Report from recon outside Baghdad, unedited -- Lafcadio T. Lion and Strawberry Sage and Friends Fun Forum

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Date Posted: 09:21:10 03/20/03 Thu
Author: Sage
Author Host/IP: qam1c-sif-58.monroeaccess.net / 12.27.215.59
Subject: Report from recon outside Baghdad, unedited

we are outside Baghdad watching the antiaircraft f
Author: faust
Date: 20-03-03 03:10

We have been very busy here. Bad dust storms. Sometimes it effects radio transmissions, other times not, we are broadcasting all the time. A lot of transmissions are being routed through us because we are in between a lot of moving formations of vehicles. Plus we are busy with our main task which is preparing targets for a battalion which we serve. The helicopters come over us in rotation. We always have a couple of gunships overhead or circling nearby. We are also at the center of a growing assembly of vehicle groups. New arrivals are coming in all the time, especially from the Jordanian side.

The whole desert out here is swarming with reconaissance units. We are not the only ones. They seem to be so many of them. We used to assume we were the ONLY ones out here, but there are units doing stuff a lot like we are doing which we didn't know about( why should we?) but who all form a NET of eyes and ears from three borders. We sneak around and they do also. Now all of a sudden we all pop up around here like ferrets in a tight shirt.
It is almost amusing.

We are not all the same kind of recon. But we all are doing recon. I don't know if I can take the time to explain that. Mostly Recon is not for FIGHTING. Recon is mostly to just sneak and peek. You can understand that. You don't come to fight. You come to see and get away again. That is what makes you successful. There are a variety of ways to do that. And it has a variety of STYLES. It is for subtle people. Recon is subtle.

Move when you can, long periods of looking and listening and then a sudden movement or a creeping around using the flow of the ground. Always moving with the ground and mostly doing your movement at night. Rest during the day and observation during the day. Using your time effectively. Lots of map work. Mapping and map use not only for yourself but setting up maps for others who will be using the same ground. I do maps continually. I am a combat map maker much of the time. My compuetr network has eleven people in it and we make maps. I am the eye that sees and the brain that sees the combat use of the ground we are seeing. I am on the ground and I am face in it.

The helicopters do this also. Theirs is a different three dimensional naturally. They can get altitude map views and range maps. So now we are trading maps with one another for targeting. I am giving them data and they are giving me data and we are making range maps and target maps.

The units coming in will need to have all their strting lines and objectives. We are going to SURROUND and CUT a city up. There are five airports to take. There ahve to be maps for where you are, where you stage from. Where the supplies are. How to line up for supplies and the schedules for refueling. Christ there is a whole mountain of vehicles and men all moving in waves and they have to be controlled with schedules and maps. I am not doing it all, but Generals somewhere need all theis data and I am a connection at an Assembly hub who is passing this stuff around, as well as taking short order cook orders for what is needed. Ecerybody need this product.

Baghdad is sitting out there holding its little balls and whimpering and we are closing in all around it like wolves in a dust storm. When FRIDAY comes we are going to eat Baghdad. At leasr I think it is going to be Friday. We have enough supplies to last another week and I want to get this done by the 28th.

We may never need to use a great deal of these maps and data. But it has to be done.

Large numbers of Tanks and other vehicles are on the move. They are using maps I made. They are going to know where they can move most effectively and what the ground is like. You might say what if the desert is just flat?

Well, the desert LOOKS flat but in reality it isn't. There might be a gradual change in the land over many miles and in some places, the land sealevel might be a thousand feet different over scores of miles.

. There is a drainage out here and water is out here when it may rain or when we have the dust storms. The soil is not the same everyplace despite the dust. And it changes all the time for some degree. These are subtle things but they make a great deal of difference if you weigh fifty tons and you want to stay out of places where the ground would give line of sight advantages to someone who can fire a shell at you from a mile away. Or you might think a piece of ground would be just dandy for a bivouac and it is going to be four foot deep in mud if it rains. Might not rain for a long time, but you sure as hell don't want to be in a fifty ton vehicle camped THERE if it DOES rain.. I try to save a Captain some embarassment by showing good bivouac areas and where the bad ones would be if he doesn't have my eye.
Little things like that.

Tankers may not be the sort of people who you would imagine as being prone to HIDE, but believe me, a Tanker who is good on the ground thinks about how the land is SHAPED so he can hide after a fashion if he needs to do so.You want to be HULL DOWN to the enemy. And you want HIM Hull up.

And officers in charge of moving combat vehicles appreciate a map that is made by someone who looks at ground the way I do and shows them stuff about manuever and deception. I am good at both.

I plan routes of manuever that take such things into account so some lieutenant who is moving up a line of tanks in combat formation can give his unit manuever orders with some confidence even if he has never been on that piece of desert before. That is one side of what we have been doing. And remember we have just covered this last 130 miles in the last few days. I had stuff for the first 150 miles but all this is NEW ground. What about MINES? I have made a route I know is secure. We reconned it. It had better be safe for those tanks or they will skin me and hang me on the barn door to dry. If our tanks run into a minefield I didn't catch, Jesus himself wouldn't forgive me.

But as I say, the helicopters and I are passing data back and forth...the ground around here is a STAGING AREA. This is an ASSEMBLY AREA for an ASSAULT on the city of Baghdad. We also passed by Karbala and Nasiriya on the way up here and they will have to be nuetralized. We don't want to ENTER those places except as absolutely necessary. We don't want to disturb the Iraqi populace. We want to AVOID them as much as possible. WHY should we fight them anywhere or even scare them as we move if we can move AROUND them and by them and cut them all off as we move toward Baghdad and the real OBJECTIVE.

Every little town doesn't require us to TAKE it. We can drive around 90% of the populated areas and ignore it. That will all be ours when we take Baghdad and kill Saddam. Saddam is the primary CENTER of Gravity for this war. The city is where Saddam is located. The only reason we are taking Baghdad itself is to get Saddam. Kill Saddam and we won't have to fight. The Iraqis will not fight without Saddam. Cut the head off and the whole body is ours.

In a sense we are a huge army of ten Tank divisions looking for ONE MAN. We are going to TARGET that one man. Everything on our side is manuevering to catch and kill that one man. We don't want to fight the Iraqi people and we don't want to even threaten or meet the Iraqi army. They are all just fine as far as we are concerned. Let them defend the populated areas. Beautiful. We will let them hide in there among the women and children like good little Iraqi army boys. When Saddam is dead they can come out and shake hands, no hard feelings. Just stay out of their way and have thenm stay out of ours. We just want Saddam. We may have to take a few places...strategic ground is essential to manuever. But we can ignore everything else, especially anything with civilians on it. We don't want to see them or have them see us.

All this door to door and alley to allet bullshit is civilian thinking. We want Saddam and we don't need to fight to take Iraq, not really. The Iraqi army is doing just what we want from it. They are hiding in town and we are leapfrogging all around the place and taking all the strategic ground that matters. Just drive up and sit on it like what we are doing now. You can't make us move and we make sure by being here that the Iraqi military CAN'T move. They just sit there scratching their Arab ass and we slowly isolate the citys from the roads connecting them. We occupy the OILfields. We have everything in Saddams wallet. He set fire to about three places but we are sitting on the entire rest of it and he can't touch it. there are 1200 wells in Jubair and Rumailah and Al-Qurna and we have had that for months.
Kirkuk and Mosul are cut off. Saddam is not able to move his troops up there. They are penned up and penned down. We have the citys up there isolated, the Oil fields are circcles. We haven't killed anybody. He can't get it back and momma is happy.

My entire tour here has been in Recon and AVOIDING being seen. I have come 300 miles or close to it and I have not been seen and I have not scared any civilians. I have popped up right in front of Western Bagdad and me and the helicopters and all the other Recon from Saudi and Jordan and Kuwait are all strung out here like lizards in the blowing sand for maybe thirty miles and we have mapped every square inch of this dirty shithole of an Arab toilet from Amman to the Kabals. We know every pipeline...lots of pipes out here, pumping stations, airfields and roads. Dips and gullys and rock formations. Every blessed thing that might give us a hidey hole or an advantage when we are moving and showing us how to move. Where the mine fields are or were. And the whole world assumes that the American army is sitting back there in Kuwait and waiting. No we aren't we are on the move and have been on the move for days. There are Fuel Depots set up. Ammmo trucks and tank transporters being run up and down that six lane highway back to Amman. Airfields and installation being atken. And Saddam is in a tight little sack only forty miles on a side and getting smaller.

The poor bleeding people in Baghdad are stockpiling potatoes and onions and taping the windows and filling the bathtubs with frinking water. The Iraqi currency is worth about 300 farkles to the American penny and going down.

And now we are sitting here waiting for the balloon to go up. Saddam ran out of time. He didn't get on a plane and scoot to Syria. Too bad for him.

Back to the targetting. Lots of work still to do. Boy are they going to get a surprise. We are all around the city on three sides and they haven't come out to stop us. They never will.
The Republican Guard are all boxed up in there scared shitless and in tanks that can't manuever. Fine way to waste a tank there abdul. Why don't you go park ALL your armor and smoke a cigarette and wait for us to cut you off and then cut you up. Jesus thes Arab tacticians are brilliant. I love them. They couldn't have done more to GIVE it to us for free.

Saddam will use Germs or Bio..well, he can, but he will have to pop it in his own pants and NONE of it will ever get to Israel. Saddam is sealed up inside the city and his military is probably sitting in his hat or on top of one another. They sure aren't defending their country. We already HAVE Iraq.

They think they have an army in the city. They GAVE the country to US when they gave us the Strategic advantage. We have the INITIATIVE. They are boxed up in holes and we can go anywhere we like one at a time and slice a piece of pie off anywhere we like and they can't stop us or come aout and defend anything. The whole world doesn't realize how helpless these scared Iraqis are.

We have total mobility and we can go anywhere we like. We haven't kiled any Iraqis and they are so scared they aren't moving.
They will allow us to separate the edges anywhere we like and take them in detail any place we pleae and they can't reinforce or protect their perimeters.
We just pick the edges off. Like eating a sandwich really.

The last stage is taking Baghdad. We don't need it ALL. We don't need to take it itself. All we need to do is find out where Big Moustache is and take HIM. The rest of the city is just fine. No need to fight in the city really. Just drop in here and there and take the road networks. Yes? Any problem? No.
Then divide the city up like a pie. Cut one part of the city off from all the other parts of the city. The Iraqis don't dare move. No co-ordinated plan to stop us. One Iraqi unit won't come to the assistance of another. We keep the military units crowded and isolated. Then we tighten it up and take the river through the city. Then the river belongs to us and we identify where the military are and where they are not.
We set up DisneyLand for the Iraqis who come into the Zones we control. We feed them and give them shelter and move them to safety.
We keep the military boxed and let them look for food and we leaflet them and wait for the inevitable surrenders.

And all the time we are putting our own Iraqis into the city to find where Saddam is and spread rumors and fears and dissnsion. Great game really. And everyone is waiting in their basements and eating cold potatoes and drinking from the toilet bowl.
For Iraqis this life in the fast lane.
And all the time we are looking for Saddam. There are lots of ways to find out where he is. And HE can't move when he needs to can he. We leave a bolt hole open like a cat at the hole. He thinks that way is open. Gotcha. He better not think he has any way he can go because even the ways he thinks are open we have someone covering. We will leave the lines to Tikrit open and he will think he has a way to move. Good we see him move...we establish how his people go back and forth. We identify them and how they move.
At some point we are going to have an buliding or a city block wher Saddam is actually located. Once that happens we ignore the rest of the city nd put our assets into isolating him THERE. And then we quietly arrange for him to be short on air.

With any luck we don't kill many people or fight alley by alley. Screw that. We have helicopters all over the city and we can cut your communications, drop an FCG here and there to stun all the communications, cell phones, turn all the ignitions and machinery off forever. Turn all the Tnks dug in to a neighborhood into steel paperweights. Stand backl and drink a beer and let them moulder. No nee to fight them. Let them run out of food while the civilains all start coming out at night and coming over into our zones to get a cheeseburgr an teir autographed CD of what Democracy can do for YOU. Inshallah and isn't Allah grand.

And Saddam wakes up a little worse every day and finally the buliding is empty upstairs and the toilet doesn't flush, the air blowers don't work, the ashtray is full and the lights are out. Hello, Saddam. Time to go back in the back room and stick a pisol in your mouth. Where are all your friends? Well, things like that happen. What is that smell?

meanwhile I am loading arhives from the Intelligence Library on Palestine street onto trucks and hauling them out of Baghdad for translation and analysis. Lots of names and addresses to help us round up Iraqi contacts all over the Middle East. The stuff on Hamas should be a trove alone..and the Syrian stuff and the intelligence trade and commerce will be better than Oil to people like me. And I will be out of here by the 28th. Been there, done that.

The kiddies don't think I am real and that I am here. Got news for you. Its been a pleasure.

If Saddam pops some germs he will pop it right in his own pants because it is too late right now to pop it much of anywhere else.

I can see antiaircraft over the city right now.
Got to get these target data transmitted. I got 600 men to give their orders to...they will be here tomorrow. We just took over the Iraqi radio station with a flying transmitter. Bet that makes everyone in the City of Baghdad feel just full of confidence. Anti aircraft overhead, momma hiding in the basement and the Amricans on the State radio broadcasting to you in your own language. Saddam probably looks like maybe he is about a peanut.

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