between that highway and the one that goes directly through the center of the city. My platoon’s one truck was somewhere in the middle of our large group of gun trucks when we stopped about a kilometer short of the cloverleaf and sat for a while.

The Marines had cordoned off the city several days earlier and weren’t letting anyone into or out of Fallujah at that point. To accomplish their mission, they had set up on the cloverleaf to control all traffic. Well, apparently the unit at the cloverleaf was in contact with the enemy, which is why we had stopped.

“Hell, why don’t we drive up there and help them out,” I said when I found out that the Marines were getting shot at. There wasn’t too much that I was afraid of with 15 gun trucks, even if there really wasn’t any command and control – we were more or less 15 individual trucks instead of one cohesive unit. Of course, we just sat there for a long long time. I even got out and took my first piss on Fallujah while I was waiting to see what was going to happen, but apparently we weren’t going anywhere fast.

“I’ve got three guys on a rooftop, two with AK-47’s and one with an RPG,” SSG Amyett said. While the rest of us were bullshitting inside of the truck waiting to move, he had taken the opportunity to see what he could see in the city with the LRAS. Well, apparently he could see pretty well from where we were sitting. The three insurgents were over a kilometer away inside of the city, but there were no friendly forces in the area so I thought we might be able to call for fire on them.

“Call it up, see if they’ll let us fire artillery on them. SSG Amyett, get us a grid to their location along with a distance and direction.” Although I was riding in the backseat of a humvee on a reconnaissance of the city, I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to kill some terrorists.

“Phantom6, Outlaw2, the LRAS has three armed insurgents on a rooftop inside the city. Two of them have AK-47’s and one is carrying an RPG.”

“Roger, standby, let me see if we can call for fire on them.”

We sat in the truck and continued bullshitting for a few more minutes while we waited for the CO to get permission to drop artillery on them. All of it was something of a surreal experience at the time. We rarely got to call for fire back in Baqubah where we normally conducted patrols. Any contact that we got into with the enemy usually didn’t last long enough to get all of the permission necessary to actually do it.

“Outlaw2, Phantom6, send me a grid to their location along with a distance and direction from where you are at and we’ll see if we can fire on their position.”

I couldn’t believe it was actually happening. I knew I was in Fallujah and all, but to call for indirect for real was out of this world. All of us in the humvee had gotten pretty excited and checked with SSG Amyett every couple of minutes to make sure that the insurgents hadn’t left their rooftop. The idea that those guys thought they were totally safe and didn’t know we were watching them from over a kilometer away made it even better.

We sat there and waited and waited. Finally, our CO came over the net and told us that our task force was having some problems talking to the Marines to get clearance for the fires. Apparently, they were using a different encryption for their radios than we were at the time, so no one in our patrol could talk to the Marine regimental headquarter’s radios.

“Outlaw2, Phantom6, it looks like this mission isn’t going to happen today.” It turned out that our commo problem with the Marines meant that we couldn’t get permission to fire into the center of the city.

We were all disappointed to say the least, but there were a couple of valuable lessons that we learned that day. First, we learned that we were having problems talking to the Marines on the radio. Whenever two difference services come together with their own ways of doing things problems like that arise. It was disappointing not to get to kill the bad guys that day, but at least when the battle really started, the Marines and our task force were talking to each other.

The second lesson that everyone learned was that the LRAS was more than a box that sits on top of a humvee. A lot of the higher leadership probably had no idea what an LRAS was until we did that reconnaissance mission. After that, everyone realized its capabilities and how it could be used.

“Man, that sucks.”
“Yea, but if he spotted these guys in only a couple of minutes, we’re going to have a field day once the fighting begins if they’re dumb enough to hang out on rooftops.”

The Rehearsal

It was a couple of nights before the battle, and we were conducting a rehersal. My platoon’s job was to drive up the military bypass route to the northeast corner of the city and establish a big assembly area. From there, we would guide all of our task force’s tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, humvees, and support trucks into position to wait for the battle to kick off.

It sucked. It was pitch black and we couldn’t see from one end of the area to the next. The whole thing needed to be several hundred meters long and wide, but the ground was so uneven that we couldn’t see from one end to the other. Eventually, we got it sorted out and were sitting around.

The whole time, the Marines up on the highway that were surrounding the city were shooting. From our position in the low ground, I had no idea what they were shooting at though. I could only see their tracer bullets flying out into the darkness, but couldn’t see or hear anything come back in our direction. Additionally, they kept shooting star clusters in the air, which are basically big Roman Candles that light up the ground. From where I was sitting, it only seemed to silhouette the Marine trucks up on the highway.

“Hey, Chris, take the LRAS truck up there and see what the hell is going on.” My commander instructed me.

SSG Amyett and I hopped in his truck and drove over to the highway. It was a steep drive to get to the top. From the bottom, I thought we might even flip over, until I thought that the Marines had managed to get up there and so it couldn’t be that bad.

His driver floored it from the bottom and I could feel us losing speed as we approached the top. Our front two tires crested the edge just as we lost almost all of our momentum, but with the humvee’s four wheel drive, they were enough to pull us the rest of the way.

We pulled up next to a Marine truck and SSG Amyett and I hopped out.

“Hey, can you tell me who’s in charge up here.” I said to one of the Marines.
“Roger, let me get the skipper on the hooks.” He said to me.

Only then did I realize the Marines were speaking a totally different language. “Skipper on the hooks? Sergeant Amyett, do you have any idea what he just said.”
“I was thinking the same thing. I think he’s getting his boss, and the hooks must be their radio.”

Eventually, someone walked up to me.

“What have you guys been shooting at up here?” I asked.
“Well, we’ve been taking contact from those two lights over there all night long.” The Marine responded.
“Hey, how far are those two lights over there?” I yelled up to my LRAS gunner.
“1800 meters. And I don’t see anyone there.” He came back with.

After a few more minutes of conversation, I realized for the first time that the Marines weren’t nearly as well equipped as soldiers in the Army. They had been shooting all night long with machine guns that were only effective for 600 meters at a target 1800 meters away. On top of that, they did not have any night vision equipment to speak of, and that’s why they kept shooting star clusters – to make sure no insurgents were climbing up the berm at them. When they saw how well we’d been equipped, they thought we must have been Special Forces.

“No, I’m telling you most Army soldiers have this stuff.” I promised them. There had been a huge push to get us the latest and greatest toys when we deployed. Unfortunately, the Marines hadn’t been so fortunate, and they were at a huge disadvantage. For the first time, I could see how budget fights between the different services of the military could filter down to the lowest level.

We stayed up on the berm long enough for some of our tanks and Bradley’s to cross and drive toward the north side of the city. The Marines had been conducting feints into the city for the past couple of weeks to keep the insurgents off balance, and this was just another one of them.

“Hey sir, they want me to drop white phosphorous on the northeast edge of the city.” My forward observer said to me. He had his own radio and was talking directly to the guys who controlled our artillery back at Camp Fallujah. “Where do you want me to drop the stuff?”

I had no clue. It was dark as hell up there, and I had never seen the city in daylight. White phosphorous was like a big smoke screen, but with some special properties. First, it would burn anything that it landed on, and second, our thermal sights could see through it with no problem.

“Drop it by that light over there.” I instructed even though I had no idea if that was the corner of the city or not. It looked like it to me though so I went with it.

A while later, I could hear the rounds flying overhead and explode in midair. Out of each round, smaller canisters of smoke streamed to the ground. All of it looked like a big spider from the initial puff of smoke and the trails of smoke leading to the ground. After a few rounds of that, the entire area was covered in a white haze. It was all a practice for the main body’s assault into the city in a couple of days. They would use the phosphorous to obscure themselves as they pushed through the obstacle belt the insurgents had made around the city.

“Is that where you want it sir? I’ll register it if you have no corrections.”
Shit, I have no idea.
“Yea, looks good to me from here.” I hope I didn’t mess this one up.

MOVIES

November 9th Raw Footage

I recommend going back to 9 November if it's been awhile.

Red 8 and I took PL Fran.

November 9-1: We are pummeling a garage that a bunch of insurgents sprinted into for cover. You can appreciate SGT P's tunnel vision once you see what he is looking through. You can also see the red laser appearance of SSG Terry's HEAT round in the GPSE. A16 and A18 were side by side on Fran and we were going to town. Also you can hear SGT P's famous "Daaaaaamn!" and his calm "ontheway."

November 9-2: Looking at SSG Terry and A18 while giving a SITREP about the garage we just hammered. You can see my loader, Langford's M240. There is a bradley in front of SSG Terry. These were the TF2-2 guys who were hundreds of meters in front of us on PL Fran, and completely oblivious to the bad guys running around in front of them. So these videos are after my tank section pulled up and prepared to drop steel rain on the insurgents.

November 9-3: I am trying to get Boggiano to see the same target I am. He was a few kilometers behind me on the bride of the cloverleaf and using the LRAS. All he saw at first was a bunch of minarets but I was trying to get him to see the one that had previously been hot with activity.

November 9-4: Watching guys blow up.

"A dude?" SGT P asked.
"A dude went flying off that thing!" Langford said.
"Was that a dude?" SGT P asked again in disbelief.
"Yes." I laughed.
"I saw that shit." He replied.

I sent up a SITREP to the XO. Props to Phantom 5. He did a good job of battle tracking all of this. The 20 rounds were just devastating. It was hard to drop more.

The net is crazy. You got your crew jabbering away on the intercom. Your wingman is trying to talk to you on the platoon net. You are trying to talk on the company net. But you are in direct coordination with Ramrod 18 on the fires net. I was constantly asking "What'd he say?" because as I was talking to one guy, I was hoping someone on my crew heard whatever the hell SSG Terry was trying to tell me.

I think the FA guys really had a blast on this day.
"He was pretty excited. They all said 'repeat it!'" I said.

By Chris Boggiano: From R&R to D-4

R and R

On my last few days of R and R from Iraq in October, there was all sorts of talk on the news about the Marines going in and retaking Fallujah.

“Do you think you’ll have to go there?” I remember my mother asking.
“No way. The Marines are on the other side of the country and there’s no way they’ll ask the Army for help.”

Four Days Later

After traveling to get back to Iraq from the US, I walked into my troop’s command post only to find that just about everyone had been shipped down to a town called Salman Pak on the southeast side of Baghdad to fight the insurgents there.

As soon as I walked in I got hit with, “Hey sir, did you hear, we’re going to Fallujah in a couple of days,” by one of the NCOs.

Shit. Pam and mom aren’t going to be happy about this one.

Less than a week after I got back, I had gone down to Salman Pak, done a little bit of fighting there, returned to our base at FOB Warhorse in Baqubah, gotten ready to move to Fallujah, and spent a day escorting all of our tanks and Bradley’s to Camp Fallujah.

Before I had gone, I called my fiancé, Pam, who I had gotten engaged to over R and R, and told her that I was going away for a while and I didn’t know for how long. All the talk about operational security and not telling sensitive information over the phone goes out the window when the person on the other line has been watching CNN.

“You’re going to Fallujah.”
“You’re guess is as good as mine.” She saw right through my weak effort at hiding the truth from her.
“You’re going to Fallujah!”

So much for operational security. I don’t think it was any surprise to anyone at that point where we were headed. The question was more how long we’d be there and how bad it would be.

Camp Fallujah

Once we got to Camp Fallujah, we’d done some last minute preparations. My platoon was part of the brigade reconnaissance troop (BRT), which meant that we were not part of any particular battalion. Our brigade commander used us as his reserve and moved us around from one sector to the next every few weeks to support whichever battalion needed the most help at the time.

I was the platoon leader for Second Platoon, Outlaws, the best scout platoon in the Army as far as I was concerned. It seemed like everyone hated us because we joked around constantly, but always managed to get things done faster and better than anyone else, but that fired us up even more. I’d taken over the platoon on June 15, 2004, after a series of tragic events had led to four BRT soldiers dying when their humvee rolled over into a canal. The old platoon leader wasn’t one of the four, but he had changed jobs to fill in for one, and I had been pulled away from my tank platoon to fill in for him.

For the year before becoming a scout platoon leader I had been a tank platoon leader. That’s how I knew Neil Prakash. He had first platoon and I had third platoon in Avenger company for the entire time before our deployment. We’d become good friends and had done a good job of keeping in touch in Iraq even though we lived on different base camps and rarely saw each other. As soon as I had heard that the BRT was going to have tanks attached to it for the battle, I knew it was going to be Neil. Company commanders always sent their best guys when they had to attach them to another unit.

The move from tanks to humvees was a little hard on me at first. On the one hand, maintenance is easier, but on the other, I wasn’t the biggest baddest guy around anymore. When I was in my tank, there was no Iraqi on this planet that would think to question my authority. I was lucky that I had fallen in on such a great scout platoon.

“Hey I want you to have three to five times as much basic load for each weapons system on your trucks.” My troop executive officer (XO) told me.
“Where the hell are we going to fit all of that?”
“I don’t know, make it fit. You’ll probably need it more than some of the other crap you’re carrying.”

Our XO had a tough job. Without a battalion to support us, he had to organize all of the logistics support himself, without the help of a higher level staff. He’d done a damn good job at it in the last week. Before we left FOB Warhorse, he’d scrounged up every piece of spare ammunition and filled up half of a large shipping container with it. It was kind of like our own little stockpile, just in case the Army couldn’t provide us with what we needed through the normal channels. In it were AT-4 anti-tank rockets, hand grenades, machine gun ammunition, C4 plastic explosives charges, and just about anything else he could get his hands on that we might need in the coming weeks.

When I broke the news to my platoon about the extra ammo, I was greeted with a pragmatic skeptism from my two section sergeants.

“He’s smoking crack if he thinks we’re going to be able to fit all of that.” SSG Danielsen told me. He was my platoon sergeant at the moment, and I was lucky to have him. He had been in the Army only five or six years, but had quickly risen through the ranks because of his natural leadership qualities. People listened to him and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. That may have had something to do with him being 6’5” and 225 pounds. He was rarely wrong and not many people wanted to mess with the big goofy gorilla all the same.

Still, he was only 23, a year younger than me, and was often criticized for being immature by people who had never really worked with him. That’s probably because he spent a good amount of his time joking around when it wasn’t time to get things done. I probably didn’t help that image much by taking on the proud role of the prankster platoon leader. Still, we all knew when it was time to fool around and time to kill bad guys.

SFC Loy, my platoon’s normal platoon sergeant, had left for his two weeks of R and R the day that I got back. With 17 years in the Army, he had about 10 years of experience on the next senior guy in the platoon. As the heart and soul of Outlaw platoon, if there was ever a time I’d wished he were around, it was now, but those were the breaks. Fortunately, he’d done a great job of training guys like SSG Danielsen and they were stepping up now in preparation for the big day.

When SFC Loy left, he had taken a bunch of other soldiers with him on R and R. In a strange twist of bad luck and timing, our troop’s R and R program had been designed to send the bulk of one platoon all at once. The other scout platoon, Hunter, had sent their guys away in September and was back up to full strength now. My platoon’s turn came at the end of October. As a result, we were sitting in Camp Fallujah with ten scouts instead of the normal compliment of 18. We borrowed a couple of guys from the other platoons so that we could at least have the minimum number of 12 to man our humvees, but it wasn’t quite how I wanted to roll into the most dangerous city on the planet in a few days.

“Well, here’s how we’re going to make more room,” I explained to SSG D. “No one is going to be able to take more than an assault pack with a change of socks and t-shirt, their sleeping bag liner, and a hygine kit. I don’t think we’re going to have much time to change once this thing kicks off anyway.”

“Alright, we’ll make it happen, but it’s not going to be pretty. Thank god we’ve only got twelve guys, otherwise we’d be screwed.” He said with a twisted smile on his face.

“Yea, well they’ll all start filtering back in during the next week or so as they get back from R and R, so you’d better have shot off enough of that ammo to make room for them by then.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

I was a little worried about what creative solution he’d find, but I trusted his judgment better than my own in situations like that. Regardless, I didn’t have much of a choice.

As I walked back to my truck, my gunner asked me, “What do you want me to do with this thermite grenade, sir?” A thermite grenade is made of white phosphorous and burns at several thousand degrees when the pin is pulled, melting anything it touches. Normally, they were used to destroy enemy weapons, but in this case, we were talking about the possibility of having to abandon our truck and destroying it so the enemy wouldn’t get his hands on it. None of us had any idea how bad things were going to be in the city.

“Put it on top of the radios, I guess. I have a feeling that if we need to pull the pin on that thing that this truck isn’t going to be much good to anyone and we’ll have bigger things to worry about.”
“Like me being dead.”
“Yea, that’s one possibility.”